For Kerry, it’s a rather startling and completely unforeseen achievement, considering Bush entered the final stretch season with an unblemished career debate record and had been given high marks by the press for his debate message discipline and ability to connect with voters. Yet he went O for 3.

Despite the consistent polling results, most of the assembled television pundits Wednesday night considered the debate to be a draw and suggested it would, in the end, have little impact on Election Day. Again, it’s hard to imagine that the media response would have been so reserved if it were Bush completing a debate sweep. Either the pundits are right to discount the importance of the debates and that the last two presidential face-offs really were draws, or voters have been sending a clear message over the last two weeks, one that’s been falling on deaf ears inside the media Beltway. We’ll know the answer to that question in 20 days.

Just moments after the debate MSNBC’s Chris Matthews observed of the two candidates, “I think they’ve debated themselves out.” Viewers got the same creeping sense of fatigue from the pundits, who for the most part doled out modest praise for both Kerry and Bush for a debate that didn’t seem to catch their interest.

CNN’s Candy Crowley complained it “was a bit of a wonk fest,” while ABC News’ political director Mark Halperin suggested “there wasn’t a big decisive moment.” CBS anchor Dan Rather said some viewers would say, “You needed a speed yawning course to get through it.” Perhaps not surprisingly, ABC’s George Will liked the debate’s wonkish feeling: “I think tonight it was not about personality and was uncommonly substantive.” (Hmm, didn’t Will tell the Cape Cod Times he’d be watching the Red Sox game Wednesday night?)

There were a number of Bush fans among the chattering classes Wednesday night. Former presidential aide David Gergen told CNN’s Larry King that the president “exceeded his expectations. He was very much in command tonight. He was presidential. He had done his homework. He seemed to be relaxed and in command.”

MSNBC host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough said undecided voters “are all going to look at screen and say I relate more to that George Bush guy. The only question is can I afford to vote for him?” How evenly split was the debate? So close that, according to Scarborough, only “an ideologue or a liar” would say one candidate obviously won.

Oops, better not tell William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, who, appearing on Fox News, announced “Bush knocked Kerry out tonight. I think it was just, he just slaughtered him.” Fox’s Chris Wallace, who gave Kerry the edge after Friday night’s debate, seemed to agree, saying “John Kerry was very much on the defensive. Most of the time you had the sense John Kerry was having to explain his votes.”

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was perhaps the only one to remark how, during split screen, side-by-side shots of both candidates, television directors purposely raised up Bush’s image so the shorter candidate would appear to be just as tall as Kerry. Mitchell thought it had a “big impact” and was an “unfair advantage” for Bush.

Over at PBS, historian Richard Norton Smith credited Kerry for, over the course of three debates, “getting the voters comfortable with who he is as a man. That’s not something you can do with sound bites.” CNN’s Jeff Greenfield joined the chorus in criticizing the debate for being excessively wonky, and not resolving the larger issue of who was fit to be president — although he did say that Bush had failed to “lay the heavy lumber on John Kerry.” Greenfield singled out the moment at the end when Kerry joked about how he and Bush (and moderator Bob Schieffer) were all “lucky people who married up,” and then added wryly, “some would say maybe me more so than others.” “It’s the first time Kerry has acknowledged he married a billionaire,” Greenfield said, saying that it apparently showed that Kerry felt relaxed.

It was Greenfield’s colleague Carlos Watson who came right out and announced, prior to the release of any instant polling data, that “Kerry won; Kerry is now three-for-three.”

It seems that should have been the night’s obvious talking point.

• “First, Mr. Gingrich is truly Clintonian in all his faults.”
• “Second, before Mr. Gingrich was the ultimate insider, he was the ultimate outsider.”
• “Finally, then as now, he is a man of ideas.”

Huh. I hope the Washington Times didn’t pay a lot for this analysis, because it fails to actually explain why Mr. Gingrich could win the Republican nomination for president.

We have a flood of these “Gingrich could win!!” stories now, because, following the self-immolation of Rick Perry and Herman Cain (and, so long ago it feels like, Michele Bachmann), Gingrich now holds sudden and commanding leads in Florida and South Carolina. He’s leading in Iowa. He’s even gaining in New Hampshire.

But … so did those other losers.

Gingrich’s current surge in the polls would have to last longer than any previous pseudo-front-runner candidate’s surge did (Perry led national polls for about six weeks, Cain for less than a month) for him to still be leading the pack come January. That’s certainly possible, but so is a belated Santorum surge.

And these poll numbers would have to translate into votes, which involves well-staffed and well-funded get-out-the-vote drives — especially in the wacky caucus states. Gingrich hadn’t even bothered to open campaign offices and staff up in early states until essentially this week. He’s belatedly rehiring people who quit on him last June. These are all states, too, where Romney already has essential experience campaigning.

Romney’s at enough of a disadvantage in Iowa that any decent finish could be painted in the press as a victory, and then he’s got New Hampshire and Nevada, where he’s always been strong. (Conversely, losing New Hampshire could sink his campaign, but that’s still a distant possibility.) Santorum and Ron Paul have spent more time and resources on voter contact in Iowa than Newt could manage if he devoted himself solely to that state for the next month. (And “religious right” voters have more reason to support those two than they do serial adulterer Gingrich.)

If everything breaks for Gingrich over the next month, he could conceivably win Iowa and South Carolina and Florida, and then the nomination would be his to lose. But we’re talking about a candidate whose lack of discipline is exceeded only by that of everyone else who failed to challenge Mitt Romney for longer than a month so far this year. The closest I’ve seen to a compelling explanation of how Newt wins is Josh Marshall’s, and even he relies on sketchy intangibles (“But it seems different; it feels different”) to make the case.

If Gingrich can sustain his lead past the new year, without busting like everyone else so far … well, I imagine the White House would be thrilled.

Belief in American exceptionalism is declining, the Pew Research Center concludes in a new report:

About half of Americans (49%) and Germans (47%) agree with the statement, “Our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior to others;” 44% in Spain share this view. In Britain and France, only about a third or fewer (32% and 27%, respectively) think their culture is better than others.

While opinions about cultural superiority have remained relatively stable over the years in the four Western European countries surveyed, Americans are now far less likely to say that their culture is better than others; six-in-ten Americans held this belief in 2002 and 55% did so in 2007.

Oh no! We’re barely more nationalistic than the Germans!

What’s causing the numbers to fall? Is it the fact that many conservatives intensely hate “our culture,” on account of all the wanton postmodernism, vulgarity, hip-hop “music” and anti-family themes on prime-time television?

No. It’s because of those leftists in academia: “In the four Western European countries and in the U.S., those who did not graduate from college are more likely than those who did to agree that their culture is superior, even if their people are not perfect.”

As Corner commenter “Ed in Cary” says:

And thus is proven the corrosive effect of modern “education.” What kind of a moron believes the implied corollary to the disbelief in the superiority of any culture, which is that “all cultures are equal?”

Conservatives: Standing up for our superior American culture, by calling 51 percent of Americans morons.

Gingrich also took on healthcare policy, by repeatedly pointing out that he did not have enough time to say anything about healthcare policy, a subject about which he is known to be among the world’s foremost thinkers.

GINGRICH: Well, I just want point out, my colleagues have done a terrific job of answering an absurd question. To say in 30 seconds…

BARTIROMO: You have said you want to repeal “Obama-care,” correct?

GINGRICH: I did. Let me finish, if I may. To say in 30 seconds what you would do with 18 percent of the economy, life and death for the American people, a topic I’ve worked on since 1974, about which I wrote about called “Saving Lives and Saving Money” in 2002, and for which I founded the Center for Health Transformation, is the perfect case of why I’m going to challenge the president to seven Lincoln-Douglas style three-hour debates with a timekeeper and no moderator, at least two of which ought to be on health care so you can have a serious discussion over a several-hour period that affects the lives of every person in this country.

A book plug, an assertion of unparalleled expertise, and a hilarious proposal that makes no sense — all in one answer? He’s still got it.

I haven’t checked to see how sales of “Saving Lives and Saving Money” are looking this morning, but I am sure Gingrich was grateful for the opportunity to advertise it for free via a supposed presidential debate.

According to Politico, here’s where the campaign trail has taken candidate Gingrich today:

Hosting a town hall meeting and book signing at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Westin Hotel

You gotta shake a lot of hands if you want to win the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Westin Hotel caucuses.

After 20 years of pretending to mull presidential bids in order to keep his name in the papers, Newt actually went through with the fake presidential bid this year in order to put his name in even more papers — and drum up business for the various schemes that keep him in diamond cuff links. (Most of his campaign staff quit because all Gingrich wanted to do was organize screenings of his documentaries.) It’s a transparent fraud from a transparent bullshit artist.

But in this environment, this year, astoundingly, it’s actually sort of working. Because Gingrich’s campaign-crippling missteps happened before those of Perry, Bachmann and Cain (in some cases up to 25 years before), he’s consolidating support from the “anyone but Romney” crowd. Real Clear Politics puts him third nationally, and his numbers have been steadily rising since September. The Mark Blumenthal “outsiders” survey has him surging among early state Republican bigwigs and for some reason he’s polling in first place in Mississippi.

The Gingrich campaign is becoming so lifelike that Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard has gone all-in on Newt, declaring him the winner of last night’s debate, playing up his poll numbers and praising his message.

What the hell is the endgame here? There is no conceivable scenario in which Newt Gingrich is allowed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency — not with his divorces and jewelry store credit lines and history of environmentalism — but we could end up with a New Gingrich, public intellectual, who’s all the more self-satisfied and ubiquitous for having actually won a presidential primary. We all lose.

It was only in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that a majority of Americans was prepared to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of Terrorism.  But this game-playing with public opinion — falsely claiming that the public is indifferent to civil liberties in order to justify assaults on them — is common.  To this day, if you criticize President Obama for shielding Bush officials from investigations, you’ll be met with the claim that doing so was politically necessary, even though poll after poll found in the wake of Obama’s inauguration that large majorities wanted those inquiries.  Similarly, when The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration was illegally spying on the communications of Americans without the warrants required by law, Beltway pundits such as Joe Klein in unison “warned” Democrats that Americans were in favor of such measures and it would be politically suicidal to object, even though polls repeatedly showed the opposite.  The same happened when Beltway pundits repeatedly insisted that Americans opposed Congressional investigations into the U.S. Attorneys scandal even when polls showed huge majorities wanting them.

What’s striking about this latest Pew finding is that mainstream political discourse barely includes anyone making a pro-civil-liberties case.  The GOP never pretended to care, while Democrats under Obama no longer do.  Still, so engrained are these political values in Americans that a clear majority believes it is unnecessary to sacrifice them in the name of Terrorism.  That’s contrary to what one typically hears both from opponents and supporters of civil liberties alike, who often assume that Americans beileve in the need to relinquish them.

Far more surprising is this finding from Pew:

I confess to being amazed that 43% of Americans — close to a plurality — believe that “U.S. wrongdoing might have motivated attacks” by Terrorists.  I’m not amazed because it’s untrue — it plainly is true — but because that is a view almost never heard in establishment media discourse.  To the contrary, the notion that American “wrongdoing” is a cause of anti-U.S. Terrorism is one of the most rigidly enforced taboos.  Nothing provokes allegations of “unpatrotism” or “anti-Americanism” — or intellectually dishonest claims that one is “justifying” Terrorism  — more than pointing out this obvious causation.  Despite that, and despite the natural jingoistic bias of believing that one’s own country does not engage in truly bad acts (certainly not sufficiently bad to provoke Terrorism), a very sizable portion of the citizenry has come to that conclusion on its own.  That’s a very encouraging finding.

* * * * *

A few related points:

(1) The NPR segment I did yesterday with Dana Priest on Top Secret America and civil liberties can be heard here.

(2) James Bamford, the nation’s leading expert on the National Security Agency, has a must-read article on the Bush/Obama legacy of the Surveillance State.

(3) Kevin Drum has interesting observations about how those who came of age in the post-9/11 era likely believe that all sorts of radical, extreme societal attributes — including “Fortress America” — are actually normal.

“We need the leaders of our party to say, ‘Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues,’” Rove told Bill O’Reilly last night. And then he says that polling the number of birthers in the Republican Party is somehow an Obama trick, because talking about birthers “fits into the White House theme-line.”

That is patent nonsense, but it’s clever nonsense. This way, Republicans who denounce birtherism don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that Republicans allowed it to spread far and wide.

It is also in Rove’s interest to downplay the number of birthers in the party. That poll of likely GOP primary voters that showed that a staggering 51 percent of them believe the president is a foreigner? That poll is also a liberal plot:

O’Reilly decided to rebut the PPP poll by showing the results of a CBS survey taken last year. According to this poll, 20% of Americans think Obama was born abroad and 58% think he was born in this country (the rest didn’t know). Both O’Reilly and Rove seemed sanguine about this poll because, apparently, the idea that only one in five Americans is completely uninformed and another one in five cannot answer a simple question is somehow reassuring.

But as Isaac Chotiner points out, the polls do not actually contradict each other, because one is a poll of likely GOP primary voters and the other is a poll of everyone.