Al Gore’s off-putting performance in last week’s initial debate has given George W. Bush a leg up going into tonight’s encounter, but Bush can ill afford to take another night off. More significant than the shift in the daily tracking polls – all of which show Bush’s lead within the margin of error -- the public reaction to Gore’s smarmy display, and the media’s reaction to that reaction, has clearly thrown the VP off stride. The challenge for Bush now is to exploit that opening by advancing a compelling case for his election. This he can do by conveying a vision of prosperity driven by individuals acting freely to pursue opportunity and fashion their own futures as against Gore’s conceit that the state is better equipped to spend taxpayers’ money than are the taxpayers themselves. Bush failed at this task in round one, and he was able to emerge unscathed from a generally unimpressive performance only by grace of Gore’s arrogance and condescension.

Tonight, then, will pit a chastened Gore doing his best to seem human against an emboldened Bush determined to build on his likability advantage with a more substantively satisfying performance. As he showed with his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Gore can, for fairly brief and concentrated periods, overcome his naturally imperious and disdainful nature. Whether Bush can string together complete thoughts into a coherent, integrated theme promoting freedom, opportunity and growth remains to be seen. Among the key issues to watch for:

• Gore’s charge that the Bush tax cut would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers. Because upper-income groups bear a disproportionate share of the total tax burden, they stand to receive a like percentage of any broad-based tax cut on the basis of a purely static calculation of the distribution of revenue effects. Bush needn’t apologize for this. In fact, he can move from defense to offense on the issue by pointing out that this bean-counting methodology entirely ignores behavioral effects which invariably result in “the rich” paying a higher percentage of total revenues after their tax rates are cut.
   

• The budget surplus as national treasure. The surplus is simply an accounting of the extent to which current tax revenues exceed the sum necessary to fund the agreed-upon activities of the federal government. From that perspective, it should be clear, the surplus belongs not to the government but to the taxpayers. While Bush has probed in that direction, he continues to support the wasteful – and meaningless -- objective of paying off the publicly held national debt. By accepting that as a worthy objective, Bush exposes his proposal to use part of the payroll-tax surplus to begin funding privatized personal retirement accounts to unnecessary vulnerability. Bush, though, could make significant headway by exposing Gore’s “lockbox” as a hoax that will not pay a dime to any future retiree, and merely piles up the obligations of taxpayers to fund future benefits.
   

• Gore’s LBJ-revisited government activism.  This Big Government approach should be opening a rich vein of criticism, but Bush landed only a few glancing blows last week. If Bush is not able to mount a more pointed, persuasive attack, and Gore moves on to claim the White House, the perception that the electorate has chosen the path of centralized government planning and mandates over market-based solutions will be difficult to overcome.