HANOVER, N.H. From very different perspectives, John McCain and Al Gore show they understand the fundamental lesson of the 1990s: Prosperity and a fiscally sensible federal government go hand in hand.
Bill Bradley and George W. Bush, however, have some learning to do. It's not too late for them, but in preaching to the core of their constituencies, they risk the foundations of that prosperity.
In the first round of direct comparison in a still-nascent campaign, Gore was right to pounce on Bradley for a health insurance proposal that has gaping holes in it and that risks a return to high-interest rates, stagnation, and flat incomes for working families.
And while McCain was dealing with a missing opponent for the second week in a row, his jeremiads against the ruinous impact of special interests on the government's skewed priorities displayed a tough-minded conservative who is trying to show voters that opposing those interests is the key to achieving conservative goals like tax cuts.
There is politics connected to the positions McCain and Gore are taking, the right kind. Both are pitching at the roughly one-third of New Hampshire's electorate that isn't partisan and tends to be relatively upscale and well-educated. In the pivotal primary here, these independent voters comprise as much as 20 percent of the electorate.
Right now, they are an important part of Bush's front-runnership. And they have been the core, especially the males among them, of the surge that has propelled Bradley to at least parity with Gore. But they are notoriously fickle, and any notion that prosperity is imperiled by a politician's campaign proposals is more than enough to induce second thoughts or worse.
Behind the blarney and style points, last week's joint appearances of the Democratic and Republican candidates briefly linked the presidential campaign with the current budgetary mess in Washington.
After back-to-back years of true (as in no borrowing of Social Security funds) surpluses - the first since the Eisenhower years - a supposedly conservative Congress has begun returning to the old habits of borrow and spend, and compounding the sin by disguising it with preposterous gimmicks.
This matters greatly for the same reason it mattered that the deficit era gradually ended in the '90s. The less government needed to borrow, the more was available in the private sector for productive, noninflationary, job-creating investment. And the less government borrowed, the less pressure on the budget was exerted by previously swelling interest payments on a ballooning national debt. And the less that happened, the longer the economy enjoyed the solid stimulus from lower interest rates. The wise guys call it the virtuous cycle. But if the government starts misbehaving again, that can easily work in the opposite direction.
In one sense, everybody in Washington and on the campaign trail is misleading the public. The allegedly at-hand era of surplus rests on an extremely weak reed - the assumption that spending limits agreed in the budget deal two years ago will be enforced. These would require truly deep cuts in basic domestic programs, starting now. In case you've noticed, not even a conservative Congress has started making those cuts, and even many Republicans believe it shouldn't. Hence all the dishonest gimmicks to hide their absence.
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, supports easing those limits, but to keep the books in order assumes that an increase in cigarette taxes will cover the gap. In case you've also noticed, that tax increase is going nowhere.
The surplus, in short, could be an illusion. And that's why it matters that McCain and Gore have put maintaining honest balance ahead of their campaign proposals as a priority.
In Gore's case, cost figures that at first did not accompany his major proposal were supplied. And one idea (universal preschool) was scaled back to make it fit. McCain is even tougher. He would finance military add-ons with swipes at Pentagon boondoggles he has specifically identified. To make tax cuts for people possible, he would junk the special-interest goodies that ate up half the vetoed tax bill Congress passed last summer. That's why he's a campaign finance reformer.
But Bradley has consumed by his arithmetic $800 billion of the prayed-for trillion-dollar surplus with just three proposals so far, the giant being universal health insurance. And with no specific cost-containment measures for this explosion in demand, at least two outsiders (one at Harvard, one at Emory) have insisted that his cost estimate is low by fully half.
And all you need to know about Bush is that he supported that crackpot tax bill, all $792 billion of it.
I don't think it's any accident that Bradley and Bush are preparing speeches outlining their thinking about the economy. So far, they've got it backwards. Claiming to be bold won't reduce the ranks of the uninsured, but it could threaten their jobs. And Bush Mush may mask a lazy weathervane of a politician. Boring is better, especially if it preserves progress.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
