y clumsily bailing out of the Oct. 3 presidential debate still listed for UMass-Boston's Dorchester campus, George W. Bush hurts his own Texas-tough-guy image, weakens his already feeble chances in the Northeast, wastes several hundred grand in site preparation, and ticks off Bill Forry.
''It's a big loss for the neighborhood if it doesn't happen,'' said Forry, who with his dad and a small crew puts out the feisty weekly Dorchester Reporter. Few motorists who stall-and-crawl past Dorchester Bay know, for instance, that ''the first town meeting in America was held here in Dorchester, on Oct. 8, 1633.''
In the tradition of local newsgathering, Forry relates that ''much of the discussion that day was the grazing of cows in the Calf Pasture, which is now Columbia Point, where the UMass campus stands.'' Perhaps the tax-phobic Bush clan was put off by the fact that what may have been one of the first taxes in the New World was levied upon cattle owners who grazed the common land. The money went for what Forry claims was ''the first tax-supported public school in America,'' also in Dorchester.
The details are on his Web site, www.dotnews.com, if Bush wants to see for himself. But he's apparently put off by the neighborhood, i.e., the looming shadow of the Kennedy Library, a Democratic Party shrine. Dubbaya seems to be put off by the Northeast. He got hammered by John McCain in five out of six New England primaries. Now the only state in the Northeast where he leads is New Hampshire, by single digits. Bush lags elsewhere in New England, and in New York and New Jersey, too. Not till he gets to Pennsylvania do his poll numbers show some promise. His debate dithering won't help, either.
Typically, the guy who's behind wants a lot of debates, starting pronto. And if the guy who was ahead suddenly finds himself behind, he does a fast 180 and becomes a born-again debate-demander. Another fact of debates: The media exaggerate the outcome. If the quickie overnight polls show that one fellow was judged the winner by 53 percent of the viewers, and the other guy by only 47, after three days of talking TV heads chewing over the results and exaggerating the purported margin of victory, the pundit class will treat it as a lopsided 60-40 wipeout.
Since Al Gore is a better debater than George W. Bush, has much more experience in those high-pressure situations, and has a stronger grasp of the thousands of governmental details that can trip up a candidate unfamiliar with the labyrinthine federal establishment, Gore wanted lots of debates.
Since Gore at mid-summer was 17 points behind, and Bush then had more campaign cash to play with, it made sense for Gore to propose both men scrap political ads and slug it out weekly on TV. That was never going to happen, and Gore knew it. But posturing is part of the game. At most, the two rivals would never have more than the three debates slotted by the national commission. And neither man wanted also-rans like Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan gumming up the works.
Bush and his crew of Texas-centric insiders made the fundamental mistake of believing that their scope to bob and weave and take other evasive maneuvers would be as great in September as it was at the beginning of August. Wrong, wrong, wrong. What changed? The polls, reflecting shifts in voter attitudes.
Bush's smooth-as-silk GOP convention week left the GOP ticket overconfident and underprepared for a rugged ride. Like Michael Dukakis in '88, Bush's team underestimated the resilience of a sitting vice president astride a great-guns economy and a period of relative harmony abroad. Now Gore rises like Bush Sr. in '88, peaking late.
Off-stride and off-message since Gore's robust convention success in Los Angeles four weeks ago, Bush Jr. mishandled the debate scenario. He rejected the bipartisan three-debate plan agreed upon months ago by the Republican and Democratic national committees. He pulled a lame high school stunt by proposing that he and Gore go on CNN's ''Larry King Live'' and NBC for talk-show chats.
Gore sneered at that. Other TV networks said no way would they broadcast shows that boosted CNN and NBC. Bush then launched some goofy negative ads claiming Gore was ducking debates. This gambit made Bush look even more wobbly.
By Friday, the Bush camp was in disarray. Insiders were admitting their debate ploys had backfired. Bush's yearlong derision aimed at ''Washington insiders'' and ''the Beltway mentality'' has sparked friction with his Republican support in Congress and in the K-Street lobbyists' canyon.
Bush's jittery pirouettes in the debate debate make him look like a spoiled rich kid threatening to take his bat and ball and go home. He stuck stubbornly to his game plan Thursday, appearing with military heroes of his father's era. Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell each took Bush Jr. by the elbow and tried to bolster him at an Ohio rally. But there is something out-of-phase at seeing the two Desert Storm chieftains prop up Junior and promise us the kid will make a terrific president. Most Americans think ''Dynasty'' is a soap opera, not a formula for picking presidents.
And if he's such a rough and ready leader who talks tough, how come Junior is ducking all these debates? Mr. ''Don't mess with Texas!'' has been messing around with the debate commitments, and made a mess of it in the process.
He might have won points with voters by taking the plunge and coming across as more folksy and down-home than Gore, says one specialist on the subject. Alan Schroeder, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern and former TV producer, is author of the just-published ''Presidential Debates: Forty Years of High-Risk TV.''. Bush has had 10 debates against GOP presidential contenders, but always with at least two others present.
In his reelection campaign, the governor limited his badly-outgunned Democratic rival to one debate, in a remote El Paso TV studio on a Friday night, with most voters watching football games. And had Bush agreed to the debate commission format, said Schroeder, he always had the right to negotiate or veto the format and the moderator and the panelists, if any. Right now, it looks as if the Texas gunslinger is nervous about walking up to the bar in the Debate Saloon and ordering up a real drink.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
