GAFFNEY, S.C. `It took a while, but we think we got him.''
This coldly rational Bush campaign assessment of its assault on John McCain before he acquires the national momentum that could sweep the Republican establishment aside makes two-dimensional sense. It's the third dimension, in this case a possible explosion in voting in next weekend's South Carolina primary, that George W. Bush still has to worry about.
If McCain likes to picture himself as Luke Skywalker trying to escape the Death Star, the Bush campaign against him is starting to feel like ''The Empire Strikes Back.'' It is not pretty and is rarely factual, but under the South Carolina Republican Party's wing - symbolized by those who learned attack politics from the late Lee Atwater - Bush is drawing blood.
More than that, Bush managed to draw McCain into his face-scratching game. The effect was to knock McCain off his higher ground and make the campaign look nasty, not the kind of primary that younger voters, first-time voters, independent-minded voters, and even Democratic voters (the people who could produce a McCain victory) are likely to view as worth participating in.
And that is exactly what the Bush operatives have in mind. For hard-core Republicans, Bush is the real conservative and McCain is not. But for people outside that inner core, Bush strategists explain that they are trying to raise doubts about McCain's character and dirty up the campaign enough to diminish enthusiasm about voting. Translation: small, typical South Carolina turnout on Feb. 19 and Bush wins; anything like the New Hampshire experience and he's toast.
The other night, the visible part of the effort was on display in this upper corner of the South Carolina, the primary's battleground area. The Bushies, with a free barbecue supper, had lured more than a thousand to the National Guard armory. They were polite but anything but wild - a typical Bush audience. The new act has three key parts:
Bush is really McCain. It's an old political trick: become some key element of your opponent to blunt his appeal. So Bush is now a reformer who gets results. His months-old speech now refers to ''my reform agenda.''
McCain is the real ''insider.'' For this part of the act, the new symbol is the repeated reference to his opponent as ''Chairman McCain,'' replacing John with the senator's Commerce Committee honorific. On issue after issue, Chairman McCain is linked with Bill Bradley and Al Gore, as in campaign finance reform, where Bush asserts with audacious mendacity that the ''big difference'' is their identification with ''labor union bosses.''
Taxes, taxes, and more taxes. Again, Chairman McCain and Gore are linked in a conspiracy to prevent people's money, in the form of budget surpluses, from being returned to them.
This public face, however, is more than matched on television with a relentless barrage of commercials painting McCain as a hypocritical influence peddler and closet Democrat on taxes. Well into this weekend, the Bush ads were outrunning the McCain commercials by at least 3-to-1, and this is the stuff McCain responded to (probably unwisely) with 30-second suggestions that Bush has Bill Clinton's regard for truth. The word is the Bush ads will get even rougher this week, built around the claim that McCain is a failed legislator.
By traditional yardsticks - above all, the historical fact of light voting on primary day, a Saturday - the Bush campaign's return to smug satisfaction makes sense.
And yet, and yet. McCain's ability to pierce conventional thinking remains uncanny. My favorite example occurred 50 miles down the road in Greenville, once the center of textile and furniture-making South Carolina but now a New South dynamo built around such investments as a sprawling BMW plant between it and nearby Spartanburg. The economic explosion has spawned new luxury housing subdivisions populated by new residents, many from outside the South.
Greenville's mayor, Knox White, is an archetypical New South Republican and proud leader of a sophisticated community that has Japanese and Italian restaurants on its main street. White has taken the plunge for McCain, very much against the upcountry grain. Just to be on the safe side, McCain also has Representative J.D. Hayworth along for the day's Straight Talk Express ride. A blowhard right-winger from Arizona, Hayworth prepared for Congress in local TV news, including a breakthrough stint on a Greenville station.
If anything, the crowds at his town meetings (he continues to average three a day despite a cold, in contrast to Bush's lazy pace) are bigger than they were in New Hampshire and just as enthusiastic as he and they converse at length. His best moment came in Spartanburg, when a mother got up in tears to complain about a call to her son from a polling firm connected to the Bush campaign that passed along negative information about McCain's record in the guise of asking for his voting preference.
This so-called ''push polling'' creates a sinister impression of campaigning. The point of the incident, however, is not what it says about Bush but how it dramatizes McCain's potential if he can keep to the high ground with his message of conservative reform.
As in New Hampshire, the head wants to say Bush while the eyes and gut say McCain. With a big debate and a week of campaigning to go, the next several days are going to seem like an eternity.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
