Bush also knew that education has consistently been the top issue in California for the past couple of years, with Gov. Gray Davis riding the issue to a 20-point victory here in 1998. But it remains to be seen whether it will define people's presidential votes the same way.

For the most part, McCain and Bush largely agree on education policies, with one notable difference: Bush would force public schools that accept federal money to develop standardized tests and make sure low-performing students' achievement improves, or lose their funding. McCain and Keyes attacked the Texas governor for advocating federal intervention in what they said should be a local issue.

"I believe it's a serious mistake to allow some bureaucrat in Washington to decide the education standards in the state of Arizona," McCain said. "I want those decisions made not by some Washington bureaucrat, but by someone who knows my children's names." But Bush's tough-love approach has earned him accolades in Texas, and scores of minority and poor students have risen steadily since he took office. In their pandering to far-right education zealots, voucher advocates and home-schoolers, McCain and Keyes made Bush briefly sound presidential.

McCain stumbled when asked what his most significant contributions to education were during his years in Congress. He muttered something about the military teachers program and "using the bully pulpit in favor of the examples that are set in my state and by other reformers in the school system in America." He failed to name any examples, however.

McCain spent a lot of time talking about wanting to talk about issues, which seems to have become his new issue as he tries to transition out of the defensive posture he has been forced into for much of this week. This week has been something of a disaster for the McCain campaign, which has gotten hung up on the senator's attacks on Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and on calls made by his campaign criticizing Bush for going to Bob Jones University. Then Californians blasted him for bailing out on Thursday's debate, and he jumped back in -- by satellite, on a big screen near Keyes and Bush.

But the debate suffered from a stodgy format, with none of the hand-to-hand combat that marked the debates earlier this winter. Instead it was a regression to the prosaic form of one question per candidate, with little or no chance for rebuttal and no opportunity for the candidates to engage each other directly.

So it was predictable: Keyes blaming the media's racism for his lagging poll numbers, implying that core Republicans were entrapped by the media and prevented from voting their conscience, and that the Republican Party was destined to nominate a candidate who would lose to Al Gore in November; McCain regurgitating his stock line of needing no on-the-job training to be president, implying, of course, that Bush would; and Bush saying once again that he is a uniter, not a divider. It made one nostalgic for Letterman the night before.