WASHINGTON -- Imagine what it takes to go to the country in the early stages of an election campaign for president, after more than 15 months of campaigning, claiming that you offer a chance at affordable insurance coverage for prescription drug costs for the elderly on the basis of a ''plan'' that doesn't exist.
Were George W. Bush not so flagrantly dishonest, it would almost be tempting to award him points for sheer guts. However, that would require treating the issue as pure politics - as he does - and not the serious matter it is for tens of millions of Americans for whom having a place to live, eating, and taking medicine are often in daily competition.
But this is the week during which we get to see one of the weird realities of presidential politics at work. On the one hand, boring, wooden Al Gore is slogging away from Tallahassee to Seattle, making speeches and holding his eternal town meetings on health care issues. You can agree or disagree, but there he'll be. On the other hand, the Bush campaign will be out there in another sense, on the airwaves with at least $7 million worth of 30-second commercials in battleground state markets, selling the plan that doesn't exist to make drug coverage available for everyone and using large drug company propaganda lingo to slam Gore. If Bush has taken the time to memorize his lines, he might even be able to get off a few eight-second sound bites for the press that contain compatible subjects and verbs.
The old-fashioned pol on the stump has been talking about his own plan for more than a year; and after having it tested in debate with the formidable Bill Bradley, Gore even made changes to reflect Bradley's contribution to that debate. And that's a good place to start.
People forget, but as their primary tussle took shape, Gore and Bradley represented two poles in the prescription drug issue. Gore initially concentrated on the daily grind facing the elderly, focusing his proposal on the regular costs of drugs taken to control serious conditions. Bradley focused so-called catastrophic drug costs associated with long illnesses or crises, which Gore preferred to deal with in the context of long-term care.
As their campaign wound down, and as fresh and much larger official estimates of the looming budget surplus were made, Gore grafted many of Bradley's ideas onto his own and prepared to face the man with no plan. What Gore has been talking about for months, committing the unpardonable sin of getting very specific, is not that complicated. For the elderly who don't have much income, singles making $12,000, and couples making up to $14,000 whose earnings don't exceed 135 percent of the poverty line, Gore proposes free drug coverage under Medicare.
For the rest - roughly two-thirds of the 39 million Americans protected by Medicare - he proposes subsidized coverage at premiums ranging from $25 to a maximum of $44 per month; there would also be an option for the purchase of drug coverage associated with long-term, chronic illness. The basic benefits would cover half of all drug costs up to $5,000 and all of the costs above that.
On the odd assumption that people want to know what the cost of a major initiative like this would be, the Gore campaign used government data (undisputed even by insurance and drug company opponents) to come up with a figure of a bit more than $250 billion over the next decade.
That's pretty straightforward. But for most of the 15 months Bush has been on the trail, the governor has been putting his comparative noninterest in health care broadly and in elderly issues in particular on display, in keeping with his generally wretched record in stingy Texas.
Generally, his response has been that prescription drug coverage needs to await a ''reform'' in medicare itself. Translation: Cutbacks in benefits can produce the ''savings'' out of which at least a modest drug benefit could be financed.
More recently, however, as it has become obvious that voters appreciate Gore's detailed attention to the issue, Bush has begun saying he supports the ''concept'' of ''bipartisan legislation'' in the Senate. His advisers have encouraged reporters to believe this means a measure sponsored by Senators John Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, and Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, that would offer less than one-fifth the Gore program to private insurance companies to provide some coverage.
The truth, however, is that Bush will not commit to signing such a measure. That's because he has yet to propose Medicare cutbacks and because his ridiculous income tax cut gobbles so much of the available ''surplus.''
The lack of a proposal, however, hasn't kept Bush from making the patently fraudulent assertion in one of his latest ads that he has one that will put coverage within reach of all seniors. Nor has it kept the Republican National Committee from spending money this week on the drug industry canard that ''big government'' will interfere with doctors' judgments. Naturally, the Democratic National Committee is matching that one on Gore's behalf.
It would be nice if Gore and Bush were to debate competing ideas. Until Bush thinks of one, however, it will at least be interesting to see in the pre-Labor Day atmosphere how something matches up against nothing.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
