THE 1992 DEBATES : Spin Doctors Now Just Draw Laughs : Politics: The professionals who try to interpret events have encountered a sea change: Media aren’t listening.

ST. LOUIS —  Forgive John Cochran of NBC News and Morton Dean of ABC. No one at these encounters keeps a straight face any more.

They were listening to Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos in the press room after the presidential debate Sunday. Stephanopoulos was trying to tell one of their television colleagues how to interpret the event they had just seen.

“It’s all over,” Stephanopoulos was telling ABC’s Chris Bury. “Clinton will be the next president.”

Cochran and Dean simply broke out laughing.

The same thing happened to Ellen Warren, the veteran political reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers.

“Did you win?,” Warren had asked Torie Clark, George Bush’s campaign press secretary.

“Absolutely,” Clark said.

Warren was laughing too hard to write anything down.

She didn’t even get the next line, the one the Bush campaign team had agreed on during a meeting in their holding room a few minutes before. “Bush was presidential. Clinton was political. And Perot was egotistical.”

For the last decade or so, political professionals have tried to shape the public perception of debates by rushing into the press areas and telling reporters how to think about what had just occurred.

It is called the art of spin, and the practitioners spin doctors.

But a sea change has become increasingly obvious this year--at least for the national press that covers the presidential campaign full time:

Spin is dead.

“It means very little now,” said Dan Balz of the Washington Post.

They should set up new rules for this, said Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe. The press room at Washington University on Sunday was a basketball gymnasium. “In the lane, three seconds and out,” Oliphant said, suggesting the rules of basketball be applied to spinning. “If someone can’t get off their line in three seconds it’s a foul.”

Washington columnist and TV pontificator Robert Novak ignores the spin doctors, in part because he believes he has been lied to too many times. He remembers the time in 1976 that aides to Gerald R. Ford tried to argue that Ford had scored a major rhetorical coup by arguing that the people of Poland were not suffering Soviet domination.

ABC correspondent Jeff Greenfield remembers too well when a Democratic operative tried to argue in 1988 that Michael Dukakis had “humanized himself” by not flinching when asked how he would feel if his wife were raped and murdered.

“Spin is definitely dead,” said Greenfield. “This has achieved the level of a ritual dance. It’s all symbol. The only way it would ever mean anything is if someone came out and said ‘we didn’t do we what needed to.”’

And no one does that, not even Ross Perot’s spin doctors, his son Ross Jr. and the chairman of his volunteer organization, Orson Swindle.

“People weren’t attacking Ross in the debate because there was nothing to attack him on,” Swindle was saying.

“They attacked him plenty when he was leading in the polls,” quipped the local Washington, D.C., newsman interviewing him. “Maybe they weren’t attacking him because he’s only at 7% now.”

Sometimes, even the spinners had trouble keeping a straight face. “I was surprised how poorly Bill Clinton did,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater was saying.

“Gee, the Clinton camp said they scored a knockout blow to the President. How are we to reconcile these two accounts?” a reporter asked, not trying to conceal the parody in his voice.

“The Democrats are giving you empty rhetoric,” the Republican press secretary said. Then then poked his tongue to his cheek to hide the grin forming across his face.

If no one believes spin, why did the press room at Washington University fill with U.S. senators like Democrat Joseph Biden and Republican Phil Gramm, Cabinet secretaries like Jack Kemp, and dozens of campaign operatives rushing to talk to reporters? Why did the Republicans print “backgrounders” pointing out places where Clinton didn’t “tell the truth” or “waffled” during the debate and rush them to the press room? Why did aides with walkie-talkies follow each Republican spin doctor around and keep in contact so that their spinners were well distributed throughout the room?

Because if one side is spinning, the other side must spin, said Mandy Grunwald, who was spinning for Clinton.