Bush's finely tuned sense of Texas politics, however, may come across as a tin ear for American environmental sensibilities come fall. In his first race for governor, in 1994, Bush went on a staged-for-the-media mourning dove hunt—one of those hallowed rites of political passage that almost everyone lusting for high office in Texas has to undergo. An aide handed Dubya a 20-gauge shotgun, he took careful aim, and then he accidentally shot a killdeer—a protected species in Texas. "I have a confession to make; I am a killdee killer," Bush writes in his autobiography. But a reader expecting mournful reflection encountered the following: "I think it showed a side of me that voters had not seen. I was able to laugh at myself, to make a mistake, admit it, and poke fun at it.... It gave me great joke material."

Bush's risible nature inadvertently exposes his own chief liability on the environment: He has a reputation for not taking it seriously. In 1998, Bush had to oversee a conference about the epidemic of drought and forest fires in Texas. He amused the audience by making rubbery faces, doing tricks with his reading glasses, and throwing broad winks at someone he knew. When the time came to summon the director of the state forest service to the podium, the governor showed his lifelong fondness for nicknames. "Tree Man!" he shouted. "Get up here!"

It's not certain, however, that Gore can score points off Bush's short environmental attention span; in fact, the reigning fin de siècle American isolationism may actually serve Bush as one of his strongest political assets. This April, when the Gallup organization asked voters to rank the issues that will most influence their choice for president, they ranked "protection of the environment" eighth. Besides, while Gore can rightly claim the title of climatologist-in-chief and straight-arrow defender of the earth, Bush gets to play the dashing avatar of can-do Western know-how. And voters rarely elect climatologists.