Bob Kolasky is the managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com. His e-mail address is bob@voxcap.com

In March of this year, The New York Times was forced to run an embarrassing correction to an article about Texas Gov. George W. Bush:

The article included an opinionated sentence casting doubt on his mastery of those issues. The sentence was sent as a message between editors after the article was written, and the reporters were never aware of it. The comment was typed in a nonprinting computer script, but converted into print through a command error.

Apparently, an overzealous Times editor, using his handy Microsoft Word editing feature, had accidentally injected his or her opinion into a news article about Bush -- a no-no in "objective" reporting. The story centered on Bush's reliance on a gaggle of expert advisers to help brief him on the issues facing him in his run for presidency in 2000. The offending sentence, inadvertently inserted into the copy, remarked dismissively that: "There may never have been a `serious' candidate who needed it [advice] more."

A home run

The Times' slip came to mind last week when Bush, the likely Republican presidential nominee, went to the Simi Valley, Calif., to deliver a major foreign-policy speech, amidst the harsh glare of the media spotlight. Bush, who a couple of weeks earlier had been caught off-guard by a foreign-policy "pop quiz" administered by a Boston TV reporter, was facing the most serious questions yet about his fitness to be president.

Stung by comparisons (mostly by late-night comedians) to his father's vice president, Dan Quayle, as well as criticisms of his lack of foreign-policy acumen, Bush reportedly spent much of the week leading up to his speech cramming with his foreign-policy brain trust.

The results were impressive. The Republican foreign-policy elite was almost unanimous in its praise for Bush's strong internationalist message. "It may have been the best foreign policy speech given since the end of the Cold War," opined The Washington Times editorial board.

It was good politics, as well, effectively blunting foreign policy as an issue in the Republican primary season. "There's not a lot of room for [Sen. John] McCain and [publisher Steve] Forbes [Bush's two main competitors] to stake a claim to any significant differences on foreign policy," says Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

A sure thing?

One of the more effective candidates for president in recent memory

Bush's success offered still more evidence of how hard he is going to be to beat in 2000. If nothing else, he has emerged as one of the more effective candidates for president in recent memory -- and for good reason. His charisma has endeared him to many a voter on the stump; his campaign stash has forced some of his potentially strongest challengers to reconsider their efforts; his well-oiled campaign staff and advisers have kept the gaffes that are inevitable in a presidential campaign to a minimum, and have prevented the ones that did arise from turning into full-blown crises; his record has endeared him to a majority of his gubernatorial colleagues whose endorsements have added to his allure; and his aura of electability seems likely to be proven to be self-fulfilling.

All that practically guarantees him the Republican nomination, particularly if you look at recent history. An analysis of elections since 1952 by the Gallup polling company shows that the man to whom Republican voters were giving the highest poll total in the fall before the election almost always ended up becoming the eventual GOP nominee, and in no situation did a strong front-runner go on to lose the nomination. Unlike the Democrats, the Republican Party likes to stand by its man in presidential elections.

But Republicans increasingly are asking just who is this man they have chosen to throw the institutional weight of their party behind. And does he have what it takes to be the next president of the United States?

Why George W.?

A bit of a cottage industry has risen up to try and figure out George W. Bush. Journalists relish trying to determine just exactly what political principles make him tick. "Why W.?" The National Review wonders. "What W. Stands For?" inquires The New Republic. E.J. Dionne went "In Search of George W. Bush" for The Washington Post Magazine earlier this year. "Is Bush about public relations or political philosophy, better principle or better cosmetics?" queried Dionne.

Despite his best efforts, Dionne, as good a political reporter as there is in the country, could not figure out the answers in September. Two months later those same questions linger.

Some think this is a problem. "I think there is a disappointment and a sense of mystery about George W. -- he seems unwilling to talk specifics," says Deroy Murdock, a libertarian political commentator who is serving as a consultant to Forbes in 2000. Murdock and other Forbes supporters from the Republican right -- such as Paul Weyrich, Armstrong Williams and Lyn Nofziger -- decry Bush as a mushy centrist whose administration will be little more than a followup to his father's time in the Oval Office.

"If George W. Bush is elected, many conservatives are wondering what does that mean," Murdock says. "Does that mean that we have a 'Read Your Lips II'? Does that mean there is the 'Son of Americans with Disabilities Act'? How about another war in the Middle East where we don't finish what we started?"

On the opposite end of the spectrum, others see a little bit of Bill Clinton in W. Last week, Bush created a minor firestorm when he told NBC's Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" that he would not meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, a prominent group of gay members of the GOP, because it would create a "political nightmare."

"What we want to know is whether the next president is going to be poll driven ¿ or stand on principle," says Kevin Ives, a spokesman for the group. "This [Bush's comments] seems to indicate that he will not stand on principle."

Hinting toward one of the most frequently leveled criticisms toward Clinton, Ives says, "What's at stake is whether we can we trust the next president."

The ¿bubble' boy

Such criticism of a front-runner is to be expected, of course, and it can even work to Bush's advantage. Having Paul Weyrich against him surely is appealing to many moderate Republicans, and having the Log Cabin Republicans upset at him certainly does not hurt in appealing to religious conservatives.

In Bush, Mark Miller, the executive director of the moderate Republican Leadership Council, sees someone with the potential to unify the party. "We want our party to be unified ¿ our party is not going to unite behind Gary Bauer ¿ our party is not going to unite behind William Weld," Miller says. "It can behind George W. Bush."

Is Bush a centrist?

Miller, too, seems unable to quite put his finger on Bush. Alternating between calling him a conservative from Texas and a centrist, he concedes that "labels are so hard to apply." He adds that although Bush has a conservative Texas record, compared to rivals such as Forbes and Bauer, he is a centrist. "That seems to be what voters want," he says.

Bush supporters will tell you that all the analyzing of the Texas governor is really just the usual media psychobabble. Hasn't Bush given dozens of speeches laying out what he stands for? Doesn't he have a record of six years in office as executive of the second largest state of the union? In fact, Bush just co-wrote an autobiography, A Charge to Keep, laying out exactly what he stands for. And he has offered specifics on what he would do on tough subjects ranging from entitlement reform to education reform.

But still, as Michel Cottle noted recently in The New Republic, a "bubble" surrounds Bush. A close reading of his autobiography reiterates that. He does a good job of painting a broad picture of a smart, likeable guy willing to take some political chances, a man more conciliator than agitator, but he does not quite let the reader privy to what makes him tick.

Bush's bubble is undoubtedly by design. In 1994, when he first ran successfully for governor of Texas, his campaign was noted for its message discipline. Bush stuck to four bedrock themes: local control of schools, tort reform, tough crime-fighting measures and welfare reform. In the presidential race, he is trying to emulate that discipline -- hoping that broad philosophical strokes will suffice, rather than debating specifics with his Republican rivals.

Bush is hoping that the voters will see his campaign style as proof that he offers what his father called "that vision thing," and will worry more about the content of his character than about his ability to dissemble public policy. His opponents, on the other hand, hope that they can convince voters that W.'s substance does not match his style.