Sound and fury, signifying very little beyond canned campaign spin - that in sum is the story of the first, and arguably most important, of the three planned presidential debates between incumbent Republican George W Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry.

If you wanted to sum up 90 minutes of controlled back and forth in four words, it would be: Kerry fought, Bush survived. Which is pretty much what the president needed to do, considering the dynamic of this debate.

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On the theory that a summation of sound bytes is better done against the frame of this debate's importance to the outcome of the November 2 elections, this:

A Los Angeles Times poll released last week found that among likely voters, 88 percent said they planned to watch or listen to the debates - up from the 75 percent or less who had said they would watch the 2000 debates. Further, the poll found that 19 percent of likely voters said the debate could affect their vote, while 79 percent said it would not.

The obvious inference is that today's exercise, at the University of Miami's Convention Center in Coral Gables, was going to be widely watched by people who would use the exchanges to make up their minds about the respective contenders.

Interestingly, 63 per cent of those who said the debates could change their mind currently support Bush - an indication that while there is a sizeable segment planning on voting for the incumbent, they could jump ship if the challenger gives them credible reasons to do so. The question going in, then, had to be - would Kerry manage to do that?

A Time magazine poll last week showed that one out of three voters will watch all the debates, and 49 per cent will watch at least some parts of the three scheduled debates. Of the 19 per cent of voters who claim they are undecided, 69 per cent said the debates would help them make up their minds.

The Time poll further shows that only 37 per cent of voters say Bush has been describing the situation in Iraq truthfully, whereas 55 per cent believe the situation is worse than he says it is. 51 per cent echo Kerry's belief that the US action in Iraq has made the world more dangerous - up from 46 per cent in early September. The spike in the disbelief factor is a seemingly clear indication that Kerry's flat out attacks on Bush's Iraq record this month is beginning to have an impact on the course of this campaign.

Against this background, consider the day's debate, moderated by Jim Lehrer of PBS - a veteran of such debates in previous elections, and the man who moderated all three of the 2000 debates. The format was simple: Lehrer would ask questions, in turn, of both candidates. The one addressed had two minutes to respond, his opponent had 90 seconds for his riposte. If either candidate wanted to extend the debate, both were given thirty seconds apiece for rebuttal.

There were no problems with the questions - they were pointed, focused, and ranged the spectrum of foreign affairs and homeland security, the two topics agreed upon for the day. The problem was with the responses, which rarely if ever went beyond the respective campaign playbooks.

Significant moments were few and far between. One such occurred when John Kerry managed, possibly for the first time, to confront the President on his shift in priorities, from the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Arguing that Bush took his eye off the ball on the real war on terror, Kerry said, "We had Osama bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora. We had him surrounded by US troops, the best trained in the world. But we did not use them - President Bush outsourced even that job, to the Afghan warlords who shortly before had in fact been fighting with the Al Qaeda. And as a result, we let bin Laden off the hook."

The charge was straight out of the Kerry playbook - in his campaign stops, he has been using the 'Osama Been Forgotten' jibe to rub the point home.

This was perhaps where President Bush was weakest - his response was, "My opponent saw the same intelligence I did, and he agreed that Saddam Hussein was a grave threat; he saw the same intelligence, and he voted for the use of force in Iraq."

The trouble with that is, it did not answer the question - which was, why was the anti-terror effort in Afghanistan downgraded, and troops diverted to Iraq even before (again, a point Kerry managed to make with force) Congress authorized the use of force in that country. The trouble, too, was that Kerry had a great opportunity here to plunge the dagger in, and he missed - the President's repeated assurances that al Qaeda was finished, that Osama was marginalized, could very easily have been countered by the facts. Thus:

During the seven months between September 11, 2001 and April 11, 2002, al Qaeda did not manage to perpetrate, or take credit for, a single attack anywhere in the world. This was when the US-led war on the Taliban and on Osama was at its height.

From then, until August 2002, it pulled off two small attacks, one in Tunisia and the other in Pakistan.

From September 2002, which was around the point when America began increasingly focusing on Iraq, al Qaeda has claimed 'credit' for 12 attacks that have claimed over 600 lives -- the most horrendous of them being the Bali nightclub bombing, that killed 200-plus people.

Clearly, the terrorist outfit is far from being marginalized - but Kerry, in repeating his charge, failed to drive it home with hard facts.

One area the President scored in - converting a vulnerability into a strength in the process - is in his response to Kerry's repeated attempts to paint the US under Bush's leadership as being dangerously unilateralist, to the point of being contemptuous of the international alliances. Leading such alliances, Kerry argued, has been America's strength in the past - losing such alliances is its current weakness.

The charge led to some initial skirmishing, with Bush making his face assume an expression of surprise and go, what? No alliances? What will you say to Prime Minister Blair of Britain? To Poland? To those other nations that are with us?

Kerry, countering that, pointed out that Britain had a mere 8,500 troops on the ground; the next highest contributor was under 4,000, the other contributors only weighed in with a few hundred troops here and there, leading to a situation where America was bearing 90 per cent of the costs, and bearing 90 per cent of the casualties.

Bush, under repeated fire on this count, countered with his core message: The American public, he argued, deserved a strong leader, who would do what was good for America and its people, without necessarily concerning himself with public opinion, either at home or abroad. Bush repeatedly snuck in little jibes, attacking Kerry for being too dependent on international opinion. Given that it plays straight out of the Republican campaign playbook, which has been drawing applause around the country, Bush remained visibly on message on this count.

Being on-message, though, has its downside. As when Kerry at one point quoted from the President's father, former President George H W Bush. The elder Bush, he pointed out, was commander in chief during the first Gulf War; he had subsequently written a book in which he said he felt it would have been a mistake, then, to go into Iraq on the ground, because it would be a brutal, vicious war without a legitimate exit strategy.

It was a direct charge, buttressed by the fact that Bush's own father was being quoted to underline the fact that the current president, in Kerry's words, went into Iraq without much of a plan to win the war, and no plan at all to win the peace.

This was a charge George Bush flubbed; his response was noticeably weak, and drew on the campaign talking point that for Kerry to claim the war in Iraq is the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place sends out a wrong signal, both to US troops on the ground, and to the insurgents.

Bush used much of his time to rub in the flip-flop charge he has been making against Kerry - thrice in course of the debate, thus, the famous Kerry vote against the $87 billion appropriation came into play. Kerry finally put it to rest with a pithy response: "I made a mistake in the way I talked about the war. This President has made a mistake in how he prosecuted it."

Both candidates were asked what their exit strategies were for Iraq, neither was particularly clear in his answer. Bush said he knows it is a hard war, it has to be prosecuted, deadlines cannot be fixed for when American troops can return, it was vital that the US stayed the course and displayed its commitment to Iraq's quest for freedom and democracy. Kerry, for his part, said he hoped to accelerate training of the Iraqis, and to thus attempt to begin the process of bringing US troops back home within six months (of his taking over).

Asked about homeland security, Bush said his priorities included strengthening intelligence and strengthening the Patriot Act. Kerry argued that 90 per cent of the containers coming into the US went unchecked; on passenger flights, while luggage was checked, the cargo hold was not; that the country's chemical plants were not being guarded adequately, and he would make all this his number one priority.

The two were pretty much in agreement that the situation in Darfur, Sudan was clearly genocidal; that something needed to be done about it. Kerry, to whom the question was first addressed, suggested that the US had to help the African Union deal with the problem, and provide logistical support to help the AU in that effort.

It would have been even possible to provide military support, Kerry said, but for the fact that the war in Iraq had overextended the US army, with nine out of ten active battalions engaged in that theatre. Bush agreed with the 'genocide' label, and said he, too, was in favor of using the African Union as the front end of international efforts to solve the problem.

Questions were asked about nuclear proliferation in Iran and in North Korea - again, both candidates differed. Bush suggested that bilateral talks were not the answer; that in North Korea, countries like China needed to be involved in the process. Kerry, for his part, suggested that North Korea was a colossal mismanagement on Bush's part, that in Iran, the US needed to go back to bilateral talks in an effort to solve the problem of proliferation.

By way of aside, a rather surprising claim from the president, early on, was when he said on the question of nuclear proliferation that the "AQ Khan network had been brought to justice" - a rather strong characterization of what, in effect, was a public mea culpa by the head of the Pakistan nuclear program after overwhelming proof had been presented of his activities, and the as hasty pardon accorded Khan by President Pervez Musharraf.

On balance, Kerry was the one almost constantly on the offensive; Bush was reduced, time and again, to repeating his canned charges regarding Kerry's alleged vacillations.

Interestingly, though debate rules clearly indicated that there should be no cutaway shots - cameras focussing on one candidate while the other was speaking - that rule was universally ignored, to Bush's disadvantage. Time and again, when Bush found himself attacked with facts and figures, his facial expression ranged from frustration to anger; what the pundits call 'demeanor evidence' was certainly in the incumbent's disfavor.

The exchanges were tense throughout; the pressure was clearly on both candidates. Kerry started slowly, almost nervously, and then seemed to get hold of himself after the first few minutes. In contrast, Bush started strong, but repeated Kerry charges on Iraq appeared to fray the incumbent's nerve, leading to a few awkward pauses, and the occasional stumble.

The only point of personal warmth and connection came when President Bush was asked if there were issues with the character of the challenger that concerned him. Bush effusively praised Kerry for his service, for his family, for his daughters who "have been so kind to mine", and for his twenty years in the Senate ("though I cannot agree with his record"), before going on to suggest that the only concern area was that Kerry was too prone to change his messages.

In response, Kerry joked with Bush about the difficulty of bringing up spirited young girls, before going back on message to suggest that he had not, contrary to the opposition spin, ever vacillated or come up with mixed messages, and that he had been consistent throughout in what he wished to do and how he wished to do it.

The essence of the debate could be distilled into single sentences. The Bush leitmotif was, 'I am a strong leader, I say what I think, I am not a slave of public opinion, I will do what is right by the American people.'

Kerry's constant sub-text was, 'The history of the war on terror is the history of bad planning and worse execution, it takes a truth-telling leader to extricate the US from the position it is in, and I am that leader.'

Polls notwithstanding, it is moot whether the respective performances will change the course of this election. For what it is worth, though, round one clearly went to John Kerry. His single biggest gain, here, was that he clearly bifurcated the war on terror from the war in Iraq.

"Saddam Hussein did not attack America, Al Qaeda did," Kerry pointed out, twice, before going on to his charge that the US, in its preoccupation with Iraq, had in fact let Osama escape, with disastrous consequences.

Before Bush and Kerry face off again October 8, however, comes the sideshow - on October 5, Vice President Dick Cheney squares off against Democratic vice-presidential candidate Senator John Edwards at the Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio.

The two - who will square off just the once - are now reportedly engaged in preparations for what is likely to be a more acrimonious, no-gloves affair than the three tight-scripted presidential debates. Cheney's sparring partner is Representative Rob Portman of Ohio, while Edwards' Cheney-surrogate is Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who performed a similar function for the then Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman in 2000.

Photographs: Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images