Columbia, South Carolina — For a man who had just grabbed the spotlight in a nationally televised presidential debate, Ron Paul seemed a little, well, defensive. A few minutes after the debate ended here at the University of South Carolina, Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, ventured into the Spin Room to talk to reporters, only to find that they wanted to know whether he really blamed the United States for the September 11 terrorist attacks.

“Who did that?” Paul snapped. “Who blamed America?”

“Well, your critics felt that you did.”

“No, I blamed bad policy over 50 years that leads to anti-Americanism,” Paul said. “That’s little bit different from saying ‘blame America.’ Don’t put those words in my mouth.”

“But the policies were bad American policies?”

“We’ve had an interventionist foreign policy for 50 years that has come back to haunt us,” Paul continued. “So that’s not ‘Blame America’ — that’s demagoguing, distorting issues…That’s deceitful to say those kinds of things.”

To many people, however, it did appear that Paul blamed the U.S. for the attacks. A few feet away from where Paul was meeting reporters, Washington lawyer Ted Olson, at the debate to support his friend Rudy Giuliani, was taken aback at what he heard from Paul. “I find it personally offensive and very disturbing,” said Olson, whose wife Barbara died on September 11, “that an American, especially an American member of Congress, can say those things about what happened to cause 9/11.”

It all started when Paul was asked how September 11 changed American foreign policy. “Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us?” Paul answered. “They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years…”

Questioner Wendell Goler, of Fox News, asked, “Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?”

“I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it,” Paul said. “They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

Enter Giuliani. “May I comment on that?” the mayor said, interrupting the orderly flow of things for the first time in the debate. “That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.”

The audience loved it. As the applause built, Giuliani added, “And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

Paul didn’t back down, but by cutting in, Giuliani had scored some of the best, and perhaps easiest, points of the night. So much so that advisers from rival campaigns couldn’t quite hide their frustration that Giuliani had moved so quickly. “I don’t think it takes a lot of courage to use Ron Paul as a prop,” said Charlie Black, the longtime GOP strategist who is backing Sen. John McCain. “But he [Giuliani] got his 9/11 credential in there, so congratulations.”

The Ron Paul moment was just one of Giuliani’s strong points in the debate. He was solid on terrorism, solid on the war in Iraq, solid on taxes, solid on lots of things. On abortion, he was not exactly solid, but his answers were more coherent than they had been in the first debate, held May 3 at the Reagan Library in California. Put it all together, and Giuliani’s aides seemed genuinely happy with his performance Tuesday night, in contrast to the way they seemed to be faking their happiness in California. “He was better,” said Jim Dyke, a top Giuliani adviser. “9/11 is very personal to the mayor. You can’t coach something like that.”

Over at the McCain camp, the post-debate mood was good, despite that touch of pique over Giuliani’s Ron Paul layup. Aides conceded that McCain seemed a little jazzed during the first part of the California debate, so they were delighted to see him be both strong and measured in his opening discussion about the war. “He’s been to war,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “He knows what war is about. He understands our enemy. He’s going to make sure that this nation is well defended, and he understands what an American is all about. We’re the good guys.”

Missing from McCain’s answers was any reference to pursuing Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell.” When McCain said that in California, it struck some observers as over the top, and there was word that Graham was the one who suggested the phrase. “I’ve used that line several times,” Graham said Tuesday night. “It demonstrates a commitment that is graphic. I want the enemy to believe that. John wants the enemy to believe that.” So don’t be surprised if you hear it again sometime.

If the McCain and Giuliani teams had plenty of reason to be happy, the third candidate in the top tier, Mitt Romney, did not. The former Massachusetts governor simply couldn’t match McCain and Giuliani on issues of war and terrorism, which are, as it happens, the most important issues to the Republican primary electorate in South Carolina. And when Romney went on the offensive Tuesday night, linking McCain to the arch-liberal Ted Kennedy, he found himself on the receiving end of a McCain smackdown.

Talking about McCain’s immigration plan, Romney said, “My fear is that McCain-Kennedy would do to immigration what McCain-Feingold has done to campaign finance and money in politics, and that’s bad.”

While some in the audience clearly agreed with Romney, McCain won applause of his own when he hit back. “Well, I take and kept a consistent position on campaign finance reform,” McCain said. “I have kept a consistent position on right to life. And I haven’t changed my position on even-numbered years or changed because of the different offices that I may be running for.”

Ouch. McCain did everything but put on a pair of those enormous foam flip-flops that anti-Romney demonstrators like to wear. Romney was rattled.

As for the rest of the field, Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, again came out on top of the second-tier candidates. In fact, Huckabee did so well, both in California and South Carolina, that if the tiers were determined by debate performance alone, he’d be in the top group. Other second-tier candidates struggled. For example, Rep. Tom Tancredo, a single-issue candidate on immigration, astonished some observers by giving weak and disjointed answers on…immigration. (Rep. Duncan Hunter was much stronger on the subject of building a wall to cut the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico.) Former Wisconsin governor and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, an advocate of cutting wasteful federal spending, couldn’t name a wasteful federal program that he would cut. Sen. Sam Brownback and former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore didn’t score many points.

So in the end, the candidate who made a big move, who came out of nowhere to win new name recognition was…Ron Paul. But it’s probably not the sort of name recognition Republican presidential candidates want. “Wow,” said one adviser to a rival campaign after listening to Paul’s blame-America lecture. “I haven’t heard anything like that this side of Rosie O’Donnell.”