The Long Road

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% Clinton's debate performance was equal to the demand, if not much more. He managed to curb his pet-student tendency to show off all he knows and try to cram six points into an answer to a question that really requires only two. He was dignified and well informed, had his points in order and managed to sound and look at least as presidential as Bush. Though Perot's witticisms clearly won the first debate, Clinton was equally clearly the winner of the second, partly because it followed a format that he suggested and had already mastered: questions from an invited studio audience of selected uncommitted voters.

But toward the end, the candidate who had run an almost flawless campaign since June began to coast on his lead, doing and saying nothing to stir things up. Smelling victory, aides began to jockey more vigorously for position, and some eyed jobs in a Clinton Administration. But when Begala crowed to reporters after the first debate that "it's over," an angry candidate chastised him. And in the third and final debate, Bush finally found a focus and intensity that had eluded him and that he has carried into the homestretch. Perot, as maverick as ever, was scoring with what amounted to half-hour, chart-filled TV commercials; Bush was coming up in the polls, though not necessarily in likely electoral votes; Clinton was campaigning hard again, warning his followers that they dare not become so complacent as not to vote. Though the denouement seemed newly uncertain, two things were relatively sure: to get even this far, given where he started, Clinton has waged a remarkable drive. And if he does hold on to win, his campaign will enter the textbooks as a model of how to prevail on the road to the White House.

With reporting by Margaret Carlson/Washington, Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro with Clinton

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