that Kerry only "seemed" to do better because he lied.
This is a critical moment. Kerry won the debate. And he won round one of the post-debate spin/reaction.
But that's only round one. And Karl Rove didn't become the world-class slimebag he is by standing by and accepting politically unfavorable realities.
He can't try to spin that Bush was better than he actually was, because that challenges every viewer who saw how tired, petulant, and downright pathetic Bush was.
So he has to suggest that Kerry's performance was less than it seemed, that his apparent effectiveness was unfairly achieved, by lying.
Why? It's classic Rove, and Bush throughout his stolen presidency. Take one of your own vulnerabilities, and accuse your opponent of it, to throw him off balance and try to inoculate yourself against it. Bush lied plenty, about 100,000 Iraqi police being trained when none have completed the full training course, etc.
We already got a taste of what they'll say when John Ensor on CNN (IIRC) said Kerry misstated the facts on a couple of things, both of which Kerry in fact got right. I checked the transcript and my initial recollection was right. Kerry quoted Allawi as saying "terrorists are pouring across the border," and Ensor lied when he said Kerry had said that "WMDs are pouring across the border."
And Ensor then said Kerry was wrong when he accused Bush of letting North Korea develop nuclear weapons on his watch, by referencing CIA info that the North Koreans started collecting enriched uranium (which Bush also wrongly referred to as the source of their weapons) under Clinton, which is correct... except that they made their nuclear weapons under Bush, and they used plutonium for them because using enriched uranium was (IIR Josh Marshall correctly) inefficient and would take much too much time and uranium.
I'm not accusing Ensor of being Rove's advance guard here -- but this is the only thing I can think of that Rove can do. He can't really say that people's perceptions were wrong, only that Kerry won by getting an unfair advantage by making stuff up. That's how Gore's substantive victory in the first 2000 debate was stolen -- by (as Somerby has catalogued) GOP operatives and pundits saying "Ah, but behind what Gore said is what you may not have noticed, that he has a deeply flawed character because he sighed too much!"
PLEASE RECOMMEND THIS DIARY -- NOT because I may or may not be right on the substance, but because this is a discussion we have to have NOW.
Rove and Bush can't afford to take this loss lying down. They can't afford to let Kerry undo all the months of their smears of his character in one night, because they will have shot their wad and have nothing left. They will come after Kerry's debate win with some kind of lying, scurrilous attempt to respin their loss, and we have to figure out what it's likely to be, prepare for it, and expose it as soon as it happens.
SO, C'MON, JUMP INTO THE DISCUSSION!