ASHINGTON - Following mixed reviews for the ticket-toppers after their first debate, the campaign spotlight shifts tonight to a tiny college in Kentucky, where Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney faces a low-expectations game in his single face-off against Democrat Joseph I. Lieberman.
While the vice presidential debate has less inherent drama than the Bush-Gore meeting had in Boston on Tuesday night, there are plenty of possible benefits and risks for both campaigns. Lieberman is widely viewed as the more lively debater, while Cheney has a reputation for being somewhat dry and stodgy. But Cheney hopes to disprove the skeptics and present himself as a feisty fighter for the GOP ticket.
The potential is much greater than usual for the vice presidential debate to have an impact ''because this race is perceived to be so close. If one candidate really catches fire and makes the other look bad or if there is a major gaffe, that could be the difference for some voters even though this is a vice presidential debate,'' said Bill Garriott, professor of government at Centre College, the Kentucky school hosting the debate.
Typically, a vice presidential selection is said to make only a 1 or 2 percentage point difference in the vote, but even that could be crucial in what has become the tightest presidential campaign in 40 years. Still, the importance of the vice presidential selection was not evident in the presidential debate; Gore mentioned Lieberman only once, and Bush never uttered Cheney's name.
Following Tuesday's debate, several ''snap'' polls showed that the contest remained statistically tied. An ABC-TV survey said Gore and Bush are tied at 45 percent, while an NBC-TV poll said Gore is leading by 46 percent to 44 percent, a statistically insignificant amount. While several polls indicated that a majority of viewers thought Gore won the debate, they also showed that many people thought Bush did well or better than expected. A CBS-TV poll found 35 percent of those surveyed changed their opinion of Bush for the better, while only 21 percent said that about Gore. All of the polls had relatively small sample sizes.
The tight contest probably will increase attention on the vice presidential debate, which is occurring so soon after the Boston meeting that it has received relatively little publicity. The forum will take place at 1,000-student Centre College, whose campus Internet site boasts that it was famous long before hosting a vice presidential debate. ''In 1921, the Centre football team made international headlines by handing world-champion Harvard its first defeat in five years,'' the college Web site says. The score of that event is noted on the side of a campus building: ''C6H0.''
Fittingly, one of the school's most famous graduates was Adlai E. Stevenson, class of 1860, who was vice president of the United States under Grover Cleveland from 1893 to 1897.
Lieberman is going into tonight's debate with a higher profile, but he faces his own set of challenges. Although Lieberman's introduction to the presidential race centered on his Orthodox Judaism - with magazine covers that declared, ''Chutzpah!'' - the senator from Connecticut probably will face questions focused on whether he has dropped some of his moderate credentials in order to be in sync with some of Gore's more liberal policies. Until now, many Republicans have dealt somewhat gently with Lieberman, compared with Gore, with Bush saying the senator was an excellent choice.
Indeed, unlike some past selections of running mates, there has been little debate over whether Lieberman or Cheney is qualified to be vice president - or president, if the situation arises. There will no grounds for anything like the most famous line of the vice presidential debates, when Senator Lloyd M. Bentsen of Texas told J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana: ''Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.''
Instead, if Lieberman and Cheney stick to their scripts, both men probably will spend much of the debate ignoring each other and bashing the various proposals made by the opposition, with words that carefully track the presidential debate in Boston. Cheney probably will repeat Bush's assertion that Gore's plans are based on ''fuzzy math,'' and Lieberman probably will mirror Gore's assertion that the Bush tax cut disproportionately benefits the wealthiest Americans.
The selection of Cheney has been criticized privately by some Republicans because the former Wyoming congressman brings nothing to the ticket in terms of electoral votes. Some Republicans favored Governor Thomas Ridge of Pennsylvania, whose 23 electoral votes are the most hotly contested in the campaign. If Bush loses Pennsylvania and the election, the selection of Cheney will become one of the most debated decisions in recent political history.
Cheney, however, brings a host of credentials, as a former White House chief of staff, former Defense secretary and former chief executive of Halliburton Co., a Dallas energy services giant with 100,000 employees. He probably will use those credentials to allay the concerns of some voters that Bush doesn't have enough experience to be president.
The format of tonight's debate provides opportunities for a more informal discussion and tougher questions. The two candidates will sit at a table, not stand at lecterns. And instead of the purposefully low-key Jim Lehrer as the moderator, the interlocutor will be CNN anchor Bernard Shaw, who is remembered for asking Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis in 1988 whether he would change his view about the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. Dukakis's impassive answer was seen as one factor in his loss to George Bush, the father of the current Republican presidential candidate.
But the vice presidential debate, more than any of the three presidential encounters, probably will focus on the personal stories of the two candidates, with Cheney recounting his Western roots and Lieberman explaining why his religion is relevant in discussing public policy. The debate is occurring in the middle of the High Holy Days, the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when Jews around the world reflect on their lives and pray for atonement.
Cheney said yesterday that he wants to have a conversation with voters. ''It's important that they get a look at me,'' he said in Washington.
Lieberman, meeting with firefighters in Richmond, Ky., said: ''There's always potential for a surprise. ... You've got to be who you are.''
Added Gore spokesman Chris Lehane: ''I think you'll see Senator Lieberman reinforce some of the same points that the vice president made in Boston. Let's see if Mr. Cheney can defend a tax cut the governor was unable to defend.''
Both presidential candidates yesterday sought to build on what they perceived as their own post-debate momentum. Bush, speaking to a crowd at West Chester University in a heavily Republican suburb of Philadelphia, forecast his strategy for the next five weeks: Hammering home his promise of deep tax cuts and trying to convince voters that Al Gore is a traditional liberal who will jeopardize the surplus. ''It is clear that the era of big government being over will be over if he becomes the president,'' Bush said.
Cheney, who has been practicing with Representative Rob Portman of Ohio as his Lieberman stand-in, is expected to rely heavily on his foreign policy expertise.
Like Bush, Gore sought reinforcement after the debate with an appearance before his base: a crowd of about 5,000 people in the blue-collar city of Warren, Ohio, many of them Democrats and union members.
Globe reporters Glen Johnson, traveling with Gore, and Anne E. Kornblut, traveling with Bush, contributed to this report. Material from the Associated also was used.
