WASHINGTON -- The last time George W. Bush played dirty, he at least arranged a protective veneer and a convenient pretext.
This time he has done neither. It may work, it may not, but it is a huge, revealing gamble.
John McCain can recount the story as only a victim can. This time around Al Gore has had the good fortune to see it coming. The differences are important.
After McCain's landslide in New Hampshire, the Bush campaign limped home to Austin, where communications adviser Karen Hughes devised a brilliant new image -- albeit in contravention of the facts -- that Bush was himself a ''reformer with results.''
But the real campaign behind that convenient veneer was to slam McCain for his apostasy on tax cuts and rally the right to crush him. When an initial Bush probe in South Carolina produced an unthinking, angry response from McCain in the form of a TV ad comparing Bush to the evil Bill Clinton, the governor pounced with an attack ad campaign that lasted straight through the primaries in early March. McCain wasted less than $50,000 falling into the trap; Bush spent millions springing it as the reluctant epitome of injured innocence.
In the locker room guy stuff that permeates Bushdom, they like to call this maneuver jujitsu -- an easy parry and then a reversing, overwhelming thrust.
But the decision to assault Al Gore's character, integrity, and honesty was different.
The Bushies were horrified when the numbers came in from the Democratic Convention. The numbers that mattered were not those that defined Gore's remarkable bounce from the convention in the horse race. What produced the horror were two sets of so-called ''internals'' from their data. The first was a sharp increase in favorable opinion about Gore as a person and as a leader; the second was a sharp shift in attitudes on issues that left Bush at a disadvantage on major domestic issues, from his beloved education to Social Security to tax cuts to health care.
It was one thing to lose the clear advantage and be facing a truly close campaign; it was something else to be facing a dynamic in the ''internals'' that all pols believe are the precursor to something much worse.
What is not generally understood is that Bush was ready to go negative within three days of adjournment in Los Angeles. The campaign produced a dreadful commercial about honesty whose last-instant rejection by Bush tipped Gore to what was coming. It also obliterated the last fig leaf of distinction between a campaign's ''own'' advertising and the stuff we used to be told was nominally ''independent'' from its political party. Produced by a media group inside the Republican National Committee that tried to push the same stuff on Bob Dole four years ago, the fact that the specific ad was rejected after it had already been fed to nearly 400 TV stations was less important than that character attacks were on the table.
Bush's unsteady, foggy communication out of the box after Los Angeles only reinforced the decision to go negative on character.
On the assumption less of cynicism than that we are all grown-ups, the attack ad running in 17 states this weekend is hardly grounds for grand jury action. There have been, and will be, much worse. Gore may even end up responding in kind, a decision you can be assured will be made on tactical grounds, not clean-campaign purity.
But the Gore campaign's response to date is revealing.
The first thing it did was get completely out of the way in a newsmaking sense, so the story was the Bush TV ad. The second thing Gore did was to put off a Democratic Party ad on Bush's increasingly muddled record as governor of Texas. In the black arts of politics, the rule of thumb is that it's not negative to argue about issues and records or claim distortion of same; it's when it gets purely personal that the word appropriately applies. Even another, updated Democratic reminder about Texas reality was deemed a distraction for a holiday weekend now dominated by the Bush decision.
And third, Gore did not waste effort playing gotcha games with the 30-second ad, conspicuously not seeking attention for a counterclaim that he in fact raised not a dime at the temple in Southern California and that he never claimed to have invented the Internet.
Bush himself is behaving defensively. The ad is described as tongue-in-cheek and actually just a counterattack. It is neither. Listen to Bush himself these days on the road, no longer selling a dream for every willing heart but the message that ''Clinton-Gore'' was a failure of leadership and seven years of squandered promise.
Refusing to admit admit to the ''N'' word, he says, ''I guess it all depends on your definition of negative ads.''
Sound familiar?
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
