George W Bush has just purchased his party's nomination. Anti-sleaze candidate Senator John McCain is beaten but his charismatic warnings about democracy for sale will still ring out in this election. As Gore and Bush now both head off for another vigorous round of greedy fundraising to buy multiple short, sharp, TV attack ads, campaign money will be a big talking point. But the money that in the end may really count is the money Bush plans to buy the voters with: tax cuts. The question is whether enough of the people can be bribed enough of the time to let Bush buy the White House the way he has bought himself everything else. The Bush message is simple, primal and potentially deadly: money, money, money. Lashings of it, golden promises ladled out at every rally, pouring like a lava flow from his website, handed out in IOU leaflets at every rally with a ready-reckoner to show every taxpayer how much richer they will be through his phenomenal tax cuts. Slashing and burning his way through the whole tax system, he will abolish death tax altogether and let inheritance rip. Crudely this appeal to greed is clothed in the high moral tones of the right: government is essentially evil, so keeping money out of its hands is virtuous. Doing good to yourself by not paying tax is doing good to your country too.  He has whistle-stopped 100 airports.   As everywhere else, in Rochester, upstate New York, bands, Republican dignitaries and some 2,000 people turn out to hear the speech he has been selling from coast to coast. Dapper, slightly simian, too small eyes too close together, he is a feeble shadow of a feeble father. That president without qualities has brought forth a man with only negative qualities and less than nothing in his past history to recommend him. (He seems even worse in the flesh than on television.) "My priorities are my faith and my family!" he declares, but the one punch in his every speech is mammon. And why not? The power of money has bought this unaccomplished man everything he has - a place at Yale, a place in the National Guard to avoid Vietnam, an oil business, then rescue by his dad's good ol' boys when it went bust, the Texas governorship and now the greatest slush fund ever accumulated by any candidate, making him the creature of every unsavoury interest including big tobacco and the National Rifle Association.  So is it surprising that his unique selling point, the one that raises the roof in stomping and cheers, is money? He learned these words at his Daddy's knee: "Read my lips: no new taxes." But his father lost next time partly because those same lips failed to deliver. This time this Bush is handing out an electoral bribe of colossal proportions the like of which no one has tried before. No doubt William Hague and Michael Portillo will be watching what happens with eager fascination.  His standard speech is larded with untruths: "Taxes are the highest since world war two when we had 7m men in uniform." To great cheers he promises to give away the big budget surplus, which currently goes mainly on repaying national debt. "I know the surplus is not the government's money, I know it is the people's money! It's risky, they say, to give people their money back. I'll tell you what's risky - to leave money in   Washington DC!" Bush calls himself a "compassionate conservative" but on his lips "compassion" has a new meaning: "It's conservative to cut taxes. It's compassionate to give people their money back."  To be sure he says other things too in his standard text. "Sharpening the military sword" is a favourite - a return to the mythical star wars missile shield costing unimaginable trillions. (But where will the money come from?) And education, a critical voter concern in this election. Bush will take away money from failing poor schools and give it to parents as vouchers. He sneers at the head start programme, saying he'll get money back from that too - though its phenomenal success with deprived pre-school children made it one of the few LBJ "great society" programmes that survived the Reagan era.  But all that is just a little flannel in which to dress up his shameless main message: money. Can voters, even in a time of unprecedented boom, still be bought with the largest, crudest bribe ever waved beneath their noses? Pollsters and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic always fear they can. In the privacy of the polling booth the offer of a minimum $2,000 in every tax payer's hand is a powerful pull. (Far more, of course, to the already super-rich.) This will be the ultimate clinical trial of what money can buy in a democracy and rightwing parties everywhere will be watching the experiment.  The Gore camp pretends not to be rattled by this. Polls and focus groups show people saying that in these good times tax cuts aren't where it's at. They want better schools, healthcare and infrastructure. Who needs money in their pocket when that money spent collectively can buy the things they know they really, really want. But do they really, really mean it? Gordon Brown and Tony   Blair will be watching this election with equal intensity. If Al Gore wins in November they might gain the confidence to bound into the next election explaining why paying more tax can get the voters more of what they want, ignoring all Tory tax hand-out blandishments. If Gore wins on a No Tax Cuts ticket then that old "eternal truth" that voters always vote with their pockets will be exposed. It is a shame this essential message is to be delivered by such a dismally poor candidate as Al Gore. But his one advantage is that Bush is even less attractive, an even more charm-free zone. It will be a flawed electoral experiment, mired in other issues, but it is as good as we shall ever get.  The Gore camp comforts itself: it's the economy, stupid. Voters do not want to risk upsetting this golden moment (though jitters in the markets this week and the coming oil price rise may change the picture somewhat by November). Gore will warn that the American economy could not take Bush's explosive tax-cut cash injection. While Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, will scrupulously avoid comment, the look on his face may be enough to remind voters that he would have to send interest rates soaring to keep inflation at bay, throttling off investment, shooting up mortgage and borrowing rates, strangling growth and employment, plunging headlong out of this magic boom. This is what Mr Brown should be telling British voters too now: higher taxes are a more productive way to dampen inflation than higher interest rates. But will he?  That may depend on whether leaden, dead-eyed Al Gore can make the US electorate sit up and understand that Bush offers poisoned gold. A difficult message to get across in the desperately truncated political language of demi-semi-soundbites. But it will settle for a long time the question of whether money in the hand always out-dazzles everything else.