The first round of media commentary on the vice-presidential debate is in. And it looks like the Obama-Biden ticket has survived what was potentially the most treacherous moment of the campaign.

Following Sarah Palin's disastrous interviews with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, there was a real danger she'd be declared the winner of last night's encounter with Joe Biden if she could somehow manage to stand upright and keep talking. All of a sudden it would be Palinmania, round two.

That didn't happen. Though Palin is receiving deservedly high marks for her folksy, feisty performance, the substance-free nature of her answers has not gone unnoticed by either the press or the public.

Perhaps the most remarkable piece of opinionating today comes from the right. In her Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and for George Bush's father, weighs in with admiration for Palin's performance skills and contempt for the emptiness behind them.

Last month, as you may recall, an open microphone caught Noonan referring to the Palin pick as "political bullshit". Noonan attempted then to deny the obvious meaning of those words, but today she makes it clear that she meant what she said.

"There were moments when she seemed to be doing an infomercial pitch for charm in politics. But it was an effective infomercial," writes Noonan, adding: "A question is at what point shiny, happy populism becomes cheerful manipulation." Noonan also lambastes the McCain campaign's "obnoxious political game" of pretending that criticism of Palin amounts to "knocking the real America".

Other conservative commentators are more kind to Palin, but they want us to know they can see and hear, too. For instance, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard pronounces Palin the winner, but then goes on to observe that she was "utterly incoherent" at times and "seemed to settle back on material that she seemed to have memorised."

So how did she win? "She won," Hayes says, "because to a vast majority of those who watched the debate tonight she likely came off as a plausible vice-president. And that was all that mattered." In other words, Hayes thinks she lost, but condescendingly assumes the rubes will come to a different conclusion.

Paul Mirengoff, writing for the conservative Power Line blog, tells us: "Palin, forced by circumstances to prove her merit to an increasingly sceptical electorate, accomplished that mission and then some." But he can't leave well enough alone, adding: "From a technical standpoint, it was Biden who had the more detailed command of the facts (and the greater ability to fudge them). He was able not just to hammer McCain, but to do so at a level of specificity that Palin could not address."

Perhaps bolstered by snap CBS and CNN polls that show viewers thought Biden won by a wide margin, many mainstream and liberal commentators are coming out of their defensive crouch today. If Republicans want to accuse them of liberal bias, they seem to be saying, so be it.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is especially brutal, writing that Palin made it through the debate "with an unnerving mixture of platitudes and cute, folksy phrases that poured from her lips even when they bore no relation to the questions asked."

At the Politico, John Harris and Mike Allen's verdict is that "she got out alive, though there were white-knuckle moments along the way: questions that were answered with painfully obvious talking points that betrayed scant knowledge of the issue at hand." Just in case you missed the point, they add: "It is hard to count any objective measures by which Biden did not clearly win the encounter."

At the New York Times, Adam Nagourney begins more mildly, telling us that Palin managed to meet the ridiculously low expectations that had been set for her performance: "Sarah Palin made it through the vice-presidential debate on Thursday without doing any obvious damage to the Republican presidential ticket."

That may be the best outcome the McCain campaign could have hoped for. Palin was good enough that her presence on the ticket, as John Dickerson of Slate argues, should become less of a burning issue than it was in the immediate aftermath of her inability to identify any newspapers she reads, any supreme court decisions disagrees with (other than Roe v Wade) or any measures her running mate has undertaken over the years to reform the imploding financial system.

So it's back to Barack Obama versus John McCain, with their running mates fading into their traditional supporting roles. That hasn't been working so well for McCain in recent weeks, but at least it's a dynamic over which he has some control.

Palin's erratic but energetic performance may end the recent run of bad news for the Republican ticket. But it's not going to accomplish anything more than that.