BUSH GETS THE SHOVE

The governor of Texas could have won in New Hampshire if he'd listened

to me, says Mark Steyn New Hampshire 'GET out there, meet lots of people,' I told Dubya at Laconia Country Club a couple of days ago.

`Ah'm meetin' lots of people,' Dubya tit- tered. (He titters a lot.)

`Yes, but you've got to meet more,' I pleaded, staring into his blazingly intense blue eyes. `When people meet you, they like you.'

'Well, there's a lot of people to meet and not a lot of time,' said the governor. I clung on to his hand as the adoring crowds pressed closer, Dubya tried to extricate himself, and the accompanying plain- clothes Texas Rangers pondered whether to shoot me dead.

'Please,' hissed my assistant. 'You're beginning to sound desperate.'

`Melissa!' said Dubya. 'I saw your face smiling at me across the floor and it did my heart good.' He leant in and gave her a smackeroo right on the lips.

Dubya likes people. He likes kissing them, shooting the breeze with them, likes sharing his troubles with them, as he did the other day, humbly opening up to some recovering teen drug addicts about his own struggles with alcohol. He even likes watching them take a leak: `Hey, Gene, you got a great spray for a guy your age,' he once told the late Gene Autry, the singing cowboy who introduced 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'. The other rein- deer, you'll recall, never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games. Dubya the Red-Faced Guv'nor has the opposite prob- lem; we've been begging him for months to get in the game, but he was uninterested. As a result, he now has even more troubles to share with those recovering teens. But fortunately for the governor he won't have to talk to anybody from New Hampshire for quite a while, maybe for ever. Unscripted and out of 'the bubble', Duhya was relaxed and affable, and every New Hampshirite who met him liked him. If his campaign managers had let him meet more of 'ern, he'd have been a shoo-in.

Instead, they decided to keep him script- ed and inside the bubble. Scripted and inside the bubble, he sucks. From the first time I heard him six months ago, to the last time this week, the lame-brain stump speech never altered; as he told us for the umpteenth time, The best decision I ever made... . 'Was to marry your wife!' we all silently yelled back.

I got a chance to look at the best deci- sion he ever made in the flesh on Satur- day night. At the Top of the Hop in Hanover, I clutched Laura Bush's hand and told her, `Get him out there, get him meeting people.'

'You're doing it again,' hissed Melissa.

But what else can you say when the most electable candidate the Republicans have had in 20 years goes into total meltdown? I told Bill Bradley the same thing, but, in fairness to the former senator, he came from nowhere. Bush started at the top with more money, bigger poll numbers than any Republican in decades, and he pissed it away more spectacularly than Gene Autry and his horse combined. As primary day dawned, 42 per cent of Republicans said they'd met at least one candidate, and over 20 per cent said they'd met at least two. But it's doubtful whether many of that 42 per cent met George W. Bush: his only campaign appearances in the northern half of the state were a brisk trip round Dixville Notch and Littleton, and a stop at Lebanon airport last October. As the last surviving example of 'retail politics' in this great republic, Granite Staters like to vote for guys they've met. If you want to vote for someone whose TV commercials you like, move to Michigan or California. Up and down the White Mountains, there are guys with great sprays Dubya never got to admire.

But, if the best decision he ever made was to marry his wile, the worst decision 'Germans.' was to give his campaign away to the same Republican party establishment that did such a great job for Bob Dole last time round, or Dubya's father, George Sr, the time before that. 'New Hampshire likes to spring a surprise on front-runners,' say the commentators. But every four years it's always the same surprise, regular as clock- work. New Hampshire does not like estab- lishment candidates who run endorsement campaigns, turning up at every morning press conference flanked by Senator Whoozis or Congressman Wossname. Just as Dole entrusted his fate to then governor Steve Merrill, Bush entrusted his to New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg.

'The Gregg machine's going to deliver the state to him,' one operative told me.

'The Gregg machine?' I said. 'I've never heard of that.'

'That's because it doesn't exist,' she said. And so, alas, it proved. He's not inside the bubble anymore, because the bubble has burst.

The joke is that Bush really was the out- sider. It's John McCain who's the insiders' man, the darling of the most powerful establishment of all, the media. His pro- posed tax plan reads like it's already been through a dozen Senate committees: it comes pre-compromised. According to when you catch him, McCain supports fly- ing the Confederate flag in South Caroli- na, or he's opposed to it. He thinks the landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade, should be overturned, or he thinks it should stay. The man of principle has no political centre, but drifts woozily around according to the company he's keeping. 'McCain is a nut,' says Republican state representative Stretch Kennedy, pithily summing up the party's view of the media's favourite Republican since Lincoln. The difference is that, unlike Lincoln, he's so far managed to fool all of the people all of the time.

By contrast, Bush didn't do anything wrong. Nor did he do anything right. Instead, he didn't do anything. And now there are five long weeks to go till the next vote, time enough for Bush's commanding lead in the South Carolina polls to wither away after McCain's Granite State knock- out. Or, alternatively, time enough for McCain to self-destruct, as one side of him seems itching to do: at Lebanon High School a week ago, he got halfway through an anti-gay crack before reining himself in. For front-runners, New Hampshire is an endurance test. Al Gore, unlovely as he is, survived. So did that soporific sad sack Bill Bradley. But Bush seems bewildered by the rawness of campaigning.

He delivered the final insult to the state just after eight o'clock. 'Don't get to the party before nine,' Melissa advised. 'The candidates never show before then.' But, schlepping through the snow down to Manchester on 1-89, we heard the governor give the earliest concession speech of any major candidate in New Hampshire history. In the ultimate snub to the northern half of the state, Bush didn't even give any of us time to get to his lousy party. When we arrived at St Anselm's College for the vic- tory rally, the parking lot was deserted. We knocked on the door. The Manchester cop refused to admit us. 'You have to go round the other side to get in,' he said.

'But no one wants to get in,' I said. 'There's a stampede to get out.'

'Well, you still can't come in this way,' he said. Heavy-handed security is kind of pathetic for a 31 per cent loser. But, while we were debating the point, a Texas Ranger inserted himself. 'Step aside!' he barked. 'Now!' And suddenly there was Dubya himself, slipping out the side door to get the hell out of a state that had left him in the same feeble condition as it left his father. There were no crowds, just Melissa and me.

It was an awkward moment for the flee- ing candidate. 'Thank you,' he said, his once piercing baby blues now reluctant to make eye contact.

Thank you and goodnight, Governor.