HANOVER, N.H. -- First-time visitors to Campaign 2000 who tuned in to Wednesday night's town meeting with Vice President Al Gore and former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley learned the basic chemical breakdown the rest of us already know pretty well: Bradley = wood, Gore = plastic.

Beyond the superficiality of Bradley's philosopher-on-a-mountaintop somnambulism and Gore's more than occasionally cloying exuberance, however, witnesses to the WMUR-TV/CNN 60-minute exchange saw two widely divergent politicians and campaigns.

To Gore's chagrin, the format of the town meeting seemed to be designed to avoid pitting one candidate against the other. Members of the audience, chosen by lottery from the Upper Valley region, asked one question to one candidate, and that candidate was given 90 seconds to respond. There were no follow-ups, introductory or closing remarks, and no direct confrontations.

Nonetheless, Gore continued to step up his attacks on Bradley -- who matches him in cash-on-hand, and leads the vice president in the state, 47-39 percent, according to a Quinnipiac College poll released Tuesday. Gore hammered home his differences with the stunningly strong insurgent on school vouchers, health care and U.S. intervention abroad. Bradley, meanwhile, continued to brush off Gore's charges like so much dandruff.

The last time Bill Bradley came up to Dartmouth College for a major competition, he only had a so-so night. On Feb. 19, 1965, the Princeton Tigers handed the Dartmouth Indians their shorts, 83-57, but Bradley -- for whom expectations were and will always be superhumanly high -- only managed to score 19 points. (In his previous trip to Dartmouth, on Feb. 8, 1964, he scored 31 points and was the only Tiger to hit double figures.)

Wednesday night's was another decent if unspectacular performance. One of the few solid, substantive punches that landed occurred when Gore pointed out that Emory University Medical School just assessed that Bradley's health-care proposal would cost $1.2 trillion over a decade -- as opposed to the $650 billion price tag Bradley had assigned it.

"That's more than entire budget surplus," Gore said. "We need to save some of the surplus to save Medicaid. The cost is way excessive." The next time Gore was asked a question -- on violence in schools -- he took a few seconds to continue bleeding Bradley's plan. "The numbers have to add up," he said, noting that "one of the reasons why we have a strong economy" is because of diligent planning. Bradley's proposal, he said, is "something that oughta be looked at very carefully."

To that, Bradley just said: "We each have our own experts. I dispute the cost figure that Al has used." And when handed a question about the still-oozing campaign-finance scandals of the Clinton-Gore '96 campaign, he refrained from attacking, noting that there were "irregularities that have been addressed," though he wasn't "going to get into the details."

Gore wasn't so easy on President Clinton. Questioned about the climate of cynicism created not only by the behavior of the GOP-led Congress, but also "the behavior of some members of your administration," Gore leaped forward and said, "I understand the disappointment and anger you feel about President Clinton; I felt it myself." But Clinton's name hadn't been mentioned, and the questioner could have been referring to any number of tarnished, indicted or imprisoned members of the administration the president pledged would be the most ethical in history.

Adding that Clinton is his "friend," and that he feels "it's time to move on," Gore also suggested that he was a vociferous Clinton defender during Zippergate because he "took an oath to serve this country through thick and thin."

The evening was a 60-minute version of the last few months, summed up for the viewers at home who'd missed the previous 10 episodes. Both men showed their considerable strengths and weaknesses.

At his best moments, Bradley connected with people in the authentic manner of a popular professor. To a question about the environment, he seemed to float off into a place where he was on the beach, or in a wood, turning into Henry David Thoreau. At other times he became Little Nemo in Slumberland, barely registering as present in the room, much less alive and staking a claim that he should be leader of the free world.

Gore, for his part, tried more direct attempts to "connect," asking questioners about their families and their jobs, joking and smiling and then suddenly turning deadly serious to address the important question at hand. When asked what the biggest mistake of his political career was, he warmly joked, "Gosh, there have been so many of them." Then he suggested that his biggest gaffe was his poor "choice of words" when saying that he created the Internet, rather than the actuality that he had "taken the lead in Congress in creating the Internet." This was a glimpse at the Al Gore you read about, the one reporters and supporters see on occasion behind closed doors.

Too often, however, viewers saw the revved-up new version of Al Gore, the one who probably means it but too often, to too many voters, seems insincere. After the debate, but before hosts Bernie Shaw and WMUR's Karen Brown said goodnight, he told the audience he would stay behind and answer any of their questions "after the cameras have gone." It seemed like shtick, and reporters reacted like it was. But in fact Gore -- and voters -- stayed a full 95 minutes after the debate ended.

And in the press room, reporters were continually bombarded with e-mails and "Reality Check" sheets taking Bradley to task for comments he had made just minutes before, poking holes in Bradley's record on campaign-finance reform, Medicare, health care, school vouchers, ad infinitum. Ever the eager-beaver student body president, Gore is the man who wants it too much, vying against the man who may not want it enough.

Both men also took the opportunity to fill in their unfinished portraits. Bradley said he wanted to attack the deficits in urban education the same way FDR attacked the Depression, devoting not only "resources and ingenuity" but a "spirit [that] needs to be behind this, a willingness to experiment." The latter seemed a reference to his past vote in support of a limited public school voucher program, which Gore has hammered him on continually, knowing how it bothers liberal Democrats and teachers.

Gore repeated what has become a new chapter in his personal narrative, sharing his disillusionment with politics when he returned from Vietnam, after his father had been defeated in his senatorial reelection run largely because of his support for civil rights and his opposition to the war. "I thought politics was the absolute last thing I'd ever do with my life," Gore said, noting that he had spent seven years as a reporter and only changed professions once he saw what local Tennessee politicians were able to do for people on a local level.

Who won? "I thought Bradley really took the debate," said Dartmouth government professor Richard Winters. "All he had to do was position himself as an equal in the posturing on the stage and he did more than that. This is a guy who's fluent, who's at ease with himself, who's confident in what he had to say. Not at all to criticize what Gore did. I thought Gore did well, but there's a kind of odd shallowness and a lack of gravitas associated with Gore that's really sort of puzzling and I don't understand it."

The press room was packed afterwards with campaign drones from both sides -- as well as three Cabinet secretaries flown up at Gore campaign, not taxpayer, expense -- to spin for their men.

Gore press secretary Chris Lehane said that his boss "raised some serious questions about Sen. Bradley's health-care plan. Al Gore cited an independent study coming out of Emory University which said simply that Bradley's numbers don't add up. I thought it was pretty interesting that Sen. Bradley did not defend his plan with the degree of vigor that one would expect when a major plank of his campaign was challenged."

"Res ipsa loquitur -- the thing speaks for itself," countered Bradley speechwriter Richard Stengel. "He spoke for himself. We don't need a thousand people in here to spin afterwards, that's why you have to resort to lame people like me to have to do this, or Cabinet officers, right? His manner and his presentation is in keeping with what we think is the spirit of the times in America: low-key, not badgering somebody, giving your positive vision, confident, optimistic, unscripted."

As for Gore's slam that Bradley's health-care plan is a budget-buster, Stengel said, "Hey, look, we think [Gore's] education plan is going to bust the budget too, but that's not what we're here to talk about, we're hear to talk about our proposals."

"Let's stop the spin for a minute," said New Hampshire State House Minority Leader Peter Burling, a Gore supporter. "The fact of the matter is, these two guys approach the issue in different ways. Bradley approaches as a poet. A philosopher. A theorist. Gore approaches it as a practical politician: 'How am I going to get the money to make that happen?' What we saw here was a contrast between the artist and the pragmatist."