TONY ABBOTT was the leader that both worms spurned.
Dial-twisting audiences of uncommitted voters in both Channel Nine's and Channel Seven's studios reacted so negatively to the Opposition Leader's negative debate performance that the Coalition claimed the wriggly creature was a Labor-biased ''grub''.
As Kevin Rudd had calculated, Abbott was at a debating disadvantage from the start. He has chosen to keep the Coalition's hospitals policy under wraps until closer to the election, so he had little choice but to spend most of his time picking holes in the government's plans.
But ever since the worm first appeared in Australian election debates in 1993 for Paul Keating versus John Hewson, it has hated negativity and loved the bloke with the positive plan.
It snaked southwards when Abbott criticised Rudd's hospitals reform. It plunged when he broadened his attack to Labor's record on insulation or wasted school spending, even though Rudd himself recently admitted he had handled them so badly he deserved an opinion poll ''whacking''.
And when the Opposition Leader made jokes like how he was at a disadvantage compared with Rudd because he was ''not capable of waffling'' or how Rudd had ''experience as an anaesthetist in the House of Representatives'' he got a laugh from the National Press Club crowd but the worm made like it was trying to dig its way to China.
In sharp contrast both worms loved the return of the calm, reasonable Rudd formerly known as Kevin 07, who talked about healthcare in folksy, real-world terms: parents worried about their sick ''little ones'', sickness reminding us of ''what's important in life'', his boyhood experiences growing up ''in the country''.
They didn't seem to mind a bit when his language was a little wonky. When he claimed to be extending the hand of policy peace, friendship and co-operation across the partisan divide, appealing to Abbott to stop the ''rolling tidal wave of negativity'', Channel Nine's worm looked like it was going to jump off the graph and start crawling up the Prime Minister's shoulder. It didn't seem to notice the appeal was really an attack in disguise.
''Wormology'' - as Channel Nine called it - does not have much of a record as a barometer of electoral success. The worm liked Kevin Rudd in 2007, but it also gave the 2004 debate to Mark Latham and the 1998 and 2001 debates to Kim Beazley.
But that doesn't mean politicians don't care about the critter, no matter what they say when they lose. It might exaggerate the electorate's preference for posit-ivity, but it does point to the real limitations of Abbott's first-stage strategy to ''oppose and attack''.
It might not tell us much about how people are going to vote, especially six months from an election, but it does give the ''worm-winner'' a handy bit of momentum. And yesterday's result has put a bit more pressure on the Coalition to explain its own policies, which was the Prime Minister's plan all along.
Rudd still has a long way to go before his hospital revamp becomes reality. But many Labor strategists thought he had taken a crazy political gamble with his spur-of-the-moment debate challenge. If the worm proved anything, it proved them wrong.
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