At the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Rudy Giuliani set the tone for Governor Sarah Palin and the sharp, well-delivered attack speech that brought her to national prominence. Then, last night, after a poor stretch for Palin highlighted by embarrassing interview performances, Giuliani was back to confidently herald Palin’s return to form.

“I mean, this was a fabulous performance,” said Giuliani, walking at a two-step-per-minute rate with his wife, Judith, in a frenzied scrum of reporters in the media center at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 2. “She displayed tremendous intelligence, she displayed total grasp of the issues, and she did a very effective job of attacking Joe Biden and Barack Obama with a lot of style and a lot of grace. And I think she knocked Joe Biden out. Her best moment was when she said, ‘There you go again,’ pointing out that Joe Biden is constantly talking about the past, represents the past, represents all that’s worst in Washington.”

He took two more steps and ducked into a television studio. A little later he emerged and added, “I think he was on the defensive so much that I think Sarah Palin induced those mistakes. Because I don’t think Joe Biden ever expected this woman to attack him so effectively. She did it with a velvet glove.”

He moved the scrum a few more steps and disappeared into another black curtained television studio. When he emerged he added, “I think any fair-minded person, who was not going at it from a liberal bias, or a liberal media bias, would say that this is one of the most effective debate performances they have ever seen.” He called her a “smart person,” and “one of the best debaters I have ever seen.”

Told of Giuliani’s broadside, Obama senior strategist David Axelrod, standing in his own media circle across the room, replied nonchalantly, “Given the spectacular success that Mayor Giuliani had in his race, far be it from me to challenge his political judgment.”

While Giuliani and other McCain surrogates in the media center "spin room" after the debate attempted to portray the more stylistic aspects of Palin’s performance, in which she professionally delivered attack lines in folksy wrapping, as hard evidence of her superior intellectual hardware, political skills and mastery of policy issues, the Obama campaign sought to pick apart what they depicted as a lack of substance in her answers.

Axelrod, who before the debate had argued to reporters that “she’s a very proficient debater and I think she’ll come in here well prepared,” now said he wasn’t just “spinning,” before. But her zingers were not what counted, he said.

“This was a folksy rendition of the same Bush policies,” he said, encircled by reporters with notebooks, television cameras and tape recorders immediately following the debate’s conclusion. “McCain and Palin, essentially, support the same direction for this country.”

Referring to Palin’s response to a question about nuclear proliferation, he said, “She said that a nuclear incident would be the ‘be all and end all’ for a lot of people. Well, yeah, that’s not news. The question is what are you going to do to try and prevent that from happening.” Asked how Biden did, Axelrod said, “Rather than offering them a wink and a smile, he offered them hope. He offered them a plan, he offered them a way out of the mess that we are in.”

The festivities began well before the candidates arrived on campus.

Hours earlier, as reporters started trickling in and retrieving their bags of shwag in the Science Laboratory building where lectures still took place in front of chalked up black boards, it was clear that the bar for Palin was extremely low. Two sign language translators standing by the debate entrance jokingly practiced tumbling their hands over one another in what one of the young women called the “fragments of sentences” sign.

On television, CNN showed Palin deplane. She carried her infant son, dressed in white pajamas, and carefully negotiated the staircase, holding onto the banister. Her husband stood behind her in sunglasses.

Just off the campus quad, where some students tossed Frisbees and played croquet, MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews set up a stage behind which students clamored with Obama and McCain signs in hand. (A few especially slim girls wore Obama stickers on the bellies of their shirts.) One young woman held a sign that said “McFailin 2008” next to a man who held a cardboard cut-out of Abraham Lincoln holding an Obama placard. A blond woman distributed yellow, pink and blue pieces of oak tag with pro-Palin messages written in paint or glitter, so as to seem homemade. They weren’t, but they were popular nonetheless.

“Can I get an ‘It’s Lunch Time For the Cuda’” said Andy Cantwell, a 23-year-old law student from Los Angeles, who happily traded in his “The Original Maverick” sign. He lifted the new sign over his head. The back of it said “St. Louis Loves Sarah.” (Sarah was written in passionate red script.)

Cantwell said he wasn’t sure who he’d vote for. (“I just think this is a cool sign,” he said.) He predicted a not-so-strong performance by Palin.

“She will say some silly things,” he said. “Even if you agree with her policies, when you see her on TV, she sounds like a moron. You can’t think, ‘Wow, she nailed it.’”

A few feet away, Michael Rodriguez, a 22-year-old European history major, drew attention to Palin’s inability to cite any Supreme Court decisions, other than Roe v. Wade, with which she disagreed, in an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. Above two straight arms he held a sign that said “Dear Sara:” (sic) “Plessy v. Ferguson, Dennis Et Al vs. U.S., Bowers v. Hardwick, Korematsu v. U.S. Love, History.”

A group of students raised a wide banner that blocked the people in the back’s view of Matthews and the a cappella group “Mosaic Whispers” practicing in a ring behind him. “Down In Front,” some McCain supporters in the back screamed when an Obama was raised. “O Ba Ma,” the people in the front replied. As the shouting grew louder, one trio of young men walked briskly towards the crowd. One of them carried a homemade sign that said, “Palin, I Am The Dad.”

Back inside the building where the debate would take place, everyone killed time. Reporters ate strip steaks and cake, drank beer and coffee at a “hospitality center,” outside of which Couric laughed with colleagues and enjoyed the positive attention she was getting. In the media center, a sick orange light shined on the white tables and notepads as reporters buttoned their jackets to shield against winds gusting from air conditioners. Barney Frank and Bill O’Reilly fought on some of the muted flat screened televisions while reality show contestants dressed in tinfoil silver jumped up and down on others. Finally all the televisions showed the same live feed of Gwen Ifill, the evening’s moderator, limping out on crutches in a coral jacket. She told everyone in the crowd to behave, then sat at a wood desk in front of two podiums and a red carpeted stage for several quiet minutes.

Then the candidates came out, shook hands and debated. When they finished, their surrogates came to the media center and debated again.

On one side of the large gym, close McCain ally Joe Lieberman, who former advisers say was the candidate’s first pick for running mate, expressed near-awe at Palin’s performance.

“This lady has something inside her, strength, that comes out at these moments,” he said. He said, “She speaks from the heartland and the heart with real progressive ideas” and, addressing her miserable interview answers, said, “she blew all those doubts out of the water tonight.”

“This is a woman who, six weeks ago, was a governor of Alaska,” he said, though, when asked if he would be comfortable seeing her in the Oval Office, couldn’t seem to quite bring himself to offer a resounding yes. “Sarah Palin proved tonight she is ready to be John McCain’s partner.”

A reporter asked if Palin had left the door open to more than this lone debate.

“It’s possible,” said Lieberman. “She said she’d rather talk directly to the American people as she did tonight, and I think with great honesty and constructive language rather than have it filtered by the media as has happened in some of these interviews.”

A few feet away, Lindsey Graham, the senator of South Carolina and another McCain confidante, said, “I hope from tonight forward we will understand that we have an asset on our hands,” and “I don’t know why she hasn’t been out more.”

He said the media had treated her unfairly, but “if we don’t use her more, we’re crazy.”

“I want to see her do a bunch a things, talking to the media,” he told The Observer. “The one thing about media interviews is that like I’m doing now, is you only get a few seconds. It’s not your fault, I mean, you got to condense down what I say to a few hundred words or 15 or 20 seconds, but I think the more exposure America has to Sarah Palin, the better John McCain is.”

Asked if it was appropriate for Palin to announce her disregard for the moderator’s questions, because she was going to talk about what she wanted to talk about, without a filter, Graham gave high marks.

“I didn’t think the moderator was unfairly challenged,” he said. “I heard her say, I’ve got an answer and I’m going to give it. I thought the moderator did a very good job quite frankly.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, senator of Missouri and one of Obama’s most vocal supporters, couldn’t disagree more.

“She’d go off on something completely different,” she said of Palin. “I’ve never seen anyone run for vice president who is not willing to stand up and answer questions.”

Asked if the McCain campaign had successfully worked the ref, by threatening that Ifill would have to answer for herself if she asked too many foreign policy questions, McCaskill told The Observer, “I kept waiting for a follow-up, or at least saying, hey, you didn’t answer the question or would you mind taking a stab at the question. I don’t know. I don’t know. It did seem that there were a lot of fat juicy, pitches right over the plate that didn’t demand a lot of specificity. I don’t know. I felt for Gwen. I thought it was very unfair what they did to her. They accepted her as a moderator. They knew she was writing this book. This book is just as much about Michael Steele and J. C. Watts as it is about Barack Obama. It’s not about Barack Obama. But you know what you do when you don’t have good ideas, you work this whole angle that it’s the media’s fault. And they are clearly into that mode now. It’s the media’s fault. It’s the media’s fault. You know what? They need to come up with some ideas that the American people are going to embrace.”

Obama supporter Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, who stepped onto the spin room floor after most reporters and surrogates left, was willing to allow some success to Palin, but not enough to stem the flow of momentum away from McCain, whose campaign announced earlier in the day that they were pulling out of the key swing state Michigan.

“Maybe McCain and Palin stopped their bleeding,” he said, backhandedly complimenting Palin on her well-delivered and “memorized” lines. “But the move is towards Obama with McCain getting out of Michigan and polls in battleground states like Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, moving towards Obama."