"I don't know what 'affirmative access' means," Gore said. "I do know what affirmative action means. I know the governor is against it and I know that I'm for it."

Lehrer asked Bush if he was against affirmative action.

"If affirmative action means quotas I'm against it," Bush said. "If it means what I'm for, then I'm for it. You heard what I was for. He keeps saying I'm against things. You heard what I was for and that's what I support."

Gore asked him if he supported it without quotas.

"I'm for what I just described for the lady," Bush said.

Gore asked if Bush supported "what the Supreme Court says is a constitutional way of having affirmative action?"

Bush chose this moment to complain that Gore was breaking debate rules.

And he was. Gore can sure seem obnoxious and overbearing. In between misrepresentations of what he's accomplished in Texas, Bush slyly drove home the point that Gore's style was typical for creatures of Washington. "A lot of people are sick and tired of the bitterness in Washington, D.C., and they don't want any part of politics," Bush said. "They look at Washington and see people pointing fingers and casting blame and saying one thing and doing another. There's a lot of young folks saying, 'Why do I want to be involved with this mess?'"

Responding to the same point -- a question about cynicism among youth -- Gore pressed for the campaign finance reform law offered by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

And therein lay the difference -- pleasant platitudes, signifying nothing, vs. old-school Washingtoniana, a legislative cure-all even for Gen X angst.

This could also be seen in Bush's effective response to Gore's laundry list of solutions to all that ailed the audience -- the immense price tag attached.

"When you total up all the federal spending he wants to do, it's the largest increase in federal spending in years," Bush said. "And there's just not going to be enough money. If this were a spending contest I would come in second." Poking at Gore's hack-pol underbelly, Bush noted, "One of the reasons I was successful as the governor of Texas is because I didn't try to be all things to all people."

Of course, Bush tried to prove his point about Gore's massive spending by citing the extremely partisan study of his proposals by the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee. Gore protested by describing the citation as one "the journalists said was misleading."

"Forget the journalists," Bush said.

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