Then, realizing that his maxim didn't come out exactly right, he tried again. "If you don't stand for something, you don't stand for anything!" he cried. It still didn't sound quite right.

Nor did his promise, made just hours before at a rally in Portland, Ore., that "Never again in the halls of Washington, D.C., do I want to have to make explanations that I can't explain."

It's at this rally where Bush used the word "resignate" as a substitute for "resonate" (as in "issues that resignate with the American people").

Twice.

No, he's not the most articulate presidential candidate in history. The reporters covering Bush have long recorded these more-or-less daily flubs with glee, to the point that Bush has had to explain himself to the American people, spinning his incoherent babblings and his poor vocabulary.

The result is not always reassuring. "Sometimes my brain gets ahead of my words, if you know what I mean," Bush said to Jay Leno on his Monday night appearance on NBC's "Tonight Show." During the second presidential debate, Bush tried to aw-shucks his way out of the problem, saying that he's "been known to mangle a syl-LAH-ble or two myself."

Bush has referred to himself as "plain-spoken," but his inarticulateness isn't plain-speaking -- it's the vocabulary of a man with 54 years of indifference to furthering his own education. What's truly remarkable is that the shallowness of Bush's noggin has now become a running joke -- a sort of Dope Chic -- that actually works in his favor. Jokes about Bush the amiable dunce distract attention from far more serious weaknesses: his ignorance of policy matters, his campaign lies, his ruthlessness.

Bush knows this. Thus viewers were treated to an introductory skit on "The Tonight Show" Monday night featuring Bush mispronouncing "flammable" as he did "subliminal" at a press conference in September: something like "Flammamababable." A taped appearance for this weekend's "Saturday Night Live" will have him mispronouncing "ambivalent." At the Al Smith Dinner in New York last week, Bush jokingly compared himself to William F. Buckley, a fellow Yalie, by saying, "Bill wrote a book at Yale; I read one." He said the ouster of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic means that there's one less polysyllabic name for him to memorize.

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