Even though ABC was more-or-less hosting it, and even though their Sunday morning guy, George Stephanopoulos, was the moderator, no ABC station took the debate live. Half of the ABC network planned to show it after their late newscasts, one of those was not the ABC outlet in New York City which, as it happens is owned by ABC and so, one would have thought, could have been instructed to show the debate at some point even if right after the Ron Popiel Retrospective at 3:30 AM.

Even C-SPAN didn't run the debate on Saturday night choosing, instead, a re-run of a speech by former Middle East hostage Terry Waite.

Because George Stephanopoulos, was the moderator and was going to use footage for his Sunday morning show, he didn't want to be in the normal Moderator position - with his back to the audience and, therefore, the camera.

So, they arranged to have the moderator's podium place on the extreme left-hand side of the panel which mean the candidates had to look over their left shoulder to look at George as he asked the questions giving the TV audience full benefit of his facial excellence.

In spite of it all, Stephanopoulos did a pretty good job.

The deadline for Sunday editions of most newspapers is very early on Saturday night. This debate was too late for the print edition of the NY Times which was delivered to the door of my hotel in NEW YORK CITY. Most reporters filed for the Internet versions of their organization.

The debate was not available on television, and was too late for East coast dailies and therefore was the first Made-For-The-Internet debate in history.

President George W. Bush beats the top three Democrats in the debate - Lieberman, Kerry, and Gephardt - by margins of 61-34; 60-34; and 60-35 respectively. Even Michael Dukakis - the last man to be photographed in a military helmet prior to this past week - got about 46 percent of the popular vote against George H.W. Bush.

Asked who they trusted to deal with the major issues facing the nation over the next few years: President Bush or the Democrats IN CONGRESS, the President has the nation's confidence 55-37. Of the nine announced Democratic candidates, seven of them have Congressional backgrounds. Six are currently IN Congress and Carol Moseley-Braun was a U.S. Senator from Illinois.

Asked how they thought the Congress generally is doing, it got a favorable/unfavorable rating of 57-37; plus 20. For comparison, in the days leading up to the 1994 tsunami election which gave the GOP control of the House for the first time in 40 years that number was 18-78; MINUS 60. The Congress was controlled by Democrats in 1994. I believe you know who controls the Congress now.

John Kerry and Howard Dean really don't like each other. Dean is trying to climb down from the Leader-of-the-Anti-War-Faction cliff on which he placed himself. Kerry can't let more than seven minutes go by without reminding everyone of his service in Vietnam. Both are tiresome.

Dick Gephardt bothers everyone else because - even though his health care plan is wrong in its conception - Gephardt is the ONLY candidate who has come up with an original idea.

If each candidate's strategy was, as Nedra Pickler wrote for the Associated Press, "to distinguish themselves from the pack," then they were not successful. In fact they only succeeded in demonstrating that the pack itself is not very distinguished.