WASHINGTON — Last week, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush asked his chief foreign policy advisor, Stanford University professor Condoleezza Rice, for an emergency lesson on how to pronounce all those troublesome Serbian names.
"It's a good thing I'm a Slavic scholar," joked Rice, who is fluent in Russian.
But the strategy behind the tutorial was no joking matter.
Last week's popular uprising in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, suddenly thrust foreign policy to the forefront of a presidential campaign that had been focused on tax cuts and health care. But at issue isn't the nuances of U.S. policy in the Balkans; it's whether each candidate is capable of handling tough global challenges.
That's why Bush wanted to make sure he could say "Milosevic" and "Kostunica," the names of the main characters in Yugoslavia's power struggle, just as fluently as his Democratic opponent, Vice President Al Gore. (The lesson worked; by the end of the week, Bush was slinging Serbo-Croatian consonants like an old Balkan hand.)
And that's why aides say the Texas governor wants to talk more about national security issues in his two remaining debates with Gore, on Wednesday and Oct. 17: He wants to convince more voters that he is sure-footed enough to handle that part of the presidency.
"The substance of foreign policy matters less than the way the candidates handle questions about it, and what that says about their leadership ability," said pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank.
"The public's level of interest [in Yugoslavia] has been modest," he said. "But an issue like this can make a candidate appear either qualified or inept, and that can make a difference."
And Bush has been vulnerable on that count. Admittedly less experienced in foreign policy than Gore, he mangled the names of several nationalities (for example, "Grecians" for Greeks and "East Timorians" for East Timorese) early in the campaign, setting up months of jokes by late-night comedians. Polls found that many voters who admired Bush as decisive or likable still gave Gore the edge on the question of experience.
So Bush studied up, under the tutelage of Rice and others. He gave a series of foreign policy speeches; he proposed a nuclear arms policy initiative; he made military renewal a major theme at the Republican National Convention and in his campaign.
