ST. LOUIS -- NEARLY 40 YEARS ago, the Surfaris had the surfing song title that sums up what happened here last night - Wipeout.
It wasn't a question of somebody beating somebody else, it was more like the image conveyed in the hit surfing instrumental - a guy (named Bush) failing to stand in the face of a vastly superior force.
Maybe it started during the answers to the first question on health care, when Al Gore started to walk slowly toward George W. Bush like someone who was confident he was about to throw someone off his game plan under the guise of asking him a question.
Gore's move, as Bush was ending the first of many vapid nonanswers about HMO regulation, unnerved Bush enough to halt his answer, glare at Gore fiercely, and then lose his train of thought.
He never got it back. For 90 minutes, when he wasn't descending into gibberish (''Forget the journalists''), he was telling the country how he feels about things, trying to make the election about himself.
If Boston was too hot and Winston-Salem possibly too cold, last night was the Goldilocks Debate - just right. The key was not Gore's swipes at Bush, though viewers will note he never pulled a punch here; instead, the key was wrapping the swipes in a larger package of command of the material, command of the stage, command of the initiative. In a word, wipeout.
But the style points pale before the fact that Bush is still missing a cool trillion of the people's money in his shamefully vague Social Security proposal. He is acting as if you can simply swipe a trillion for young people's investment accounts with no impact on the revenue that pays benefits. The fact is that it threatens the future benefits of every working American ages 35 to 50.
Last night Gore nailed him on this, and Bush's failure to show us the money should be considered disqualifying all by itself.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is t-oliphant@globe.com.
