Kucinich livens up the predictable

DENNIS KUCINICH got off the best line of the debate last night. Asked by Ted Koppel about Al Gore's endorsement of front-runner Howard Dean, Kucinich deadpanned: "I can't say I was really counting on it."

Kucinich also got the most applause of any candidate last night. To Koppel's query about when the candidates who are low on money and low in the polls would drop out, Kucinich shot back: "You see where the media takes these campaigns?" First they make us talk about endorsements, then they ask about polls, then about money. "When do we talk about issues?"

But when the candidates did talk about the issues, what did we learn? That John Edwards manages to work the words "special interests" and "powerful lobbies" into the answer of every question he's asked? That Wesley Clark was a far more impressive candidate for president before he ever got into the race? That John Kerry can string together pejoratives in denouncing President Bush's foreign policy -- "arrogant, inept, reckless, ideological" -- without ever explaining coherently why he voted for that president's war in Iraq? None of that came as a surprise.

In fact, the only surprise in last night's debate was that Dean showed up with his sleeves unrolled and his suit coat on. Perhaps that was a sign that Dean already sees himself as the Democrats' nominee-apparent and is gradually beginning to reach out to voters beyond the angry left wing of the Democratic Party. Certainly he showed little of the fire-and-brimstone style that has made him such a hero to the MoveOn.org crowd; for the first 80 minutes of the 90-minute debate, in fact, he acted as if mixing it up with the others was the last thing he wanted to do.

And understandably so. For anyone who is already in Dean's camp -- and if opinion polls are right, that includes 40 percent of New Hampshire Democrats -- there was nothing in last night's debate to change their minds. For the front-runner from Vermont, that was the good news. The bad news is that there was also nothing last night to change the minds of a much larger group of Americans: those who think Bush is doing a decent job.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.