"When did you graduate?" Bush asked her, as she recalls. She told him. That's when Bush told her that Yale "went downhill since they admitted women."

"I said, 'Excuse me?'" Novick says. "I thought he was kidding. But he didn't seem to be kidding. I said, 'What do you mean?'"

Bush replied that "something had been lost" when women were fully admitted to Yale in 1969, that fraternities were big when he'd been there, providing a "great camaraderie for the men." But that went out the window when women were allowed in, Bush said.

"He said something like, 'Women changed the social dynamic for the worse,'" she says. "I was so stunned, shocked and insulted, I didn't know what to say."

She says two things offended her the most: "That he would think that, but almost more so that he would say that to a woman who went to Yale."

So the question is raised: Just how compassionate is Bush? Many of the female reporters on the Bush campaign press plane -- ones who like Bush, generally -- don't think the candidate is capable of relating to them as he does with their male counterparts. He does indeed seem more capable of turning on his famous "charm," when he's dealing with a man, usually a white man and especially a white man from Texas who can talk about baseball.

Gore is relatively incapable of human contact with most earthlings, of course, and his press plane is packed with naysayers who find him charmless and think he has a veracity problem. But Gore isn't marketing himself as a candidate who's capable of great empathy. Indeed, his wife Tipper's Sunday excoriation to a crowd -- "This isn't 'The Dating Game'! You don't have to love Al!" -- was pathetic in its utter acceptance of the fact that after 24 years in public service, Gore is still essentially a political clod.

Bush, on the other hand, is supposed to be the charming guy, the "compassionate conservative," the one who will bring people together. But his inability to comprehend those not like him -- like, say, gays and lesbians, the underclass, Jews, those offended by the race- and gay-baiting shenanigans of his and his allies' South Carolina campaign -- make this task seem all the more Herculean.

This has, of course, reared its head before. There was Tucker Carlson's article in Talk magazine last year that recounted Bush's callous mocking of the death row pleas of Karla Faye Tucker. His constant campaign smiles when asked about the death penalty even led to one question during the third presidential debate about why he always seemed so "gleeful" when talking about capital punishment. And of course, his clumsiness and seeming indifference toward the family of James Byrd Jr. suggests, at least, a discomfort that would suggest his abilities as a racial healer may not extend much further than the multi-culti pageantry of the Republican Convention.

We know Bush can be a compassionate man, but the question continues to be over how far his "armies of compassion" extend past his own honest, but narrow, life experiences. But we know at least this much: Wealthy people and born-again addicts need not be concerned.

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