The syntax of the father . . .Bush shares dad's gift for garble on the stump

LEXINGTON, S.C. - Like his father before him, Gov. George W. Bush is articulating his political vision with a syntax all his own.<br><br>From diners in New Hampshire to the debate stages of Iowa, the Texas

Thursday, January 13th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

LEXINGTON, S.C. - Like his father before him, Gov. George W. Bush is articulating his political vision with a syntax all his own.

From diners in New Hampshire to the debate stages of Iowa, the Texas governor is recalling his father's legacy of tangled sentences and novel pronunciations in a distinctly Bush style.

At a news conference Tuesday in Michigan, the Republican front-runner found himself in a rhetorical briar patch a few times, hopping from clause to clause.

Commenting on GOP rival John McCain, Mr. Bush told reporters:

"If he's saying I'm going to veto every single appropriation bill that comes across my desk, again, I just, he was, I thought it was a kind of. . . ." His voice trailed off to unintelligibility.

At a campaign stop in South Carolina on Tuesday night, Mr. Bush got tongue-tied over the phrase "potential missile launches," warning of "a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses."

He says he supports assuring that people have access to college and government funding, saying he backs "private capital for people who are accessing."

And when it comes to dropping diphthongs and creative pronunciation, the governor shines: "We're getting down to vote-askin' time," he told supporters Tuesday in Florence, S.C. Several times, he has scrambled the verb obfuscate as obsfucate, and he coats the word nuclear with a languorous East Texas patina. "Nyoooo-cue-lair," he says.

As president, his father was renowned for tortured syntax and a creative lexicon - once identifying the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as the Nitty Ditty Gritty Great Bird.

As for the son, Mr. Bush might have a way to go. Still, last week he combined trade and barriers - He warned against terriers - and, declaring education a top priority, said he would not stand for the "subsidation" of failure.

Communications director Karen Hughes cringed when he had a brief educational failure of his own, declaring: "The question we need to ask: Is our children learning?"

When he sought to head off a reporter's interruption at a news conference by saying he had not yet reached his "peroration," it sent the traveling press to the dictionary to see whether he had minted a word.

But no. It was a word, all right, one he'd learned at Yale, and he used it correctly.

Mr. Bush, who has trumpeted the idea of broadening the Republican Party's appeal among minorities, said Wednesday that he didn't see any problem in holding a political rally on the grounds of a restored Southern plantation.

"People shouldn't read into venue locations someone's heart," he told reporters Wednesday in Lexington.

The rally, an oyster roast that attracted several hundred Bush backers, was held Tuesday night on the 700-acre Boone Hall plantation at Mount Pleasant, where supporters gathered in a large tent adjacent to the white-pillared Southern mansion. Nearby was a row of small houses that 150 years ago served as the slaves' quarters.

"Boone Hall is a place where people hold public functions all the time," he said. "Fortunately, we had a place that was large enough to accommodate the over 2,000 people who showed up."

Mr. Bush said both Democrats and Republicans have held events at the site. And he noted that the state's Democratic governor had attended a function on the plantation grounds the night before.

The crowd at the plantation, like those at other Bush events, was largely white.

"I have a lot of work to do in minority communities, I recognize that," he said. "And I'm going to reach out to people."

The issues of race and politics were intertwined Wednesday as Mr. Bush sought support in South Carolina, whose Feb. 19 primary will be the first in the South.

The Texas governor woke up to a front-page story in the Columbia newspaper about an imbroglio in the Palmetto State over a Republican state senator's remarks that the NAACP should be called "the National Association of Retarded People."

Mr. Bush called the remark "unfortunate name-calling" but fended off reporter queries about whether the lawmaker should apologize. "That's up to the senator," he said.

So quickly has the TV show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire worked its way into pop culture that in its first season, it has earned a regular reference on the 2000 presidential trail.

During an earlier GOP debate, radio talk show host Alan Keyes challenged Sen. John McCain with a long question on morality and rap music, his voice rising.

Mr. McCain paused, as if beleaguered. "Can I have a lifeline?" he said, referring to a device on the TV show that allows contestants to telephone somebody for help.

Asked whom he would have called, Mr. McCain said his 15-year-old daughter.

This week, Mr. Bush has three times used host Regis Philbin's signature line - "Is this your FINAL answer?" - to gibe Mr. McCain for revising his tax-cut plan.

"I quote Regis and ask, 'Is that your FINAL tax plan?' " he said in Grand Rapids, Mich.

By Wayne Slater / The Dallas Morning News