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Bush, Gore debate at UMass tonight

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 10/3/2000

fter a year of political jousting, and having survived everything from attacks by primary challengers to the ridicule of late-night comics, Governor George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore square off tonight in a presidential debate that is expected to focus largely on which candidate can best preserve peace and extend prosperity.

The Texan and the Tennessean, scions of famous political families, sons of Harvard both, are set to meet at 9 p.m. in a red-carpeted gymnasium of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a commuter school that itself hopes to benefit from its evening of nationwide fame.

For millions of Americans, the nationally televised debate will be the first opportunity to hear the Republican Bush and the Democrat Gore speak for more than a few seconds in a television sound bite. For 90 minutes, the two men are expected to clash on education, health care, Social Security, tax cuts, oil prices, the national debt, and prescription drugs, all issues that have been carved out as crucial by both campaigns during these relatively prosperous times.

Most national polls show the race is dead even, the closest competition at this late stage of a campaign in 40 years, with the undecided vote dominated by independents, women, and suburbanites. An obvious gaffe by one candidate or a clear advantage for another could determine not only the winner of the debate, but also of the election.

''The whole debate context is that Bush has a lot more riding on this than Gore,'' said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. ''There is still that question about whether he is smart enough, serious enough, and he can answer that.''

Gore, meanwhile, ''has to be careful not to come across as condescending,'' Rothenberg said.

Voters will be looking more for a gut-level feel for the candidates than policy detail, according to Colby College professor Anthony Corrado, author of ''Let America Decide,'' an analysis of past debates.

''Voters are trying to determine, `Is this the type of person I can trust to represent my views on the issue? Is this a person who will care about me?''' he said.

Only Bush and Gore were invited to participate by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is run by former chairmen of the two major political parties. The commission said that candidates have to reach 15 percent in five selected polls to participate. That infuriated some third-party candidates who said the commission had purposefully set up a Catch-22 that ruled them out. Unless they participate in the debate, these candidates argued, they couldn't rise in the polls, and if they couldn't rise in the polls, they couldn't debate.

Instead, Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, who drew 12,000 supporters to a Fleet Center rally on Sunday, and Reform Party candidate Patrick J. Buchanan came to Boston and encouraged their supporters to protest their exclusion. Police prepared to close off streets near the campus amid predictions that thousands of protesters would assemble as close as possible to the debate site.

In some ways, the key question at this debate is the same one that Ronald Reagan asked to great effect in 1980: ''Are you better off today than you were four years ago?''

By strict economic numbers, at least, Gore can argue that people are better off than they were four or eight years ago. But throughout the year, Bush has sought to parse the question on his own terms, suggesting that he would usher in an era of ''prosperity with a purpose'' and would ''leave no child behind.'' Bush has also suggested the nation has a moral deficit and, most recently, has asserted that the nation is in an ''education recession.''

The two men have been running to the political middle all year, but they do have differences on some key issues.

Bush wants to allow some Social Security recipients to put some of their savings in the stock market, while Gore wants to use the projected federal budget surplus to shore up the retirement system. Bush opposes abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or threat to the mother's life, while Gore supports abortion rights.

Bush wants to ban unregulated political contributions from corporations and labor unions, while Gore supports a tougher bill authored by Senator John S. McCain of Arizona that would ban all unregulated ''soft money'' donations.

Both men want to cut taxes, but Bush's proposals are larger and would give more benefit to wealthier Americans, while Gore's plan is targeted toward the lower- and middle-income.

And, while foreign policy has not been at the center of the campaign, the latest violence in the Middle East is likely to focus attention on the different world visions of the two men.

For Bush, the challenge is to overcome his reputation as a mediocre debater who got to the national stage on his father's name. His campaign aides say the son of the former president must show the country that he is ready to step into the Oval Office after less than six years as Texas governor and little foreign policy experience.

For Gore, the challenge is equally great. Derided as stiff and boring by some, and tethered for good and bad for nearly eight years to President Clinton, Gore is anxious to show more than his expected mastery of the issues. The vice president wants to show himself both as the engineer of a thriving economy and a fighter for those left behind.

While the evening will be dominated by discourse of the issues, the winner may be whoever leaves the most favorable impression, either with a well-timed line or cleverly disguised putdown, a la Ronald Reagan's famous dismissal of Jimmy Carter in 1980, ''There you go again.''

The debate is the first of three presidential encounters between today and Oct. 17, with a single vice presidential debate to be held Thursday in Kentucky. While not required by any law, debates in recent years have become an expected part of the campaign, as American as baseball, which, as it happens, has won out over debate coverage on NBC-TV, although affiliates are free to air the debate. The debates will be broadcast by ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel, among other outlets. In the past 12 years, the television audience for debates has ranged from 50 million to 97 million.

While the debate epitomizes the democratic nature of the campaign, the 900 or so seats in the debate hall are the most exclusive tickets in town. The two campaigns are each given a third of the tickets. A ''ticket hot line'' advertised on the UMass Internet site yesterday had a recording that said no tickets would be available to the public. Officials instead planned to hold a lottery for an undetermined number of tickets to be distributed to students, with the remainder going to press and security officials.

Corporate America, meanwhile, is highly visible at the event. Ford Motor Co., which helps pay some of the commission expenses, paid for press badge holders that contain the corporate logo and are supposed to be worn by the media. Anheuser-Busch paid for a media food tent, complete with ping-pong tables painted in a beer logo. Fidelity Investments sponsored a media party.

Inside the Clark Athletic Center, where the debate will be held, the floors were covered with red carpeting and rows of folding chairs. A stage has been erected with two lecterns, positioned in front of a half-moon table where moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS will sit with his back to the audience. In the back of the hall, the television networks have erected six booths that overlook the scene. Most of the 1,655 members of the media, however, will watch from a separate hall.

Late last night, police were pulling down about a half-dozen Gore-Lieberman signs that had been posted on an overpass spanning Morrissey Boulevard.

Gore wrapped up his debate preparations yesterday in Florida much as he started them: a 5-mile jog on a treadmill, a walk on the beach with some of the dozen ''special guests'' he had invited to be observers, and a mock debate with a cadre of advisers including campaign officials from Nashville and some administration officials from Washington, such as Labor Secretary Alexis Herman.

''It's clearly an important event in this campaign,'' said Chris Lehane, the vice president's spokesman. ''There are just very, very, very few opportunities you have in a modern-day presidential campaign to talk directly to that many people.''

Bush kept a relaxed pace yesterday, holding one public event before heading to Boston at noon today, while his campaign worked diligently to lower expectations about how he will perform.

Bush's communications director, Karen Hughes, called Gore ''one of the most skilled debaters in American politics,'' and said she expected him to ''attack, attack, attack.'' Hughes anticipated several of his tactics, predicting that Gore will be armed with one-liners written by his Hollywood supporters, and that he will assail Bush's proposed $1.3 trillion tax cut.

''You wait until tomorrow night,'' Bush told a crowd of supporters in Huntington, W.Va. ''Tomorrow night in the debates, he'll say, `You can't do that.'''

Globe reporters Anne E. Kornblut, traveling with Bush, and Glen Johnson, traveling with Gore, and Globe correspondent David Abel contributed to this report.