Monday night's presidential debate -- the first in the crucial state of Florida -- may have come before any candidate actually took the stage.
Prior to the camera rolling, NBC, the debate's host, told audience members to hold their applause. It was not an agreed-to rule among the candidates themselves. In fact, none of the campaigns said they had even requested it. But it created a type of no-thrills vibe that clearly benefited one over the other.
Mitt Romney, by most estimates, emerged better off Monday night. He peppered his answers with attacks on Newt Gingrich that his own top advisers freely called "aggressive." Most of the action came within the debate's first half-hour, when the focus was on the former speaker's role as a consultant/lobbyist for Freddie Mac, his propensity for bombast and his serial unreliability.
'I don't think we can possibly retake the White House if our nominee was a lobbyist for Freddie Mac," Romney declared at one point.
After the fact, the campaigns spun the debate in typical fashion. But each adviser kept coming back to the same keystone: the prohibition on applause.
"Audiences, I think are there to watch," said Stuart Stevens, Romney's top adviser. "They are not there to be, sort of, an 11th man on the team. And look, we have done fantastically in these debates. The audiences have been very good for Mitt Romney. I just think, personally, that the audiences should not be, it is not the LSU-Alabama game."
"We are picking the president of the United States here," Stevens added. "It is not a game show."
If that didn't give off the indication that the Romney campaign felt it benefited from a dryer, quieter format, the reaction from the Gingrich camp certainly did.
"I also think the prohibition for no clapping was kind of un-American. What if you went to a baseball game and they were like, 'No cheering after a big play,'" asked Gingrich's top spokesman R.C. Hammond.
"I'm going to [file a complaint] right now," Hammond added, tongue in cheek. "R.C. is lodging a complaint."
For the campaigns to put such tremendous stock in the debate rules may seem like an effort in finding a superficial explanation for a candidate's performance. But the rest of Monday night's hour and 45-minute forum was, truly, a dull affair. The candidates found themselves agreeing on several substantive matters: whether it be a limited version of the Dream Act (a path to citizenship for military service) or English as an official language. Former Sen. Rick Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul, the other two candidates, weren't called on until 10-plus minutes in. And, far more often than in the past, they were used as strategic allies by the two frontrunners
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