The USA Today/Gallup poll showed viewers giving Sen. Obama of Illinois, the Democratic presidential nominee, the edge over Republican nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona by a whopping 12 points -- 46 percent to 34 percent.

Although Obama has been in the Senate only four years, less than one-fifth the 22 years McCain has served there, a Los Angeles Times poll found 46 percent believe he looked more presidential compared with McCain at 33 percent. In U.S. presidential elections, perceptions of physical presence and poise matter immensely.

These figures are of potentially great significance. They suggest that Obama finally may have made the breakthrough that has eluded him over the past three months since he made his "grand tour" of Afghanistan, the Middle East and Western Europe. That trip, which was expected to deliver a boost to Obama's ratings at home, instead saw them slightly but crucially erode.

Everything Obama has tried since then has fizzled. Even his speech-with-fireworks extravaganza in front of more than 80,000 people and 37 million television viewers to top off the Democratic National Convention in Denver failed to give him any appreciable boost. He failed at first to even be able to capitalize on the unprecedented economic meltdown on Wall Street and its threat to the domestic U.S. economy.

Now, in yet another of the extraordinary reversals of fortune that continue to shape this messy, unpredictable election, it is McCain, of all people, who has ridden to Obama's rescue.

McCain made a surprising move by requesting a debate delay to prioritize crisis talks in Washington to help craft the bailout plan to try to avoid national financial ruin. That didn't play particularly well in the polls, but it didn't play badly either.

McCain didn't have to fly to Oxford, Miss., to squeeze in the first presidential debate after that bold move, but he did so anyway.

Clearly McCain and his strategists thought he could eat Obama alive in the debate. Obama doesn't have the experience or taste for impromptu remarks and one-on-one debating that McCain does. And, indeed, most political commentators, including many liberal ones, scored the first presidential debate as a toothless draw.

Daniel Politi, writing in Politico Monday, noted that the USA Today/Gallup poll gave Obama a huge boost of 30 points among those polled, who said they had a more favorable opinion of him after the debate.

McCain just broke even on that crucial score, with 21 percent saying they had a more favorable view and 21 percent a less favorable view of him.

Politi also noted that in Sunday's Gallup's daily tracking poll, Obama extended his 5-point lead over McCain to 8 points.

"If Obama's improvement does stem from his debate performance, his numbers could rise further over the next few days as the proportion of polling conducted after the debate increases," he wrote.

The Rasmussen poll told a similar story, with Obama 6 points up on McCain Saturday by 50 percent to 44 percent. Opinion Research Corp., in a Friday night poll after the debate for CNN, had Obama winning 51 percent to 38 percent. All those figures are consistent and point in the same direction.

McCain now faces the danger that he could suffer Vice President Al Gore's fate in the 2000 presidential election against Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Gore, a physically bigger man, went after Bush energetically in those debates, much as McCain went after Obama. And Bush was as vague on many of his issues and answers then as Obama was on Friday night.

Several times Obama even ducked McCain's attacks by appealing to debate moderator Jim Lehrer instead. Yet in 2000, polls taken after every presidential debate gave Bush a slight but widening edge.

Ironically, the poll advantage to Bush from those debates still left him half a million votes behind Gore in the total popular count, though Bush finally squeezed home after a Supreme Court decision put an end to the recount in Florida.

The latest polling figures give Obama a much stronger lead than that. If the McCain campaign wants to retain any hope of winning, they will have to drastically rethink their strategy and assumptions for Round 2. They haven't been knocked out of the fight, but they certainly have been knocked down -- and hard.