NEW YORK (Bloomberg) – The Republican Party paladins were on their best behaviour yesterday, leaving the sneers in St. Paul and performing like concerned citizens on the Sunday morning news programmes in the US.

There was Rudolph Giuliani, for example, defending an advertisement that accuses Barack Obama of sponsoring legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners.

"I re-read the bill last night," he told Tom Brokaw, on NBC's "Meet the Press," his tone just as collegial as could be. The McCain campaign ad, more poisonous than most arrows in the Republican quiver, was fair, Rudy said, because the bill included education on HIV and AIDS and used the word "comprehensive."

"I agree that the campaign has gotten too negative on both sides," Giuliani said with a straight face – a look quite different from the one presented two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention, where the former New York mayor transformed the words "community organiser" into an obscenity.

Then there was professional character assassin Karl Rove, speaking to Chris Wallace on Fox. He sounded like the considered voice of reason, chiding both campaigns for distorting the truth in their ads. It was as though he hadn't been the architect of the most putrid political parries of the past decade. Just ask John McCain.

Before a national television audience, the Republicans practice the art of dissembling with considerably more elan than the Democrats muster when telling the truth.

The Democrats are "in full-throated panic," Carly Fiorina said on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos".

Stephanopoulos, so busy dodging volleys instead of moving the discussion to actual issues, even failed to register astonishment when Fiorina said, "Let's ask if Barack Obama has ever stood up against his party." Obama, of course, would have had to answer with only one word: "Iraq."

New York Senator Charles Schumer tried making that very point to Brokaw. Asked by Brokaw whether Democrats were concerned about Obama's 20 percent drop in the polls on the question of preparedness to lead the US, Schumer responded: "I don't think so." In fact, he added, Obama "has a big leg up" over McCain because of his early opposition to invading Iraq. OK, so the Democrats are guilty of wishful thinking.

It was Giuliani who did the most persuasive shape-shifting act of the day. Obama, he said, would change the capital gains tax as a means of "redistributing wealth". Brokaw didn't ask if redistributing the wealth by easing the burden on the wealthy wasn't exactly what the Bush administration had been doing for the past eight years.

The weekend's most salient political jabs had come 12 hours earlier, on "Saturday Night Live", with Tina Fey and Amy Pohler playing Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, respectively.

Their mock "joint appearance" quickly degenerated as "Palin", Fey's outfit and accent spot on, called global warming "just God huggin' us closer" and "Hillary" expressed surprise that people suddenly cared about a woman in the race.

It was Fey's Palin, blithely playing air guitar behind Pohler's ever-more agitated Clinton, that gave weekend couch potatoes their most accurate view of the state of the campaign: The Republicans with their new rock star, the Democrats playing defence.