PELLA, Iowa -- Not to put too fine a point on it, but George W. Bush has attacked John McCain in a television commercial for sins he has not committed on the basis of information whose veracity Bush cannot support and in violation of a promise he made with McCain that he sealed with a public handshake.
And he keeps attacking fellow preppie Steve Forbes for the crime of negative campaigning, which he and his supporters are themselves engaging in with rapacious intensity.
No wonder it's beginning to look like Forbes has the potential to embarrass Bush here tomorrow, to hold our president-in-waiting to his standard gentleman's C in the Iowa caucuses. No wonder McCain ties him in knots in New Hampshire with a deft blend of accessibility, authenticity, and common-sense conservative reform. And no wonder his mom has taken to saying that Bush ''should'' be president, as if the Oval Office were a codicil in his trust fund.
But the best evidence that the governor is having more than the standard near-death experience that every front-runner must endure is the lack of response to his message, which is as flat as a pancake.
I've caught the act a half-dozen times down the stretch, and the desultory atmosphere never varies from what it was here in heavily Dutch south-central Iowa, known for manufacturing windows and growing tulips. With 500 residents listening at Central College, the pitch for his massive tax cut got the polite applause of perhaps a third of the audience - about what happens when he promises to ''earn the respect of our men in uniform.''
The lines that get loud, sustained applause are always the same - the pledge to bring ''dignity'' to the White House, which touches the anti-Bill Clinton chord in all Republicans, and Bush's vow to run a positive, optimistic campaign focusing on issues. Polling data now confirm this, but the point that income taxes are less than the holy grail has been apparent since last summer, when GOP legislators dashed home to sell their almost-as-preposterous-as-Bush tax bill only to find the public more interested in paying down the national debt.
Bush is only compounding his problems by attacking McCain and by making a charge that even he admits has no supportive evidence. It started in the debate last weekend, when Bush asked McCain a leading question that anticipated his false TV commercial. The Bush thesis was that McCain would raise income taxes by $40 billion over five years on ''working people'' by ''taxing'' their ''benefits.''
Bush was playing an old trick. McCain's proposal is sketchy in parts, and it doesn't specify which fringe benefits would no longer be tax deductible for employers as part of the $151 billion in so-called corporate welfare tax breaks for special interests that McCain wants to end to help fund a tax cut roughly twice that amount.
What Bush did was fill in the blank himself, assuming without evidence that McCain was proposing the elimination of deductibility for all fringe benefits, including continuing education and health care provisions. He then falsely claimed that the result would ''impose a $40 billion tax increase on employees'' and was off to the races, even invoking its alleged impact on a ''single mom.''
The governor was not doing anything different from what his dad did in New Hampshire 12 years ago with a similar attack that destroyed Bob Dole on taxes without benefit of truth. But this is now, and not only are a lot of people sick of this kind of campaigning, but this is an era of budget surpluses when the notion of paying down debt has traction, including with many Republicans.
Bush has also hurt himself with a silly argument that the alternative to his $1.4 trillion proposal is ''keeping the money in Washington'' for spending by dastardly politicians. This has left him open to McCain's counter that by ''spending'' he must be referring to the senator's proposals to invest in Social Security, Medicare, and defense, and that no legislator has a better record as a pork-fighter than McCain.
When a bunch of us pinned him down after his appearance here, Bush could not defend the assertion in the commercial, could not cite anything resembling it in the material McCain has released, and was left with the lame assertion that at least his proposal is more detailed.
He also bristled, and his staff was truly angry, at questions suggesting that his campaign tactics against McCain aren't really different from Forbes's assaults on his proposal two years ago in Texas that mixed some business and sales tax increases in with a property tax cut to reform the system for funding education.
''The difference is I had a real tax cut,'' Bush said. Well, so does McCain.
When he then protested, famous smirk in clear view, ''I'm not criticizing Senator McCain,'' the only response was titters.
Unlike Ronald Reagan, who beat the other Bush 20 years ago for the nomination, Governor Bush is going after that prize from the top down, not from the grass roots up. It may yet be enough to prevail in the end in this still-hierarchical party.
But ever since the straw poll put on by the party here last August, Bush has been at best a mediocre candidate in Iowa and a wretched one in New Hampshire. Adversity made Al Gore better; it is making Bush worse.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
