INSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Be yourself. For a week - since last week's battle in Boston - their wives, their friends, the supporters told them that simple message. No preaching. No flinching.
And they tried. In a Carolina chapel rising behind a manicured lawn, they tried not to sound too shrill, too aggressive. They tried not to seem too combative, too negative. And until the very last exchange, when the tensions they tried to suppress all evening finally could no longer be contained, they were successful.
Indeed, there were few sighs, except of course for the sighs of relief from the audience, both here and across the nation. There were no shouts, except perhaps for shouts of glee from nervous advisers.
And yet even in the relative calm of the discussion at the Wake Forest University round table, the two men remained stubbornly close to their caricatures.
Vice President Al Gore was formal, Governor George W. Bush was informal. Gore was intellectual, Bush was intuitive.
For even in the more casual setting, the meeting of the two nominees - members of the same generation, same class, and same inclination to seek the middle ground and the middle way - in the second debate of an especially close presidential election, the two men emerged with exaggerated features. Gore at times seemed to sneer from beneath a furrowed brow. Bush at times seemed to giggle with nervousness.
Whether conducted with candidates at a podium or with nominees sitting at the same table, these presidential debates create a physics of their own, the gravity of the confrontation conforming to Einstein's theories by distorting the normal geometry of space and time.
For months the two men have lived in parallel universes, the one seeking to move his party from the right toward the middle even as he tried to dampen controversies over issues such as school prayer and abortion, the other seeking to move away from a tarnished leader even as he tried to consolidate his party's appeal as the architects of prosperity.
On their own, their personalities flowered in unpredictable directions, Bush growing from a governor to a national figure and advocate for conciliation, Gore growing from a rigid figure in starched shirts to an energetic suitor in jerseys that were unbuttoned and maybe a bit too tight.
But on the stage together a mysterious force - the stress of the moment, perhaps, or the size of the audience, or maybe even the remarkably close poll soundings - seemed to push them back to the stereotypes.
While Gore was more relaxed, even understated at times, he still seemed prone to lecture. And while Bush was more fluent than he was in Boston, he still seemed to take refuge in slogans and rehearsed lines. In the opening exchange, for example, the governor used a variation of the phrase ''best interest'' of the United States six times in the course of his first five sentences. In his response, the vice president opened by saying ''I've thought a lot about that particular question,'' an unmistakable effort to suggest that his rival had not.
Ordinarily such personal characteristics would be secondary, taking a back seat to issues such as foreign policy, Social Security, and Medicare. But this is an unusual election, not only because it is so close but also because the personalities of the two men seem so important in voters' decisions.
A Pew Research Center poll released only hours before the debate indicated that Gore's personality, not his views on issues, might be costing him support. The poll suggested that Bush was more likable than the vice president, perhaps accounting for the disappearance of Gore's September lead. It also underscores why Bush, who resisted these formal debates fiercely in August and September, really had little to fear from a format in which personality tends to trump policy nuance. Be winning, the lesson seems to be, and you just might win.
There were no new initiatives, no new offensives, no new perceptions growing out of last night's debate. The two men's views on the major issues are better known and more accessible than those of any two candidates in history; the demands of the Internet, which require candidates to have well-developed views on issues that candidates could have skirted only a generation ago, saw to that.
But for the few Americans who still don't know whom they will support - the ultimate audience last night, and next week in St. Louis - the session in Winston-Salem provided few new insights. Gore was slightly more deferential (he even seemed to apologize for his assertiveness only a week ago), Bush was slightly more confident (there were fewer terrifying moments of pause in his answers). But the candidates are still prisoners of their images - and the undecided still have an excuse for remaining so.
