hen Boston newscaster Andy Hiller popped his match-the-country-to-its-foreign-leader quickie quiz, and George W. Bush flunked, there was a lot of eye-rolling and gum-flapping about how fair it was.
Cheap shot, ambush, gotcha-game were some of the terms tossed about by pundits who take themselves utterly seriously. Like football officials debating an NFL penalty call while the game stagnates, we journalistic zebras sometimes succumb to the tendency to insert ourselves into the game when it should be reserved for the combatants.
Bill Bradley, apparently, was too cagey to take the cheese when Hiller tried the same gambit on him. In the last election, Lamar Alexander stepped on his necktie when he was stumped by a questioner who challenged him to cough up the price of a quart of milk and a loaf of bread.
I give Hiller credit for a good gimmick. Any campaigning politician is fair game for any question within bounds of propriety. Learning to turn aside a potential stumper is basic training for any tyro politician. The reason Hiller's cheeky challenge has resonated through the pundit world is that it lifts the veil on a very basic question about the front-runner - the man most likely to be our next president, if you believe the polls. The question about Bush: Is this guy really a dope, or what?
The Texas governor has proven to be a popular and affable campaigner-in-the-flesh. He does great in front of adoring crowds, backslapping supporters, Republican office holders, and rich Republicans lugging checkbooks.
But his campaign has been a Bubble Boy operation from the get-go. Texas Rangers elbow aside the common ruck of humanity. Events are tightly scripted. Bush is protected from criticism at every turn. He ducks debates. His interviews are few and far between except with ''friendlies.''
The rough-tough Texas bad boy image clashes with frozen-in-campaign-consultant-amber reality. The wild man of the frat house is on a short leash. Most of his so-called public events are fund-raisers, in which his scripted sound bites are delivered before carefully vetted crowds of dutiful Republicans under flattering lights against cheerful backdrops.
There's no crime in any of this. It's standard spin-doctor fare, with the all-important visuals left to the image-crafter. Portraying the privileged Bush-boy as a rugged West Texas wildcatter helps take the elitist sheen off the lad who was ushered through Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School.
You can do a lot with millions of dollars for a TV makeover, and Bush has benefited from his PR buildup, just as the young JFK prospered with his daddy's patrimony and connections. But the Rose Garden strategy cooked up by the Bush high command in Austin has pumped up a presidential front-runner woefully short in the gravitas department.
Is this guy heavy enough to run the country? We don't know. He looked goofy in the Andy Hiller interview, which was apparently scheduled as a routine give-a-local-TV-reporter-a-few-minutes throwaway for a Boston channel whose signal goes into New Hampshire.
In the rare moments we have seen Bush taking unscripted questions from nonfriendly media types, he has displayed some rookie nerves. He tends to repeat his soundbites, to stammer ungrammatically (note the Ted Kennedy similarity), and to look sort of peeved if things aren't going his way.
He shows some of his father's impatience with lesser life, like journalists, which was all the more jarring because it contrasted with R. Reagan's practiced, if vacuous, jocularity.
''What is this, 50 questions?'' ventured the flustered George W. He didn't get that right, either. He apparently intended to draw a comparison to the old parlor game, ''Twenty Questions.''
Bush's academic record was no great shakes, it appears, and his vaunted business acumen has been, to put it generously, benefited mightily from persons in Texas with reason to curry favor with his old man.
He has spent a grand total of less than six years in public office. He has won only two elections. In the first, he defeated Ann Richards to become governor of Texas in 1994, when any Democrat running in the South in the Year of Newt was road kill. And last year Bush beat a woefully underfunded Democrat. In both campaigns, Bush had only one televised debate against each general election opponent. He did all his business with TV ads.
Now his secretive campaign staff in Texas pulls the strings with marvelous manipulative skill. They do a great job of covering up their guy's weaknesses. Boy George gets weekends off, according to an admiring New York Times column by old Nixon speechwriter William Safire, who must know a thing or two about how you win the White House with string pullers. The Bush camp rations George W.'s exposure to TV audiences, and the front-runner will spend half his days at home through Christmas.
When Bush canceled out of the only televised New Hampshire candidate's night so far, the excuse was that he had to be in Dallas to watch his wife get an award. That proved to be a mistake. John McCain's surge in New Hampshire showed the J.R. Ewing approach to politics doesn't go down well up here. You have to win on the road to take the White House, and George W., off the evidence to date, is not much of a road warrior.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
