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The morning after the last GOP convention to propel that party to defeat - Dole-Kemp, San Diego, '96 - I ran into Eddie Mahe, an old-hand Republican consultant, after a talk he gave Elon students interning at the convention.

Rumpled, bleary-eyed, he'd been up to the wee hours in a Marriott suite, talking long-term game plans with party insiders. Plans for how to salvage November? I asked naively.

"Not this election. We're already looking at 2000," he said dismissively, then threw out the name of the early favorite, a name that left me momentarily confused: George Bush?

"George W. Bush," he corrected impatiently, underlining the middle initial. "The governor of Texas."

It would take a few years for that back-room soothsaying to sink in - with the same sense of chilling inevitability that pervades "W.," the Oliver Stone movie that opened Friday.

Unlike Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," the devastating indictment that preceded the last presidential election, "W." is more to Bush what "Primary Colors" was to Bill Clinton. It's a comedy of manners (especially table manners) and a tragedy of character flaws from which you come away feeling not amused, but ... well, subdued. Sad, actually.

Granted, Josh Brolin's dead-on W. is given plenty of pretzel-choking, grammar-mangling pratfalls, but make no mistake. This is no "Saturday Night Live" skit.

"W." is Stone's backstage pass to a drama played out on the ultimate stage of history, destiny, dynasty. And that third element is the key for Stone ("Platoon," "JFK," "Nixon") and screenwriter Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote Stone's "Wall Street."

Charting W.'s journey from Yale frat boy to born-again governor to first-term president with an 80 percent post-Sept. 11 approval rating, the film has one constant: W.'s desire to measure up to "41," the emotionally distant father who preceded him in the Oval Office and clearly favored Jeb to carry on the family name.

"No matter what I do," the script has W. confide to Laura (Elizabeth Banks), "it's never gonna be enough."

As detractors are likely to point out, the overarching plot in "W." is familiar ground for Stone. The inner circle run-up to the Iraq War is spurred by ego-driven advisers hungry for empire and oil. And in this case, the military-industrial complex has a name.

Dick Cheney is as arch and shrewd as Iago in the hands of Richard Dreyfuss, who, having already played a Karl Rove type ("Silver City"), need only play Donald Rumsfeld to complete the trilogy.

What actor wouldn't want to? In defense of Stone and company, there's a reason art imitates life and life imitates art.

Just because something is an archetype doesn't mean it isn't true.

Same with a Smothers Brothers joke: "Mom always liked you best."

The funny part is, George W. Bush gets more sympathy from a supposed knee-jerk liberal like Stone than he does from his own party. Once, the back-room kingmakers all lined up behind him, and he rode so high in his first term that every Chevy Suburban seemed to roll off the assembly line with a "W" decal stuck to the back window.

By the time the GOP nominated John McCain, the sitting president wasn't even welcome at his own party's convention and was left praying for a hurricane to save face.

It's food for thought, not just about what potential leaders will do with power, but why they want it in the first place and what they will do to get it. Stone, at least, goes beyond reducing an unpopular president to an effigy or, maybe worse, a skit on "SNL."

The most excruciating part of "W.," other than the scenes of Bush visiting wounded soldiers, comes at a news conference when a reporter asks how history will remember him.

"W.," at least, tries to give him some kind of due: the burden of a war that doesn't end neatly and of being the wrong Bush at the wrong time.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com