have some good news and some bad news for the five Republicans scheming how to derail George W. Bush in tomorrow night's New Hampshire TV debate:
The good news is that the 53-year-old Texas governor is unused to debate, largely untested in a hostile TV environment, and not too quick on his feet or nifty in the clinches. The bad news? He's better than you think; he can remember and deliver his sound bites; his themes were dry-run in last year's gubernatorial race; and he has the confidence - some think cockiness - of the already anointed.
I make these assertions on zero experience of King George Second in the flesh. But a Turkey Day perusal of Dubbya's sole television debate of the 1998 campaign - a grim affair in El Paso - showed the Junior B-Man to be not quite the turkey his critics advertise. On my card he outpointed Garry Mauro, the underfinanced underdog largely abandoned by the Texas Democratic establishment, in a debate whose format was dictated by Bush, who won the election, 70 to 30 percent.
The debate was nowhere near that lopsided, but I gave Bush the nod, though the arcane questions about local problems, education funding, and a ban on any questions hinting of personal criticism made it dull fodder for viewers. Which was just how G.W.'s handlers wanted it. I have needled the Bush outfit for hiding their boy from the media and ducking the opening round of GOP debates. Tomorrow night will be only his third big-time TV debate lifetime, counting Mauro and one four years earlier against former Governor Ann Richards.
There's only one way to toughen a rookie hide for a presidential branding iron: that's to rough-house behind the barn with the rowdy candidates. I am still not convinced that George Jr. is ready for prime time, but his 60-minute sparring session with Mauro, a sacrificial lamb on a very short tether in his one meager shot at Bush, was not a fair fight.
''We all know about George Bush's family,'' gasped the underdog. Let me tell you about mine, he began. ''I worked my way through school ... making pizzas.... I still can't look a pizza in the face.'' I knew then it was gonna be a long night, pardner, especially after the outgunned Mauro tried to ingratiate himself with the audience by saying George ''is a nice guy.'' This was the start of a difficult hour.
Bush's opening was far from slick. He lunged for his Texas-twang song book, spurning the diction lashed into him at home, Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School. Right from the get-go he got to droppin' his ''g's'' and a-hitchin' his haitches. He's a regular, gol-darn skedaddler when it comes to talkin' Texan. ''If I say sumpin,''' he drawled, ''I mean it.''
After overcoming early jitters, stumbling over phrases and repeating words, Bush hit his stride and strummed some of the same themes he mines today: limited government, death on taxes, more military strength everywhere but not using it anywhere that Clinton might, and oh, yes, he's for improving education and making kids feel better about themselves, and by golly, ''I love my wife,'' and all other Bushes, and Texas, too.
Clearly the man is no debater in the formal sense. But Bush has his father's antitax rap down pat. ''Are you gonna raise taxes?'' he demanded of the hapless Mauro, a lamb being led to Texas slaughter, ''or who's not going to get the money'' promised to the voters.
Not quite ''Read my lips,'' but maybe Junior doesn't want that Peggy Noonan line, so effective against Mike Dukakis, used to throttle him as it did his tax-raising pappy. Junior's body language is still not secure. A relentless grip-and-grinner on the stump with friendly crowds, he sat stiffly and didn't square up to the camera for the first half of the debate. He blinked a great deal. But his brow was a lot less furrowed than it appears today. Bush seems to have aged, or become more worried, when you see him frown on TV now.
He tries to align himself with common folk by bonding with the Great Unwashed through the use of downmarket diction and jut-jawed promises. He says '''cause'' for ''because.'' He can ad-lib droll or self-deprecatory remarks. After Mauro went through a particularly convoluted defense of his school funding scheme to give every teacher a $6,000 raise, Bush shrugged: ''I'm no fiscal genius, but it was a little confusing.''
Bush generally eschewed cheap shots. He drily noted that Mauro was an old friend of Bill and Hillary's, but by the Texas standards of cut-and-thrust politics, that was a mild needle. Bush was clearly wobbly on how and why his administration sited a nuclear waste dump within 18 miles of the Mexican border and tried to lay that off on the woman he defeated in 1994. Bush knew how to shut off debate on a topic that was a loser for him.
The best line of the night was his; asked about teen-aged drivers, he drawled that ''My daughters are 16; there are not enough officers to protect the people of Texas from these drivers.'' He can't be too quippy, too cocky, or too casual this time; so far he's light on gravitas.
Those who debate him tomorrow night, where each man will have at best seven or eight minutes to make his case, will find him well coached, armed with sound bites and a closer that will seek to reassure Americans that, basically, he is not a dope. My hunch is that with expectations for him so generally low, in terms of debate performance, he'll do OK.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
