The rabbit hole called ‘Spin Alley’

The presidential debate was still going on upstairs in the basketball arena on the campus of Washington University when actor-Bush advocate Ron Silver and New York Gov. George E. Pataki arrived to spin the media housed in a downstairs gym.

“I think the president really did a great job convincing a lot of people that we need him for four more years,” Pataki said as President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, continued to go after each other on TV monitors. “The American people can see the president I know, someone who cares deeply about the American people.”

Pataki, a tall man with an owlish grin, was asked whether it felt odd to be talking about the debate while it was still occurring.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

On TV, spin plays like the mostly vacant media ritual it’s become, the Ebert and Roeper of political engagement. In person, it involves many, many more people, thousands in fact -- campaign staffers in gray suits, segment producers, TV anchors in pancake makeup. “Spin Alley,” as the media have come to dub it in each debate location, is where all these subgroups mingle all day. Then, as the debate ends, they converge in a mad dash to define the event for the TV cameras. The other journalists, the ones who use notepads, are also in the room, but they don’t need what TV needs -- the constant, self-fulfilling, infomercial-making machine that every now and then accidentally runs into the truth.

It was easy to forget which came first, the debate or this. The spinning, after all, had been playing for the cameras all day and now into the night. The debate was only 90 minutes long.

“This is a whole cultural phenomenon,” said Mark McKinnon, who designs TV ads for the Bush campaign. “People understand that how this gets framed and filtered through the press is often as important as the debate itself.”

Maybe because it was all happening in a gym with folded-up basketball hoops, the whole thing felt like a school dance. Each spinner stood next to a volunteer holding a giant Bush or Kerry poster on a stick, with the name of the spinner at the bottom. So you could go stand under the Terry McAuliffe stick and listen to the Democratic National Committee chairman say to microphones of various sizes: “The president of the United States lost control tonight. I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, called Sen. Kerry by the wrong name, kept referring to the Internets. I mean it was just one mistake after another. The man was totally flummoxed.”

Then you went and visited the Karen Hughes stick and heard the senior Bush campaign advisor declare: “Clearly, the president dominated the debate tonight. There were some key moments. I think he very effectively pointed out that Sen. Kerry’s thinking on the war on terror is limited and dangerous.”

Kerry campaign spinners Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, who had been exuding media omnipresence all day, talked to the cameras as unflappably as they had at 2 in the afternoon.

Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, meanwhile, was wagging the dog in a more targeted manner, sitting in one of the mini TV studios in the gym and speaking directly to network affiliates in swing states.

It’s a measure of how strategic the media campaign is that Rove, post-debate, dispatched himself not to any of the star-driven major cable news networks but to a little booth that delivered him to KWGN in Denver and then to WTVJ in south Florida. Onstage, a woman with a headset directed people holding Bush-Cheney banners behind Rove to move more directly into the camera’s view.

It was a “Capricorn One” moment being replicated around the room. Across the way, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was also talking into a camera at swing voters, Kerry supporters waving banners in the background.

“If you don’t think Kerry won this debate tonight, I don’t think you were watching,” said retired Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the Air Force chief of staff during the Persian Gulf War, who is a Kerry supporter. “The first one was a knockout punch. The election was won in Miami, at that debate. The rest of this is window dressing, unless Kerry fumbles somewhat.”

McPeak allowed that the debates were less debates than staged readings of platforms, followed by spin.

“Here’s an interesting point,” he said. “My guys, my handlers, say that we’re supposed to say Bush has never lost a debate ... how formidable a debater he is. I’ve never seen Bush win a debate. The spin machine wins debates for him after the debate.”

Finally, after close to two hours, the crowd began thinning out.

“So, people asking you your opinion and you have to tell ‘em Bush won tonight?” CNN analyst Jeff Greenfield asked Silver, the Bush advocate by way of Hollywood whom the Republicans had unveiled at their party convention.

“Yeah,” Silver said, betraying no offense.

Only one reporter seemed to lose his mind.

“Everybody’s lying!” he yelled. “Wake up, people!”

Some in the vicinity turned to look. It was Ed Helms, correspondent for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central.

“Now try it crying,” his producer said.