By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

“Read my lips,” George Senior said petulantly. “No — new — taxes.”

I remember when he said it, and I remember thinking, “You had better mean it. Those are the sort of words that can sink your ship.”

And they did. When you say something that's easy to understand, you don't hedge even a little, and then you emphasize it by prefacing with “Read my lips,” you leave yourself wide open.

The whole furor over John Rocker reminds me of the Bush debacle in a way. In both cases, they might as well have handed an axe to Lizzie Borden and bowed their heads.

Bush's sin, though, was not lying. Millions went to the local fire station and voted against him, all the while cursing him for lying, but he didn't lie. His sin was in believing he could predict the future.

He had no intention of going along with any tax increases, and that's what he should have said. Instead, he let a reporter get under his skin and made a promise he couldn't keep.

President Jimmy Carter made a similar error, though it was this particular error that caused me to vote for him. He promised, unequivocally, that he would balance the federal budget within four years.

The leaders of his party dealt him the death blow on that one. Carter offered Congress budgets every year that were designed to gradually reduce the deficit until in the fourth year the budget would be balanced. The Congress took his carefully crafted budgets and piled on the pork, and you know the rest.

Ever since then, I've been less concerned with who the president is and more concerned with what happens in Congress. No president can do anything about the budget, except to give Congress a good starting place. During the last several decades of runaway spending and borrowing, Congress was to blame, just as in the last six years of gradually bringing the deficit beast more under control, Congress, not the president, deserves the credit.

I've been watching the current crop of presidential candidates for any similar errors, but so far I haven't seen any. They're a careful lot, which makes the whole election process about as exciting as nap time at the home.

The same is true of the New York Senate race, by the way. (I only bring that up because that race is getting more media attention than the presidential race.) TV talking heads Sunday tried their best to get Rudolph Juliani to promise that he would absolutely never run for anything else (like president) during his six-year term in the Senate, if elected.

He was too smart for that, and said quite reasonably that he would be a fool to tell you with any certainty what he would be doing in three or four years.

All anyone can tell you right now, if he's being truthful, is what his intentions are, backed up by his history — by what he has done.

As I watch the candidates for president, I'm not basing my final decision on anybody's “ironclad” promises.

I'm looking primarily at their records on issues like taxes and balancing budgets, a strong defense and generally reducing the size, power and reach of the federal government in favor of more state and local government control, and more personal freedom.

I'm afraid that as I read their lips, I'm not hearing that “F” word, “freedom,” very often from the top half dozen candidates. But more on that some other time.

For now, the lesson for today, boys and girls, is to pay attention to what they say, but compare it to what they do.

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