t first glance, it seems like a case of irreconcilable political differences: the Bushes and the Bay State.
The Republican Party's most prominent family and one of the Democratic Party's most formidable strongholds.
A GOP clan building a Republican regency and the place that gave birth to the Democratic dynasty of the Kennedys.
A state where blue bloodlines and Brahmin institutions still have a potent claim on the collective imagination - and a tribe of transplants determined to live down their elite New England roots by adopting Texas ways.
Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Republican nominee George W. Bush has cast a gimlet eye on Massachusetts. First his campaign objected to a debate at the University of Massachusetts' harbor campus because of its proximity to the Kennedy Library. Now, though he's agreed to debate here, Bush's campaign hoped not to have to spend so much as a night here - and opted to do so only grudgingly and at the last minute.
Who knows when he'll be back again? Certainly Massachusetts doesn't look like promising political ground to plow.
Not that the family doesn't like the state, exactly.
Nancy Ellis, President Bush's sister, George W.'s aunt, has long lived here, in Lincoln for years and now on Beacon Hill.
In an e-mail, President Bush said he enjoys coming to Massachusetts, noting that he visited the JFK Library this summer with Caroline Kennedy and likes to go with Ted Williams to see the Red Sox play.
History and sports are one thing, however, politics quite another. ''But I disagree with the state's one-party approach to Congress and the Senate,'' Bush wrote. ''Everyone knows that Mass. is a truly liberal state and we Bushes in politics - Jeb, George W. and I - do not fit that mold.''
And yet, beneath the surface, it's less an oil (men) and water relationship than it seems, for the Bush family ties here are substantial.
Start with President Bush, who was born in Milton before his father, Prescott Bush Sr., relocated the family to Greenwich, Conn. Bush attended Phillips Academy, Andover, and was stationed very briefly at Hyannis as a US Navy pilot.
In his e-mail, the former president also recalled the time when, during his junior year at Andover, he developed a life-threatening staph infection.
''My life was saved many years ago at Mass General when I became very ill while attending Andover,'' he recalled.
Some four decades later, his political life may also have been saved here, for there's a good case to be made that it was Massachusetts that set Bush up to become vice president, the job from which he won the presidency.
That year, 1980, the lesser-known Bush had emerged from the pack with a surprise win in the Iowa caucuses.
Then came a devastating loss to Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire on Feb. 26, after Reagan famously seized the microphone and the moment in a campaign debate by chastising an officious newspaper editor who tried to cut him off.
Bush's campaign seemed to spiral downward. Massachusetts, on March 4, was the next test, and the first big state to hold a contest that year.
Aided by a dedicated group of supporters, Bush had campaigned energetically here. And when the votes were counted, that hard work here had paid off; he eked out a paper-thin win over John Anderson and beat Reagan by 2 percentage points.
''The primary victory following the defeat in New Hampshire in 1980 meant a great deal,'' Bush recalled.
Rejuvenated, Bush went on to win in Connecticut on March 25, Pennsylvania on April 22, and Michigan on May 20 (as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.), victories that, though they weren't enough to derail the front-running Reagan, established him as a force with a following in the party.
''It certainly enabled him to stay in the race, and he was able to win some primaries later on. He was definitely on the radar screen of Ronald Reagan as a result of that,'' says Governor Paul Cellucci, Bush's Massachusetts co-chairman that year. ''It might have been the end of his campaign if he had lost.''
The boost Massachusetts gave Bush ''kept him alive long enough to win other states, and that made him a strong contender for the vice presidency,'' agrees Andrew Natsios, former chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party and another longtime Bush loyalist. ''So Reagan could appear to be uniting the party by having his chief rival on the ticket with him.''
That same campaign gave Bush a committed cadre of Bay State Republicans who have stuck with the Bush family through thick and thin: Cellucci, a top state or regional official in all of Bush's subsequent campaigns and an important early booster for George W.; Natsios, who directed international relief efforts under Bush; Andy Card, Bush's deputy chief of staff and later secretary of transportation and the man whom George W. turned to first to run his convention and now to be his point man on the presidential debates; Ron Kaufman, a top-notch political tactician who became White House political director under Bush; and Leon Lombardi, later Massachusetts party chairman. In his e-mail, Bush singled that group out, saying he ''will always be grateful'' for their efforts on his behalf.
It was only in 1988, when Governor Michael S. Dukakis bobbed to the top of the Democratic pack, that the Commonwealth really became a Bush foil.
Portraying Massachusetts as more mess than miracle, Vice President Bush was fond of noting that Dukakis had promised he would do for the country what he had done for Massachusetts - and concluding that that was precisely what worried him.
And he laid it on thick, mocking Dukakis for his ''Brookline, Massachusetts, liberalism'' or ''Harvard boutique'' views.
A group of political guerrillas behind enemy lines, Kaufman, Cellucci, and company remained convinced that Bush could exploit the weaknesses in Dukakis's record to tarnish the managerial reputation of the man who had stood before the Democratic convention and confidently declared that the presidential election was about competence, not ideology.
From July to September of 1988, Bush made four sorties to Massachusetts. The first was a July 7 speech to the Clergy-Laity Congress of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America. Bush's speech, and afternoon news conference outlining his ideological differences with Dukakis, went better than expected. The candidate moved easily around Boston, without protests or hecklers, and his remarks were well-received.
All that convinced Bush's Massachusetts operatives that he should come again. When he did, his tour of filthy Boston Harbor was a seismic splash to start the crucial month of September.
''The idea was to try to find a way to use the state against Dukakis rather than for him,'' says Kaufman, a chief organizer of the harbor tour.
There was blame aplenty for the dreadful condition of the harbor. But Dukakis, whose administration had focused for too long on an ill-advised effort to obtain a waiver from the costly secondary-treatment requirements of the Clean Water Act, bore a significant part of that responsibility.
Standing in the bow of ''the Bay State,'' against the Boston skyline, Bush declared that ''while Michael Dukakis delayed, the harbor got dirtier and dirtier.''
This time, the Dukakis campaign had cobbled together a counter-effort: a rag-tag flotilla, including a rubber raft, a sailboat, and a small powerboat, to dog their opponent. But politically, there was hardly a ship of the line among them; so puny was the effort that Bush scoffed, ''Out of respect for my office there ought to be more than that.''
''The fact that it was so feeble emboldened us to feel we could come to Boston again,'' recalls Kaufman. Three weeks later, Bush did, this time to collect the endorsement of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association.
With the Dukakis camp finally ready with protests and a counter-rally with their own boys in blue, the Bush campaign ducked indoors, holding the rally at Lombardo's function hall in East Boston.
Eight days later, Bush was back again, this time in Springfield, to win the backing of that city's police union.
By that time, Bush's publicity-generating forays into his rival's home state had helped to plant the notion that Dukakis was soft on crime and weak on the environment.
''Obviously, neither affected the outcome in Massachusetts, but the Boston Harbor trip and the police endorsement both helped nationally,'' Bush recalled. ''I believe the police endorsement had the most national significance, and also meant a great deal to me personally.''
''They did a good job,'' concedes Charles Baker, field director for the Dukakis campaign. ''They took the fight to our home turf. More than people would have admitted at the time, it put us on the defensive - and presidential politics is a game you always want to play on the offensive.''
George W.'s history with the state is less dramatic.
Like his father and brothers Jeb and Marvin, he attended Phillips Academy at Andover. Sister Dorothy went to Boston College, and George W. later earned an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Despite the ardent backing of Cellucci, Bush got roundly thumped by Senator John S. McCain of Arizona in the March primary, with McCain winning 65 percent to 32 percent.
That loss notwithstanding, Massachusetts has been fertile fund-raising ground for the Texas governor. As Cellucci proudly points out, Republicans have raised nearly twice as much for Bush here ($1.7 million) as Democrats have for Gore.
Still, coming to Massachusetts to debate is viewed by local Democrats as a journey into the lion's den.
US Senator John Kerry has jocularly predicted another Boston massacre when Gore and Bush go head to head. And certainly the expectations are that Gore, a master both of policy detail and of a debating style that dispatched Bill Bradley, Ross Perot, and Dan Quayle in short order, will devastate the less articulate and knowledgeable Bush.
''He is going to get clobbered here,'' predicts Baker.
Perhaps. Yet as Cellucci says, Bush ''has effectively lowered the expectations'' for his clash with Gore.
And as former US representative Chester Atkins notes, presidential debates often turn less on policy argument than smaller perceptual matters that make candidates seem real or robotic, down to earth, or distant and disconnected.
''That plays to George W.'s strengths,'' says Atkins.
Indeed, in bouncing back from a polling deficit that hit double digits in early September, Bush used the wit and bonhomie he first honed at Andover to show that up close, he can be a funny, engaging, likable politician.
Which is why, even though Gore enters the friendly turf of Massachusetts as the putative favorite, George W. has the potential to spring a little Boston Harbor surprise of his own.
