St. Louis — In the hours before Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden took the stage here at Washington University, Barack Obama’s top advisers went out of their way to talk up Palin’s debating skills. “I expect that Gov. Palin is going to be very effective tonight,” chief strategist David Axelrod told reporters. “She’s been working hard at this.” David Plouffe, the campaign manager, upped the ante when he called Palin “one of the best debaters in American politics.”

Maybe they were just trying to raise expectations, set about a millimeter off the ground after Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. Maybe they really thought Palin would do well. In any event, their statements before the debate allowed them to stride into the Spin Room after the session and say, See? — I told you she was good.

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“Everybody thinks I was joking about it,” Axelrod said after the debate ended. “I was not joking about it. Sarah Palin is a good performer.”

No argument there. Despite a few weak moments, Palin delivered a strong and sure performance Thursday night. After enduring weeks of derision, Palin didn’t just beat the low expectations for her performance; she ran all over them.

But how? Superior debating ability? Commanding logic? A winning manner? No, not at all. If you listened to Team Obama after the debate late Thursday, you learned Palin accomplished her impressive performance by . . . winking.

“Don’t sell the American people short,” Axelrod told reporters after the debate. “I’m sure they liked Gov. Palin, but they need more than a wink and a smile.” Axelrod also said Biden gave people hope, “rather than offering them a wink and a smile.” And he added that, “The American people are asking for more — they want more than a wink and a nod and a smile.”

A few minutes later, I talked to Bob Barnett, the Washington lawyer who has played key roles in past Democratic debate preparation and who this time represented the Obama campaign in negotiating ground rules between the two candidates. Barnett knows how to watch and evaluate a debate, so I asked him to critique Palin’s performance. “She played her tapes,” Barnett said, meaning that Palin repeated pre-planned statements. “She came in with ten things to say and six winks to perform, and she did them.”

“Six winks?”

“Yeah. Did you see? Six. I counted six.”

“You were watching closely.”

“Well, I was counting.”

It’s probably safe to say that this was the first national debate in which one side explained that the other had done its best work by winking. By a few hours after the debate, the great wink issue had driven some commentators on the Left nearly to distraction. “The next person that winks at me, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to take it after tonight,” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Representatives of the McCain campaign had a different explanation for Palin’s performance. “Smart, tough, and together,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key member of the McCain Posse. “I thought she understood where the country would go and articulated how the country would be different with McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden, and she had a personable nature that said, ‘I am different and new to Washington.’“

I asked Graham whether the Palin on stage seemed different from the Palin of those CBS and ABC interviews. “Yeah,” he said. “I think she just hit her stride. I think over 90 minutes you can understand who the person is . . . she had a level of confidence and likeability, for lack of a better word, that shone tonight that you’ll never see in a 15-second sound bite.”

Graham’s words brought up the complaint, going around in Republican circles, that the McCain campaign has mishandled Palin, keeping her under wraps except for those high-profile, old-fashioned broadcast network interviews. Insiders concede that there was something wrong in Camp Palin — a problem that was fixed, at least somewhat, by the intervention of top campaign officials as debate prep got underway. Now, everyone has signed on to the idea of letting Palin be Palin. “I think we ought to use her more,” Graham said. “I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was not to showcase her to the people.”