Cheney was prepared and smart; Lieberman charming and human. Thus, their running mates seemed all the less so.

It wasn't obvious that the night would go down like this. One Cheney flew into Kentucky full of piss and vinegar. "We got two good men, sheriffs, riding in out of the West and they're going to kick the bad guys out of town," promised his wife Lynne.

But the shots came more subtly than those fired in anger by the demure Mrs. C, though both Cheney and Lieberman got their licks in between their with all due respects.

Both came loaded for bear. Lieberman had a slew of Cro-Magnon, hard-right-conservative votes from Cheney's House career, where he was only a handful of voters to oppose restrictions on armor-piercing "cop-killer" bullets and undetectable plastic guns.

But he didn't bring them up. He didn't even mention, when home heating costs were brought up, Cheney's opposition to one of Bush's favorite programs, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which he voted against almost a dozen times in the 1980s.

"I have great respect for Dick Cheney," Lieberman said. "I don't agree with a lot of things he said in this campaign. He was a very distinguished secretary of defense and I don't have anything negative to say about him."

As expected, Cheney fired most of his shots at Gore. But -- when asked by the moderator, CNN's Bernard Shaw, if he'd noticed "a contradiction or hypocritical shift by your opponent on positions and issues," Cheney said, before laying into Lieberman, "We've been trying very hard to keep this on a high plane, Bernie."

"I do have a couple of concerns where I like the old Joe Lieberman better than I do the new Joe Lieberman," Cheney said. "Joe established an outstanding record, I thought, in his work on this whole question of violence in the media and the kinds of materials that were being peddled to our children, and many of us on the Republican side admired him for that."

"There is, I must say, the view now that having joined with Al Gore on the ticket on the other side, that the depth of conviction that we had admired before isn't quite as strong as it was, perhaps, in the past," he said, turning to Leiberman. "You're not quite the crusader for that cause that you once were."

Cheney later took on Gore for not being able to work in a bipartisan fashion.

"Dick Cheney must be one of the few people who think nothing has been accomplished in the last eight years," Lieberman said. "Promises were made and promises were kept. Did Al Gore make promises in 1992? Absolutely. Did he deliver? Big time," Lieberman said, laughing in his geeky-dad manner at his reference to Cheney's response to a much-publicized off-color remark by Gov. George W. Bush caught by TV microphones last month.

Cheney gave as good as he got. After Lieberman said, "I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago, too," Cheney said, "The government had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Lieberman added, "I can see my wife and I think she's saying 'I think he should go out into the private sector.'"

"I'll help you do that, Joe," Cheney smiled.

Their smooth presentations were tailor-made for the suburban swing-state undecided voters. Lieberman invoked a heavenly entity seven times, slightly edging out the number of times he underscored his bipartisanship with mentions of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- three -- all the while boosting his running mate.

For his part, Cheney was strong, serious, knowledgeable, strolling down the Gulf War days of yesteryear, soft-pedaling -- deceptively, one might say -- his ticket's opposition to abortion and gay rights. Cheney could be seen as the winner of the debate, at the very least in the sense that -- for a night, anyway -- he redeemed himself from the dud-ness that has been his candidacy.

The truth of what the two of them said, however, is a different matter.

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