St. LOUIS -- It was hard not to notice Larry Lindsey hustling this joint like a snake-oil salesman before and after his boss, George W. Bush, butchered his economic policy positions when he wasn't misrepresenting them in the final debate here.
Wealthy America's representative at the top of the Bush campaign, guru Lindsey had mistakes to paper over, truly fuzzy math to redo, arcane fudge, and outrage at Al Gore to feign - all of which the portly boy genius of the Reagan-Bush years handled with his customary credibility-sapping zeal.
But there was nothing original about the song and dance - in either Bush's gauzy debate garbage or Lindsey's comical cover job. It had all been done 20 years and more than $4 trillion in national debt ago.
Back in 1980, in another Midwestern city at about this point in the game, another amiable foe of details, whose gauzy garbage at least reflected deep conviction, was preaching that the US could easily afford a major military buildup and historically gargantuan tax cut all at the same time and still balance the federal budget.
It sounded off the wall, but economic times were very rough and, besides, Ronald Reagan had this gaunt genius, more libertarian than pure conservative, with him that day in Chicago as he unveiled his program, and he told a bunch of reporters that it could all happen without pain, without red ink, and without debt.
The guy's name was Alan Greenspan.
But the Greenspan Reagan eventually appointed to chair the Federal Reserve eventually helped undo the huge damage he helped do, to purge the government and the economy of the substantial harm this historic mistake caused, and to preach the virtues of never doing it again. In fact, Greenspan did just that two days after the debate.
Now, of course, it is being argued by President-in-waiting Bush that in good economic times, it will be no problem to have still another military buildup, gin up domestic spending, cut taxes on a massive scale undreamt of by Reagan, and still remain in fiscal balance, and without any danger of growth-choking high interest rates . The reply from the public should be: ''Fool me once and it's your fault, fool me twice and it's my fault.''
But this is America, the land of short attention spans and impulse shopping. In the raunchy atmosphere of politics, what H.L. Mencken called the Carnival of Bunkum, the mass stimulation and marketing of a simple urge to change parties after eight occasionally tumultuous years can easily trump common sense as it has so many times before.
At least this time, however, the warnings of what is to come will have been clearly stated. And there's more, also involving Greenspan.
Not five months into Reagan's presidency, a bit blinded by early success and now facing huge budget deficits, Reagan proposed a reduction in future Social Security benefits.
The uproar that followed was so intense that he yanked his idea back within days, but the harm done was huge and in the midst of the deepest recession since the Depression, the government actually had to borrow money to meet current benefits.
The result of this policy fiasco was a bipartisan commission - Greenspan was the chairman. Under his guidance, it won some tax increases, some restraint on future benefits and even a gradual increase in the eligibility age. The surpluses Social Security enjoys today stem from his commission's work.
But the damage the deficits and debt did to the economy of the 1980s and early '90s was so substantial that the commission's goal - Social Security solvency through the death of the baby boom generation and beyond - cannot be achieved with current law.
And so, we're poised to make a huge goof with Bush. The final debate exposed a huge hole in his ''thinking.'' In proposing partial privatization, he would use about $1 trillion of the $2.4 trillion Social Security surplus over the next decade to create private investment accounts. But in taking that sum out of current revenue without funding it, Bush would make the day of insolvency years closer - affecting most current workers - and dictating serious cuts in benefits or tax increases.
Lindsey's suggestion here that the gap might be filled with ''bridge loans'' adds the specter of a return to debt - big time as Dick Cheney would say.
Bush's yelps of protest over ''scare'' tactics after the debate show he knows that he has been exposed. But two weeks from the election, his fog machine is functioning well. It is hard to believe the country is poised to make the same, huge mistake it made 20 years ago. But it is.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is t-oliphant@globe.com.
