Campaign 2000: Bush Bears Down

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What's the best way to deliver an unpleasant message to George W. Bush? You say little, and let the evidence speak for itself. So, just after Christmas, when the Republican front runner returned to Texas after shaky moments in three debates, he was handed a tape. It had to be to the point because, as Bush told TIME last week aboard his campaign bus, "I'm not gonna watch hours of tapes of myself, and I don't want to rehash all those debates." But this tape was crystalline in its message: it had been carefully edited to exclude all the other candidates, leaving only Bush onscreen with his scripted, repetitive answers and awkward impromptus. The Texas Governor plopped the tape into a VCR, watched it alone at the mansion and got the picture. "I'm a competitor," he told TIME last week. "I want to win. And I'm wise enough to understand that all of us need to improve in life."

Bush knows a thing or two about self-improvement. He did it in business, by turning a mediocre career in oil and gas into a success story in baseball. And he did it again in politics. Having run just once, and lost, in a 1978 House race, he ousted a favored incumbent Governor and then won a thumping re-election four years later. Now he is trying to do it again. After flubbing a reporter's foreign-policy pop quiz in the fall and seeming to be in over his head at those early debates in December, Bush has begun to erase some of the doubts about whether he has the sure-footedness to be a winning presidential candidate.

For one thing, he no longer looks like a sure loser in New Hampshire. Some polls last week even showed him with a narrow lead over his rival, Senator John McCain. "Before Christmas, the Bush campaign was in a lot of trouble," says New Hampshire pollster Dick Bennett. "But they made some changes. The slide has stopped." And that is in New Hampshire, where McCain has campaigned almost nonstop for months. (To lower expectations, Bush aides are predicting that they might lose New Hampshire, even as they work flat out to win it.) In Iowa, where McCain is not participating, Bush has maintained a solid margin over publishing tycoon Steve Forbes in the final week before the Jan. 24 caucuses. And the outlook is even rosier nationally, where a new TIME/CNN poll shows Bush trouncing McCain among Republicans by 45 points.

On the campaign trail and in a series of recent debates, Bush has begun, slowly, to find his voice. He doesn't wait patiently for his turn to answer questions but jumps in to defend himself when one of his opponents attacks. And he is no longer too cautious to take a verbal swing at a rival, as he has proved of late by gleefully maligning McCain's economic plan of modest tax cuts and debt reduction as something only a liberal like Al Gore could love. Aides have also backed off. Rather than grilling Bush right up until air time before debates and sending him out on stage rattled, handlers have allowed the Governor plenty of time to rest beforehand. All in all, the result has been a more confident, relaxed candidate. "A lot of politics, and of running for President, is getting used to the process," Bush said in explaining his change in style. "Man, it's new to me. And I'm getting used to it."