PHILADELPHIA -- To George W. Bush, all this isn't business, it's personal. In making that bet, and showing his cards, he has left Al Gore an opportunity to make the other case - that it isn't personal at all, that it is indeed business.
The concepts that have really mattered for the past two weeks to the backroom strategists and the GOP nominee himself involve leadership, character, boldness, vision, decency, inclusiveness, his family and faith.
Think about it. It's been about Him.
It's a sound bet, with some interesting history behind it. But Bush has left Al Gore an opportunity to make the case that it isn't about Me, it's about You, and there's some interesting history behind that, too. Forget the partisan edges for a moment, this is a great time to get serious about strategy.
In putting together Bush's campaign even as President Clinton's impeachment trial was bombing in the Senate, advisers who briefed writers during convention week acknowledged that two conflicting currents are at work this year.
One is the stiff odds against vice presidents being elected to succeed the presidents who named them. Since they started running as tickets early in the 19th century, only two Veeps have made it - Martin Van Buren in 1836 and Bush's dad in 1988. One reason there have been so many failures is that the instinct for party change is particularly strong when the presidency is open. And this year, because President Clinton is such a divisive personal figure, the Bush candidacy is based on a conviction that this instinct is even stronger.
But there's another current that's even stronger historically. This one has always kept the ''in'' party around when the economy is prosperous, incomes are rising, the public mood about the immediate future is positive, and the belief is that the country is headed in the right direction.
That is why Van Buren and Bush's dad beat the historical odds, and ironically why they each got defeated for reelection, leaving our history without a sitting Veep having won two terms as president since some guy named Jefferson.
As Bush enjoys a well-earned bounce in the polls, his advisers are aware of these currents, and they are laboring to strengthen the first and weaken the latter. Judgments about the convention must be hedged because of the unprecedented lack of public interest and television coverage, but one truth about conventions appears to have survived - that they require a nominee to show most of his big cards by the end.
Bush put at least three more on the table here in addition to the overwhelmingly personal nature of his basic appeal. Each is both serious challenge and real opportunity for Gore.
He has decided to join Gore and Clinton as his opponents in order to enhance the Clinton fatigue that his campaign believes will make the high hill all vice presidents must climb even steeper. Dick Cheney began showing this card with his surprisingly direct argument that ''you never see one without thinking of the other.'' Bush himself was no less direct in claiming that the administration was asking for ''another chance,'' a ''third chance'' that should be denied.
It's a solid move if you are going after voters who personally disapprove of the president. But it allows Gore is to go after those who approve of the job Clinton has done - numbers without precedent in polling history.
Bush has decided to go straight at this sentiment, too, with another surprisingly direct argument that the ''Clinton-Gore'' administration's record is an eight-year flop. His planners have assumed that the prosperity is so great and long-standing that it is a given in the public's mind and that there is an opening for the assertion that Clinton-Gore have ''squandered'' the opportunity to take advantage of it to accomplish big things like fixing Social Security and Medicare.
In doing so, he made the prosperity ''a test of character,'' another example of making the election about himself and not merely about policy choices. He has to try, but in showing this card, he has offered Gore an opportunity to make a totally different case: Use the last eight years to make the case about the economic policy record as a backdrop about what it will take to sustain this prosperity.
But the other opportunity for Gore is to remind the country what conditions were like before the administration took office, when the White House was occupied by another guy named Bush.
Bush did not shrink from his truly conservative agenda of everything from massive tax cuts to the effort to end abortion rights.
But his campaign has now framed his positions as those of someone who will lead on principle, the word Bush used over and over again.
Once more, he has made the issues more a matter of character, his own, than choices facing the people.
Here, Gore faces a well-set trap. By taking the bait and making his campaign mostly about Bush's proposals and Texas record, he will become the pure pol, the whiner about ''risky schemes'' Bush ridiculed so expertly, the negative philosopher of roadblock.
Gore's real opportunity is to emphasize his own ideas, a far more convincing refutation of the one aspect of the governor's campaign that is purely negative.
Bush has put his best foot forward - himself. But that leaves the rest of us.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
