MANCHESTER, N.H. In his State of the Union address Thursday night President Clinton got right in Bill Bradley's face.
You want bold? Top this. No more playing cute with Al Gore; you simply can't go at him substantively; I will leave you not an inch of room without coming straight at me. As my ally, Dick Gephardt, put it when he ran for president back in '88, it's my fight, too.
The president's speech also stepped all over Bradley's oddly petty decision to make the windup of his New Hampshire campaign mostly about the alleged hurts he has suffered during an extremely mild (by historical standards) dust-up with Gore in which he has given as much as he's gotten. Not by accident, the contrast this weekend is between a vision of the recent past and the long-term future and a Bradley campaign that is too much about Bradley and too little about the voters.
But the president's astonishing speech was no less a challenge to his vice president. It's fine to say that budget surpluses of undreamed dimensions make it possible to fund preschool for every kid via block grants to the states or to extend the life of Medicare without penny-pinching cutbacks for another 25 years. But Clinton's vision of a completed social contract - you will search in vain for a more comprehensive blueprint from any modern progressive president - demands that Gore raise his sights as well.
It has taken months of struggle - the classic vice president's challenge - to get out from the boss's shadow, to achieve a separation made even more essential by this president's unique baggage. But that shadow just got a lot longer.
Along all 89 minutes of the way, Clinton also shined a bright light on the battle among conservatives to succeed him as he put down his challenge to do far more with unprecedented prosperity's fiscal rewards than simply fix the roof while the sun is shining (to borrow Bradley's concept).
George W. Bush took the easy way out in his quick hit about the evils of big government making imperative the return of the non-Social Security surplus in the form of income tax cuts. But the congressional response organized by Bush's backers in Congress sounded more like John McCain.
In her economic policy comments that were part of the televised reply, Senator Susan Collins of Maine gave only a vague endorsement of ''tax relief for American families,'' reflecting the decision not to proceed down last year's profligate, pointless road. And the priorities Collins did stress - protecting Social Security (co-responder Bill Frist of Tennessee added Medicare), paying off the national debt, and targeting tax reduction for small businesses and ending inheritance levies - are McCain's conservative priorities, not the conservative pork that Bush advocates, which would concentrate roughly 90 percent of the tax cut dollars on the wealthiest 10 percent.
It's no crime, however, to concentrate on Tuesday's pivotal primary, because Clinton himself did, in intimate connection with his veep's effort.
At last week's silly debate about campaign tactics, a top Gore adviser told me that his separation from the president - as a person seeking the office on his own, then as an angry friend intolerant of Clinton's personal irresponsibility - was a necessary precursor to an eventual reunion on national and foreign policy direction.
The clue that this was coming has been around for weeks as the Gore battleship slowly turned its guns on the economy, that great uniter of Democrats, as the Iowa caucuses demonstrated.
The task was made much easier rhetorically by a Bradley slip-up down the stretch in Iowa. He had the troubled farm economy in mind, but by asking a version of the old Ronald Reagan question to Iowans - Are you better off then you were seven years ago? - he created a huge opening that Gore rushed through. He used the line in nearly every appearance down the stretch and used it to begin his closing comments at the debate here.
The president came next, and what he did went miles beyond the five specific references to Gore that I counted in the State of the Union, along with the special notice of Tipper Gore's work to transform mental health policy.
One clue was the late addition to Clinton's text on gun control advocating (as has Gore) the registration and licensing of the owners of all new handguns. Bradley's proposal to go at the tens of millions already in circulation is by definition wasted, unworkable effort.
An even better clue was the explicit endorsement (following Senator Kennedy's) of Gore's health care position, building toward universal coverage on the strong foundation of existing efforts under Medicaid, the new children's insurance program, and Clinton's idea to allow people to buy into Medicare at age 55.
Then the clincher: ''The lesson of our history, and the lesson of the last seven years, is that great goals are reached step by step, always building on our progress, always gaining ground.''
The president and Gore represent a party remarkably united on policy in Congress and around the country given its fractious past.
Bradley is free to argue that nearly everybody else in the parade is out of step. I read the polls same as everybody, but I've seen New Hampshire turn on a dime before.
Instead, Bradley has chosen to concentrate on the slights he says he has suffered when the political going got tough. The basketball player who once grabbed and held for a living is now whining as a tactic when he gets the inevitable elbow in return.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
