m I the only one who thought the governor of Texas was a tad too trigger-happy in his first want-to-be-president debate?
''I'd take 'em all out,'' the onetime Air National Guard jet jockey said, smiling at he mention of Saddam Hussein's potential weapons of mass destruction. And just in case you didn't get it the first time, the goofy-grinned George W. Bush repeated his threat: ''Take out the weapons of mass destruction.'' Yowza!
In the lava-flow of post-debate analysis Friday, most of the pontificators thought none of the six Republican aspirants made any big goofs Thursday night in Manchester, N.H. Count me out of the conventional wisdom. I thought Bush was doing swimmingly till he got his last question, when I thought he went too far.
Maybe it's because Hussein is still in power, and Bush's father is rusticated, defeated the year after winning the Gulf War. Bush the Younger vowed to get tough on the Desert Despot. He said that as president, he'd try helping the Iraqi opposition. Apparently Junior's briefers did not mention beforehand that we've been trying that, to no considerable avail.
''I'm surprised he's still there,'' drawled Bush, as if he could somehow, after Inauguration Day, wave his magic wand, or a few B-52s, and exorcise his father's nemesis. Bush has a yen for the next swearing-in. He even mimicked the ceremony in his closing statement Thursday night, just as he did in August in his Ames, Iowa, straw poll speech. This fella has been practicing on his ''So help me's'' in front of the mirror, it looks like.
He raised his right hand solemnly as if swearing on the Good Book that he'd be a darn-tootin' upholder of dignity and decorum in the Oval Office. That's not the problem. It's the threat to ''take out'' whatever secret weapons Mr. Hussein is hiding that shivered my timbers.
Screwing around with tax cuts, teacher rules, gummint regulations, and the Mom-and-apple-pie sound bites is what they all do. But offhandedly threatening to reignite the Gulf War as a throwaway line in New Hampshire is a big boner in my book.
But not to other scribes, I gather. The second paragraph of AP's overnight lead, by the capable Ron Fournier, began: ''Bush, the leading GOP candidate, avoided a major gaffe. ...'' And the pack of talking- heads I caught later on TV seemed unruffled by the Dr. Strangelove act.
If I'm plotting some anti-Bush spots for Al Gore or Bill Bradley for next fall, I'm thinking: Hmmm ... . Do I go for the killer ap and cook up something like the Daisy ad of the little girl and the nuclear explosion that LBJ used against Barry Goldwater in '64? Or do I choose humor, and caricature George W. in his cowboy hat, riding down a nuke like Slim Pickens in the Kubrick movie? Do I get the peace people to denounce Bush as a warmonger? That whole cowboy image has potential.
Bush was running for president of Texas in the debate I saw. World's 11th largest economy. Got his own foreign policy for Mexico already. By the time his sound bites came around for the second or third time, it reminded me of one of my old Jerry Jeff Walker tapes, played so often that the darn thing skips when my vehicle goes over a bump. Young George was so rehearsed that, to some of those I watched with, he seemed robotic.
But his team prepped him well. The 22-year-old magazine quote suggesting hiding the Social Security retirement age that Bush sprang on the geeky Steve Forbes was a nifty bit of opposition research. The deliberate embrace of US Senator John McCain - ''he's a good man,'' Bush repeated, as he repeats so many of his sallies - was a clever bit of political business. With all those rumors of Bush's camp spreading rumors about McCain being a nutter as a result of his POW years, Bush's praise for his closest rival was shrewd politics.
Closest rival? How about only rival? Forbes's money - he spent $40 million last time and could top that this time - and the not-unexpected endorsement of the Manchester Union Leader should prop up the Magazine Man into third place in New Hampshire come Feb. 1. But the rest - US Senator Orrin Hatch, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer - are not close to being a factorin the primary.
Bauer, a sincere antiabortionist who argues that abortion is the biggest issue facing the country, and therefore the world, is an asterisk with a cause. Keyes, a talk show tirader, is an entertaining soapbox haranguer, a sideshow act. And Hatch's forlorn plea, his Hop-on-the-bus-Gus bid to get his five rivals to commit to a two-week bus tour of Iowa and then New Hampshire for some Lincoln-Douglas style tag-team debating, was ludicrous.
Lincoln-Douglas? I'm thinking Larry-Moe-and-Curly. Maybe the bottom three Republicans should get on that Greyhound, and let the rest of us listen to McCain, who had the best night of any of them. Most of the good lines were his. Asked about his supposedly short-fused temper: '' A comment like that really makes me mad!''
And reappointing Alan Greenspan to run the Federal Reserve? If old Al happens to kick off, said McCain, a Greenspan groupie, ''I'd prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him and keep him as long as we could.'' That's the Beau Geste approach to monetary policy, stacking the French Legionnaire up on the parapet with his musket pointing out. And on Pentagon pork-spending by Congress? ''Look, we've been buying C-130s for 10 years. We're going to have a C-130 in every schoolyard in America; there's no need for much of the equipment we are purchasing.'' If you like the status quo, quoth McCain, ''then I'm not your man.'' A message even a Democrat can love.
We'll see if the New Hampshire numbers move as a result of the show. Two more are coming shortly. It is clear from all the polling elsewhere that New Hampshire is the only state with a chance to halt the headlong rush of the GOP to coalesce behind Bush. The Texan is an unproven commodity, nationally as well as internationally. But New Hampshire is the only place on the calendar where the voters can say, ''Hey, let's stop and think about this guy before we hand him the keys. Just where is this fellow planning to take us?''
Out of his own mouth, he's ready to put B-52s to work on Iraq. And he says it with that cockeyed grin. And what is troubling this December could be terrifying next December, if he's sitting in Austin, packing his bags for D.C., practicing his ''I do solemnly swear ...'' in front of the shaving mirror with his right hand raised.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
