ith a puppyish naivete that would be endearing in a fraternity pledge but is embarrassing for a presidential candidate, George W. Bush retooled himself in Texas over the weekend to emerge as: ''The Outsider.''
One week after luring 2,000 shivering New Hampshire Republicans to an outdoor rally in Milford where the seminal event was Governor Bush introducing his mother, his father, and assorted kin down to the level of third cousins, Bush licked his wounds in Austin and came up with his ''I'm a reformer with results ... somebody who comes from outside the system.'' Is he serious?
Bush raised more money - $70 million last year - than Al Gore, Bill Bradley, and Senator John McCain combined. He has the endorsements of 28 or 29 Republican governors, the vast majority of Republican senators, and enough GOP congressmen that if they were laid end to end, they'd span the Potomac. There are more lobbyists and government fixers on his contributors list than fleas on a St. Bernard. Yo, Dubbaya: You are the system! You never even gave a speech in Milford, which frosted the crowd; all you did was introduce the family and the band, as if your pedigree was all the persuasion required.
But you has to say something different after the sandblasting you absorbed in New Hampshire took your bandwagon down to the primer paint. You've heard of Miller Time? This is Bush Time - time to trash McCain. The Arizona Straight Arrow, hero of the Hanoi Hilton, is really a sneaky Washington grafter in the new party line from your designated bashers like Haley Barbour, the burly good-ol' boy from Yazoo City, Miss., a former GOP national chairman who has his own history of corralling Hong Kong soft money for the Gingrich Revolution that captured Congress in '94.
The Bush Boyz will go negative because negative is all that's left. His pie-in-the-sky tax cut is a no-go in this, the most prosperous period in American history. The McCain-is-not-a-real-conservative argument does not fly either. The McCain's-a-turncoat-who-betrayed-us-veterans by a Bush introducer backfired badly. The dirty little let's-conspire-to-keep-McCain-off-the-ballot-in-New-York ploy blew up in the former front-runner's boyish kisser. Nor did it help when Daddy Bush referred to number one son as ''the boy.'' Thanks, Dad, but no thanks.
So just as Bill Bradley started hollering that Al Gore is a lying crook, a deceitful prevaricator who doesn't have the truth in him, the guy who fell behind in New Hampshire in the other race went negative just a tad later. Was it only Jan. 5 that I loftily opined here ''the biggest surprise in the most important month of campaigning is the virtual absence of campaign nastiness''?
The Marquess of Queensberry expired in New Hampshire when Bradley choked on a 12-point tracking poll deficit, and started shouting ''liar, liar, pants on fire!'' at Gore. Bush's negativity came later, after he dug out from under the avalanche of independent votes for McCain, who also edged him among registered Republicans.
This is not a politics-as-usual year. So please stow the lament, the `Why can't we ever get any good candidates to vote for?' groans that recur, like the Olympic rings, every presidential season. You have four clear and distinct choices this time, spirited races on both sides.
How to vote on March 7
You have one week to register to vote in the Massachusetts primary or to change your party registration to independent so you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary.
I f you are a Democrat who wants to vote for McCain or a Republican who wants to vote for Bradley in the Massachusetts primary, or you're not yet registered, Wednesday, Feb. 16, is the deadline. You can phone 1-800 462-VOTE and the secretary of state's office will put a registration form in the mail. You can fill it out and mail it back, or you can go to your city or town hall and do it in person.
Clerks will be open till 8 p.m. on Feb. 16 everywhere but the smallest towns. You can also get a mail-in ballot if you'll be out of state on election day. When you vote in person, you can change your party registration back on your way out the door.
M ail-in forms have to be postmarked by Feb. 16 to be valid. If you haven't voted for years, you may have been purged from the lists.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
