WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush's assault on Senator John McCain in pivotal South Carolina has a veneer of substance, but in fact it is personal. McCain is being portrayed as a Washington insider hypocrite, an influence-peddling corporate jet passenger in league with the hated liberals in politics and the media to keep taxes high and government huge. Bush avoided this kind of behavior in New Hampshire because it could not have survived scrutiny. The calculation that conservatives in South Carolina are dumber and easier to manipulate is suspect, however.
In just the first few days it has already boomeranged once, over McCain's record on veterans' issues. If it boomerangs once more, Bush could easily lose the Feb. 19 primary and with it another layer of his once-assumed inevitability as the kind of Republican leader who can appeal across ideological lines.
And it deserves to boomerang, because the linchpin of Bush's assault on McCain's character - economics - is patently fraudulent.
The Bush assault commenced Friday, when he began broadcasting the first, honest-to-badness attack commercial of the 2000 campaign. The key sentence: ''McCain's own economic adviser says he supports Bush's plan that earmarks $2 trillion to protect Social Security, pays down debt, and gives a real tax cut for every family.''
Every bit of that sentence is false. The statement reflects a continual need by Bush for the trappings of respectability for a tax proposal that deserves none.
The ''economic adviser'' is actually a supporter, Washington lobbyist and former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber, a onetime acolyte of Jack Kemp on economics and Newt Gingrich on politics, who doesn't advise McCain on policy and who made an innocuously gracious comment about Bush's plan that the governor's campaign has directly misstated as support.
Another falsehood in the commercial is more substantive. The truth is that Bush's plan ''earmarks'' nothing, not a dime. There is a tax proposal that would cost at least $1.4 trillion over the next 10 years and a pork-filled but otherwise vague proposal to spend even more on the military than is programmed for the next several years by the Clinton administration. Far from protecting the Social Security system, it is a dagger aimed right at its fiscal heart.
What Bush has done is falsely use the figure of $2 trillion as if it were one concept when in fact it is two. On the simpler level, it represents the annual surpluses within Social Security payroll taxes and benefits spending that are certain to accumulate until the main impact of the baby boom generation's retirement hits. Everybody running for president in both parties, as well as the GOP Congress and the Clinton administration, supports the retention of those surpluses.
Both Bush and McCain also favor the establishment of individual investment accounts for future retirees, financed by a 2 percentage point cut in each willing individual's payroll tax. But Bush has no way to finance the huge, upfront costs of such a partial privatization except from within the system - meaning future benefit cuts. So much for protecting it.
The McCain difference stems from the concept of what could be a second $2 trillion. This is the outer range of estimates of the operating surpluses in the government outside Social Security that could accumulate over the next decade. McCain doesn't believe it for a second, while Bush clings to the figure like a life preserver. For starters, half the figure would disappear without deep budget cuts that neither Congress nor Clinton has been willing to even propose, largely for good reasons.
Unlike Bush, McCain really does ''earmark'' whatever operating surplus occurs by using percentages in his proposals: 60-plus percent for Social Security (on top of the $2 trillion saved within the system, thus making provision for investment accounts), another 10 percent for Medicare (ignored by Bush), and the rest for national debt reduction (which also shores up the pension fund).
The Bush commercial's claim about debt reduction is false by comparison because there is no earmarking. And that ''real'' tax cut would be an illusion for most Americans, its few dollars drowned in the program cuts that would have to accompany it. It would, however, be ''real'' for the 1 percent of income earners who would get nearly 40 percent of the dollars.
The commercial is, in short, preposterous. Lamer stuff has worked before, but as this campaign goes down the stretch in South Carolina, Bush sounds more desperate than determined. Wrong, too.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
