Thanksgiving was still a day away, but George W. Bush was already counting his blessings last Wednesday morning. Although the temperature outside the Governor's mansion in Austin, Texas, had slipped into the unseasonable mid-40s, sunlight filled the second-floor solarium, where Bush and five of his top campaign advisers were seated around a table. The mood was relaxed, maybe even thankful. After all, Bush had just passed two big tests. He had performed adequately in delivering his first major foreign-policy speech, and two days later he had emerged virtually unscathed from a one-hour grilling on NBC's Meet the Press. After being knocked for weeks as a lightweight who didn't understand foreign policy and could not field tough questions, he had handled the speech and the televised interview well enough to quiet some of his critics. Now the next hurdle, a debate this week in New Hampshire, seemed less daunting. "I'm feeling comfortable," Bush told his team as he sipped coffee. "I'm ready."
He had better be, because the stakes for Bush could not be higher. In a new TIME/CNN poll, Bush trails John McCain, 35% to 37%, for the first time in the key state of New Hampshire. The poll's margin of error means the race is a statistical dead heat, but the trend is ominous for Bush. As recently as July the Texas Governor was swamping McCain in Granite State polls by more than 30 points. McCain, with his anti-Establishment appeal and his pow story, has all the momentum in New Hampshire, making him, not Bush, the candidate with buzz going into the first real debate. And yet the burden of high expectations hasn't shifted to McCain; it rests, like a steamer trunk carrying all the G.O.P.'s yearnings for the White House, on Bush's shoulders. After skipping earlier debates and visiting the state less often than his opponents, Bush must convince New Hampshirites that he doesn't take their votes for granted. "Bush has got to hit a home run," says Dick Bennett, a veteran New Hampshire pollster, "because viewers will be looking at him with a critical eye. They'll be looking for something they don't like."
But even as he competes with McCain's appeal to reform-minded centrists, military veterans and independents, Bush must contend with Steve Forbes' attacks from the right. The multimillionaire publisher has yet to launch the kind of televised air assault against Bush that he did against Bob Dole in 1996, but last week he started warming to the task. He accused Bush of reading his foreign-policy opinions "off of a TelePrompTer" and of turning too often to Washington solutions. On Thursday night Forbes will almost certainly inform debate watchers that Bush tried to raise some taxes in Texas, that he allowed spending there to increase "a whopping 36%" and that he isn't committed to the fight against abortion--an opinion that social conservatives Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes will loudly second.