But the youthquake in the new economy comes with a caveat that also may begin applying to politics. If you’re inexperienced and you want a big job, you’d better be smart as hell. Older and wiser managers with a wealth of life experience can afford to space out occasionally, Reagan style. The young and ambitious can’t. In this new world, speed rules. Onetime nerds grow up to be multimillionaires. They get their revenge, lapping the frat boys who once taunted them. The code is clear: you’re ahead of the latest curve—or you’re road kill.

Which brings us to George W. Bush. On one level, all that talk about getting stumped on some pop quiz by a Boston TV reporter doesn’t really hurt him. Even the smartest of smarty-pants couldn’t have answered all four of those “gotcha” foreign-policy questions. Bush went to Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School—not too shabby. And besides, America doesn’t like intellectuals and policy wonks any more than Bush does. If he simply gets the votes of anyone who has ever thrown a paper airplane in class or not studied for a test, he’ll win in a landslide. All Bush has to do now is show up and sound reasonably articulate and he’ll beat the expectations spread set by the media. Game, set, match.

Could be. Bush is no boob. But there’s a potential problem with this scenario that should be worrisome for the Austin crowd. What if the expectations game itself has changed, thanks to the candlepower of folks like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton? What if, even amid TV pabulum, standards of performance are ratcheting higher? Without even knowing it, the public may expect more, just as colleges now demand a higher-quality student than they did when Bush got into Yale. Acting relaxed and cool might not be enough any longer, especially with that smirk. Americans might figure that if they’re fated to swim in the deep waters of the global economy, their president should be, too. And swimming there is not something you can fake with the help of lifeguard advisers. Imagine the CEO of your company not knowing who runs the second largest company in his industry. That’s what it looked like when Bush didn’t know who runs the second largest country in the world, India (which will pass China soon and become the world’s most populous nation). Luckily for Bush, the voters haven’t tuned in yet. Unluckily for him, when they do, a gentleman’s C might not cut it.

In its own crude way, every campaign season erects a set of threshold challenges for the candidates. For Al Gore, it’s finding the elusive balance between loyalty and independence. For Bill Bradley, it’s conveying that he’s imaginative and tough enough for the campaign. For George W., it’s showing that he’s ready for the presidency.

No one’s ever fully prepared for the inherent unpredictability of the office. But on the campaign trail it may be easier for John McCain to prove that he doesn’t have a temper than for George Bush to prove that he does have the brainpower to master the job. It’s ironic: Bush has been at the forefront of commendable efforts to enact rigorous new educational standards for students. Now the governor himself will be tested repeatedly by the press on his knowledge of foreign policy. If he fails, there will be no social promotion.

Bush wouldn’t have to worry so much about performance if he had a compelling life story to give him gravitas. Unfortunately for him, he’s had the least eventful personal history of any major political figure in modern memory. Until his 1994 election as governor of Texas, Dubya lived deep in his father’s shadow. President Bush was an academic and athletic star at Andover and Yale, a war hero and successful oilman. George W. was an academic slacker at the same schools, a mediocre athlete, a member of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War and an unsuccessful oilman. Before politics, he was probably best known for the nicknames he attached to people—a hipper and more sarcastic version of the “Saturday Night Live” character who gives everyone he meets a name while “makin’ copies.”

Of course, that kind of detail is missing from “A Charge to Keep,” the ghostwritten campaign autobiography released this week. At first Bush resisted doing this book because he knew he hadn’t lived a full enough life yet. He should have stuck with his gut. Unlike McCain’s book on his family and years as a POW, Gore’s on the environment or Bradley’s on his Senate years, there’s little insight into the person beneath the press release, and almost nothing new. The biographical material is canned, the political vision skeletal (his foreign policy: “tough realism”). Bush is passionate about reading—other people’s reading, that is. The commitment to education seems genuine and innovative, but his own intellectual curiosity is faint.

You can’t fake that, either. No one expects George W. to be, as his father’s slogan once had it, “Ready from day one to be a great president.” The learning curve will be steep for anyone. But the part of Bill Clinton that voters are reacting against is not his brain. They’ve learned to respect that, and even expect it. The turn of the century is a complex and confusing time—a time to examine the candidates’ memory and search engines, as well as their hearts.