November 29, 1999
Web posted at: 11:43 a.m. EST (1643 GMT)

Thanksgiving was still a day away, but George W. Bush was already counting his blessings last Wednesday morning. Although the temperature outside the Governor's mansion in Austin, Texas, had slipped into the unseasonable mid-40s, sunlight filled the second-floor solarium, where Bush and five of his top campaign advisers were seated around a table. The mood was relaxed, maybe even thankful. After all, Bush had just passed two big tests. He had performed adequately in delivering his first major foreign-policy speech, and two days later he had emerged virtually unscathed from a one-hour grilling on NBC's Meet the Press. After being knocked for weeks as a lightweight who didn't understand foreign policy and could not field tough questions, he had handled the speech and the televised interview well enough to quiet some of his critics. Now the next hurdle, a debate this week in New Hampshire, seemed less daunting. "I'm feeling comfortable," Bush told his team as he sipped coffee. "I'm ready."

He had better be, because the stakes for Bush could not be higher. In a new TIME/CNN poll, Bush trails John McCain, 35% to 37%, for the first time in the key state of New Hampshire. The poll's margin of error means the race is a statistical dead heat, but the trend is ominous for Bush. As recently as July the Texas Governor was swamping McCain in Granite State polls by more than 30 points. McCain, with his anti-Establishment appeal and his pow story, has all the momentum in New Hampshire, making him, not Bush, the candidate with buzz going into the first real debate. And yet the burden of high expectations hasn't shifted to McCain; it rests, like a steamer trunk carrying all the G.O.P.'s yearnings for the White House, on Bush's shoulders. After skipping earlier debates and visiting the state less often than his opponents, Bush must convince New Hampshirites that he doesn't take their votes for granted. "Bush has got to hit a home run," says Dick Bennett, a veteran New Hampshire pollster, "because viewers will be looking at him with a critical eye. They'll be looking for something they don't like."

But even as he competes with McCain's appeal to reform-minded centrists, military veterans and independents, Bush must contend with Steve Forbes' attacks from the right. The multimillionaire publisher has yet to launch the kind of televised air assault against Bush that he did against Bob Dole in 1996, but last week he started warming to the task. He accused Bush of reading his foreign-policy opinions "off of a TelePrompTer" and of turning too often to Washington solutions. On Thursday night Forbes will almost certainly inform debate watchers that Bush tried to raise some taxes in Texas, that he allowed spending there to increase "a whopping 36%" and that he isn't committed to the fight against abortion--an opinion that social conservatives Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes will loudly second.

Bush, once the lone front runner, is now in a two-front war. He must appeal to home-schooling Evangelicals in Waterloo, Iowa, even as he reaches out to socially moderate soccer moms in Nashua, N.H. He must halt McCain's surge in New Hampshire, but he cannot take victory for granted in Iowa, where being organized counts for more on caucus night than doing well in early polls, and where Forbes is dumping huge sums of money into the most sophisticated campaign organization in state history. "No question," says Iowa G.O.P. chairman Kayne Robinson, "Forbes is going to turn out a lot of people on caucus night." A loss or a weak victory in Iowa, followed by a McCain upset in New Hampshire, is the scenario that keeps Bush's team up at night.

Bush's broad appeal to voters of all stripes is still his biggest asset. But it takes a lot of energy to maintain. Bush has stretched himself so thin to span the issues that his support tends to be shallow; voters who like him often can't say why. But if his ideology--a dab of conservatism here, a touch of moderation there--remains difficult to pin down, that is precisely the idea. His self-styled New Republican approach continues to draw supporters from across his party's ideological spectrum. By emphasizing issues like education, for example, Bush is attracting women voters at levels other Republicans can only envy. He is even winning favorable reviews from a majority of moderate and conservative Democrats, according to data collected by the Pew Research Center. And while he has lost ground in New Hampshire, Bush is still the favorite of conservative Republicans in national polls. "Bush is a conservative who doesn't scare moderates," brags a top adviser, who insists that Bush can lose New Hampshire to McCain and still cruise to the nomination. "Our message doesn't just resonate with one target group; it resonates with all of them."

Indeed, Bush's success so far comes in part from nourishing political yearnings on both sides of his party. He sounds almost like a Democrat when he says saving Social Security is a high priority, but he makes like a conservative Republican when he adds that privatizing part of the system is the way to do it. In his Meet the Press interview, Bush broke with his party by endorsing the right of patients to sue their HMOs, but he burnished his social-conservative credentials by declining to meet with the leading group of gay Republicans. He's against hate-crimes legislation aimed at protecting minorities, gays and women, but he's for set-aside programs that give 10% of government contracts--and maybe more--to firms owned by women and minorities as long as there are no "quotas."

Bush would increase the size and funding of the Department of Education, heresy to social conservatives, who would prefer to see the agency abolished. But if a public school fails to meet standards after three years, he would cut off its federal funds and turn the money over to parents in the form of vouchers, allowing them to send their kids to private school. He satisfies the right by praising conservative Supreme Court stalwarts Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas but sticks by his pledge not to use a pro-life "litmus test" in picking court nominees. And even as he promises tax cuts, a G.O.P. staple, he swears he will work hard to close the gap between society's "haves and have-nots."

The same zigzag pattern goes for foreign affairs, where Bush takes his father's pragmatic internationalism and injects it with muscular rhetoric aimed at America's erstwhile enemies in the Kremlin. Bush would cut aid to Moscow as long as it wages war on its own people in places like Chechnya, and he would abrogate the ABM Treaty of 1972 in order to build a Star Wars antiballistic-missile-defense system, whether Russia likes it or not. But Bush is no Buchananite America Firster. "The fearful build walls," he likes to say; "the confident tear them down." That's shorthand for a policy that would make trade with China a priority and human-rights abuses by Beijing's communist regime an afterthought.

The key to Bush's success--in the coming debates and then in the primaries--is selling the whole package. "People don't have to agree with you on every issue," says Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, "but they need to know you're a strong leader they can trust." Even as McCain surges in New Hampshire and Forbes tries to outorganize him in Iowa, Bush is confident he's getting the larger, thematic message across. Confident, but not complacent. Bush adjourned the meeting in the solarium last Wednesday after just 45 min. But as he left with his family to spend Thanksgiving with his parents in Houston, he took along some reading: a 3-in.-thick briefing book loaded with all the questions and zingers he can expect to have thrown his way in the New Hampshire debate. "He's ready," said an aide, "but he will read the briefing book."

--With reporting by John F. Dickerson/Washington

Cover Date: December 06, 1999

• The second Atlanta fire
• Feeding both sides
• George W.'s rescue squad

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