Even pundits notice that the man is a gaffe artist -- that's the easy part, the (you might say) no-brainer. Evidence is not lacking that young Bush is grammatically challenged, semantically befuddled, factually slipshod. He makes a cheap spectacle of himself, whereupon his people can brand finger-pointers as, horror of horrors, elitists. Instant replay is made to order for television news -- it requires no homework -- and gaffes are made to order for instant replay.

It's not hard to go to the videotape to show Bush as Governor Malaprop, he of "subliminable," using "subscribe" for "ascribe," "retort" for "resort," "hostile" for "hostage," "forethought" for "forefront," "gracious" for "grateful," "gist" for "grist," "suckles" for "sucks," and so on ad infinitum. Jacob Weisberg in Slate has collected these and other examples (he is not the only one), as well as many an instance of Bush jamming together singular verbs and plural nouns -- as in "Our priorities is our faith" (Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10) and "Reading is the basics for all learning" (Reston, Va., March 28) -- and inverting, as in "We want to promote families in America. Families is where our nation takes hope, where wings take dream." (La Crosse, Wis., Oct. 19) There is also his memorable crack at Gail Sheehy: "The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never interviewed her." (Orange, Calif., Sept. 15)

Cast as a regular airhead, W. himself has learned to mock his own feebleness, joking, "I've been known to mangle a syllable or two, if you know what I mean." (Greensboro, Oct. 10) As he said to David Letterman the other night, "Well, a lot of folks don't think I can string a sentence together so when I was able to do so, the expectations were so low that all I had to do was say, 'Hi, I'm George W. Bush.'" That's what a man of the people does, turns a charge of incapacity into a gag at the expense of the accuser. Thus did Ronald Reagan, whose age had become an issue in the 1984 campaign, say about Walter Mondale, "I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." This is the good-ol'-boy ingratiator at work, and W. has gotten rather competent at that if nothing else.

Thus does George W. Bush of Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, a chip off his father's pork rinds, appeal to his audience's resentment of brains. When he tediously, deceptively, ribs Gore for claiming to have invented the Internet (what Gore said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a klutzy formulation that is more than half true, but who cares what he actually said and what the truth is?), he identifies himself with people who cannot fairly claim to have invented anything -- people like the winners of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" consulting friends and studio audiences (audiences as focus groups!) on their way to winning big bucks by answering questions about television programs. Bush auditions for entertainer in chief, playing to know-nothings who resent the idea that there are people who know more about anything than they do.

In 1956, upon being told that he had all the "thinking people" on his side, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson replied, "That's wonderful. But I need a majority." Bush's handlers are gambling that the majority will turn its back on the smart kid in favor of the frat party glad-hander. ("This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow citizens, I like interfacing with them" -- George W. Bush, Sept. 8.) No presidential candidate ever went broke betting on the anti-intellectualism of the American people.

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