N A SEASON of smirks and sighs, of personalities and psyches, this final hoedown was about issues. Those who see or hear no difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush could not have been watching or listening to the exchanges at Washington University in St. Louis.
''Look, we're in an information age,'' Gore said, and he downloaded enough data to overwhelm the Memorial Arch. On health care, education, taxes, and the military, the vice president did not stint on what Bush dismissed as ''the fine print.''
''The real Al Gore,'' who was staff-sedated at Wake Forest in North Carolina last week after his bumptious turn at UMass-Boston, showed up last night as a vigorous, energetic, and brainy dynamo, as he was in the Senate, ready to filibuster any subject. If this was a test of intelligence, Gore's fairly shimmered. Indeed, it bubbled, frothed, and overflowed. He even tried to do Jim Lehrer's job, as if running for national moderator.
No agitation preceded the debate to ''let Bush be Bush,'' which is probably why the Texas governor leads in the polls: Whatever he is, there's only one of him. Bush is the antibickering candidate who would ''change the tone'' in Washington, a place he pronounced as though it were a vague curse. Details are not his bag: ''The difference is I can get it done.''
Bush did respond with some stats about Gore's ''top 1 percent'' of taxpayers who will, Bush said, ''end up paying one-third of the taxes and get one fifth of the benefits.'' This statistic is the maraschino on Bush's ice-cream message that he trusts folks, not the feds.
''We're from the government and we're here to help you'' is a punch line from a 1980s joke that Gore hopes is forgotten. He wants voters to choose earnestness over likability and brains over charm. This campaign's choice is now clear.
As Dooley Wilson sang in ''Casbalanca,'' a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, but fundamental things apply as time goes by.
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
