10/18/00 9:05 a.m.
The Trumpets Sound
Straight talk rides again.

By Michael Knox Beran

eorge W. Bush found his voice in Tuesday night's debate. Al Gore, unable to draw the governor into a mire of policy minutiae, was left to look on in evident frustration as Bush rode up to claim the philosophic high ground. In the third and last of their face-offs, Bush did more than find smart ways to respond to Gore's litany of policy innuendo. He did more than poke gentle fun at the way a Beltway bore badgered him about the status of bills in committee and the prongs of Supreme Court tests. Though Gore (in the apt assessment of former senator Alan Simpson) tried "desperately to bait" his opponent, Bush kept bringing the debate back to first principles: choice, options, the limits of federal power, the foolishness of a one-size-fits-all approach to the country's problems. A note of restrained passion — the trumpet sounds a lot of us have been waiting for in this campaign — crept into the governor's voice as he made his case before the people, and the words rang true.

Gore, for his part, never managed to find a way to sound like anything other than a Washington prince who has run out of fresh reasons to justify his pre-eminence. Bush's refusal to be thrown off message helped make clear that Gore doesn't really have one. The vice president's outmoded populism, his half-hearted attempts at class warfare, his Great Society entitlement demagoguery: The third time around these Old Democrat tricks seemed merely shabby. It may be, after all, that there are limits to the amount of political capital which politicians can extract from bread and circuses — just as there may be limits to the amount of dead capital which Americans will allow to lie moribund in the cavernous crypts of a 1930s-era pension system. At the beginning of a new century voters might be willing to gamble that a New Democrat could take the country forward; but will they really want to go all the way with the two and a half percent returns promised them by an Old Democrat? Will they really want to go all the way with LBJ?

Style points. Bush used his own good manners in debate to draw attention to his opponent's imperious rudeness. (At several points during the evening Bush had the audience smiling at the vice president's overbearing iron-man debate persona). Where Bush's affability seemed genuine, Gore's attempts at Clintonian empathy failed altogether. A study in unctuousness, the vice president appeared to be trying out for the part of the phony politician in a made-for-tv movie; his hectoring policy sermons could only have re-enforced a popular impression of pompous sanctimony. Bush, by contrast, succeeded in turning his chief debating weakness — the choppy tentativeness of his sentences — into a kind of strength. To many Americans Bush's laconic cowboy talk may have seemed a good deal more compelling than the vice president's blow-dried smoothness. And if Bush's stream-of-consciousness sloganeering occasionally led him down President Reagan's Pacific Coast Highway — so many soundbites in search of an answer — the damage was minimal.

The pressures of debate can destroy good styles as well as show up bad ones; but in the heat of this final one Bush was able to project an image of himself that those undecided voters who up to now have been unpersuaded by his candidacy may find appealing. Bush was the honest sheriff in St. Louis, a man whose promise of straight talk is convincing even though — perhaps because — his sentences are sometimes shaky. Awkward the governor's language occasionally is; and yet it may be that Americans are beginning to sense in it a credibility that they do not find in the vice president's patronizing braggadocio.