Their True Primary Colors

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Primary season has a way of reducing grand, soul-searching battles into questions you can cup in your hand: Are you better off now? Why not the best? Whom do you trust? Candidates unspool speeches on education and health care and economic policy, and then they trip over questions about where the Confederate flag should fly and whether they can tell if a person is gay and "How off-beat is your heart anyway, Senator?" There are still nine months of ads and polls and policy papers to go, but there may never be a better time than these next few weeks to sit right up close to the small stage, where you can hear the lines that are flubbed and see the costumes that don't quite fit and watch the candidates trying to master their roles.

The single most dramatic change has been Al Gore's transformation from wooden soldier to junkyard dog. The commentariat made fun of every move by the loyal, refined Vice President who thought a change of clothes and address could turn him into an Alpha male. But his rivals aren't laughing now. The ones who've tangled with him over the years have always known that behind closed doors, in budget fights and partisan brawls, Gore was a pitiless enemy; and now he's taken it public. What was derided as a phony makeover turns out to bring us closer to the truth about Gore, and whatever limbs he rips off Bill Bradley, whatever truth he shaves and scars he leaves would be nothing compared with what he'd try to do to a Republican with whom he actually disagreed. He has been so effective that Republicans who once wanted to run against Gore now have the opposite fantasy. They want the lefty professor Bradley to win and are worried about going up against the scrappy Vice President who, as a veteran of two Bush campaigns put it, "reminds me of Lee Atwater. He counterpunches, and he counterpunches fast."

Bradley knows this better than anyone. Mr. Authentic, with the well-worn shoes and soft voice and goodness platform, who hired the ad agency to help package him as the unpackaged candidate, said he wanted a different kind of campaign, noble and high protein. But Gore wanted to do it the old-fashioned way. Bradley might survive as the un-Politician but only if he is willing to fight for it and, by extension, fight for us. So far, he seems not to grasp the role televised debates play these days. They are no longer pro-bowl versions of high school oratory contests; increasingly, debates are the arena itself, where most of the winning and losing and living and dying of candidates takes place. His contempt for Gore just looked like bad manners, but his message that the whole ugly process of becoming President was beneath him just looked bad.

His fellow upstart John McCain is trying to play the hardest role of all: a Washington insider with a conservative record running as a maverick outsider on a centrist platform, against the guy his whole party crowned months ago. Maybe that's why he seems to be having the most fun onstage; no one in the audience has a clue about what he's going to do next. But it's a lot to juggle: his rhetoric as a reformer against his record as a Commerce Committee chairman; his reputation as a straight talker against his need to mollify flag wavers in South Carolina; his luck that New Hampshire loves mavericks against his certain knowledge that his party hates them.