WASHINGTON -- If it's personal, George Bush wins. If it's business, your business, Al Gore wins. That was true last spring, this summer, and all fall. It will be true tonight in St. Louis, with all the money on the table.
Bush can show how he feels; he can invoke a few broad principles that most people are comfortable with. Gore can tell you what he'll do, gambling that detail can be compelling, not off-putting.
In this byplay between competing strengths may hang the result of the presidential election. And on no topic is the distinction more obvious than the one they've debated the least so far - Social Security.
It may drive Democrats nuts, but Governor Bush can win this debate on style points. He can bemoan the absence of progress toward solving the system's long-term problems during the 1990s; he can blame the impasse on partisan politics; he can say that ''Clinton-Gore'' have not provided leadership.
Bush can then say that he will, that his time in Texas shows he can bring Republican and Democratic legislators together. He can offer a vision of total benefit protection for today's seniors. He can offer a vision of younger workers putting ''a portion'' of their payroll taxes in investment accounts that would most likely earn far more than ''their money'' currently does. He can pledge reliance on bipartisan legislating to work out the pesky details, freeing him from offering any in the campaign.
And anticipating a Gore attack, he can say that all the vice president has to offer is time-worn tactics to scare people and block change. The trap will work, unless Gore uses his two minutes on the topic (and every other topic, for that matter) to do far more than simply attack.
In a forum that will be distinctly unfriendly to merely aggressive debating, Gore will have to tell a four-part story - the record, the current situation, his own proposals, and only then, and for no more than a quarter of his comments, can he take a swipe at a ''plan'' by Bush that turns out not to exist.
What is available to Gore is something like this:
1. Once upon a time, that would be after the last bipartisan ''fix'' in 1983, the future of Social Security was supposed to be assured as far as its trustees' eyes could see - until the year 2063. But a decade of ruinous deficits and a ballooning national debt strangled the economy and threatened the program.
By 1992, the trustees were projecting exhaustion of the retirement trust fund's balance by 27 years earlier, in 2036. Five years into the Clinton administration, the projections were worse - operating deficits after 2014, insolvency after 2029.
2. But the Clinton-Gore administration's bold move toward budget sanity in 1993 turned the situation around. By this February's budget submission, the deficit date had already been pushed back by two years, the insolvency date by five. With budget surpluses in a healthy economy going to national debt reduction, the prospect at last was for even more of a cushion.
3. What Gore proposes is a rapid payoff of the national debt over the next dozen years, made possible by using the savings from lower debt interest payments to also retire debt. This approach would keep Social Security exactly as we know it solvent until 2055, and leave room for some improvement in the benefits to the most vulnerable population - elderly widows.
He proposes that investment accounts be financed as a supplement to Social Security, not out of the system's revenues that go for current benefits. This could be done via refundable tax credits to moderate-income workers as long as the government doesn't waste its surplus on giveaways like cutting income and estate taxes for the highest income and wealthiest Americans.
4. Governor Bush threatens this secure future. His ''plan'' has no specifics beyond the diversion of Social Security revenue for investment accounts. The drain, about $1 trillion over a decade, will push forward the insolvency date by at least 15 years, threatening the benefit structure for every worker aged 30-50 today. That's not scare politics; that's truth.
This is a tall order for any debater, especially one under the pressure Gore faces. If he fills it tonight, the campaign is transformed; if he fails, the lure of ''likeability'' will only grow.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is t-oliphant@globe.com.
