By David S. Broder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 7, 1999; Page A06

PHOENIX, Dec. 6—Five other Republican presidential contenders invaded the home turf of Arizona Sen. John McCain tonight for their second nationally televised debate in 96 hours.

With McCain participating by satellite from a studio in Boston, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, publisher Steve Forbes, conservative activist Gary Bauer and talk show host Alan Keyes shared the stage in a downtown theater for the hour-long event, cosponsored by the Arizona Republican Party and CNN.

The debate gave the others a chance to showcase their messages in the state whose Feb. 22 voting--it shares the date with Michigan--could pose a serious challenge to the McCain candidacy, which has caught fire in New Hampshire, the site of the first primary on Feb. 1. Recent polls here show the home-state senator with a slight lead over Bush. Forbes, who won the Arizona primary in 1996 over Robert J. Dole and Patrick J. Buchanan, was a distant third in the polls, with the others still farther behind.

But McCain has seen the state's top Republican, Gov. Jane Hull, throw her support behind Bush. Both Bush and Forbes have active campaign organizations here--refusing, at least so far, to concede Arizona to McCain.

Tonight's encounter was actually the second GOP candidates' debate in this city. On Nov. 21, McCain, Forbes, Hatch and Keyes met on the campus of Arizona State University. Bush skipped that debate because he had promised that his first such appearance would come in New Hampshire, and Bauer also was absent.

Bush said after arriving in Phoenix that he expected to be a target. "I imagine so long as the polls look pretty good they'll be aiming at me, but that's okay, that's part of the political process," he said.

It was Bush who suggested the date for this encounter--much to the annoyance of the McCain camp. The Arizona senator had scheduled a full day of defense-oriented speeches in New Hampshire and New York for Tuesday's anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day. He declined to shift his schedule to be here in person--a decision some local Republicans said he might come to regret.

McCain did not wait until tonight's debate to make news. Campaigning in New Hampshire this morning, he said he would shut down the federal government if necessary to curb pork barrel spending. "If we don't change business as usual in Washington, people will be deprived of their representation," he told a town hall meeting.

The debates will come thick and fast in the next six weeks, as forums in Iowa--site of the Jan. 24 caucuses--and New Hampshire dominate the candidates' schedules.

The six contenders met for the first time in Manchester, N.H., last Thursday evening for a 90-minute forum. The format of that session had the candidates alternating in answering questions but did not permit much in the way of direct give-and-take among them. By contrast, the last half of tonight's hour was set aside for them to ask questions of one another.

Despite the restrictions of last week's format, Bush and Forbes had a sharp exchange over Social Security. Forbes had just begun running an ad accusing Bush of "betrayal" of senior citizens by his refusal to rule out the possibility of a future change in the eligibility age for Social Security. Current law calls for a phase-in of raising it from 65 to 67, and Bush said in an earlier interview that he hoped to avoid any further increase but could not absolutely guarantee it would not be advanced again.

In Manchester, Bush produced an article Forbes had written for Forbes magazine in 1977, in which the publisher said exactly that kind of change might be needed. Forbes said the "emergency" that prompted his musings then no longer exists. And after the debate, he implicitly raised questions about Bush's personal history by telling reporters that "when I was young and foolish," he speculated about Social Security's future, adding that the public did not know what Bush was doing at that time of life.

By using the language Bush himself has employed to describe his younger days--"When I was young and foolish, I did foolish things"--Forbes appeared to be alluding to Bush's acknowledged heavy drinking in those years and to rumors, without substantiation, of drug use. But when questioned, Forbes said he had no such intent and apologized for any such impression.

By contrast, McCain and Bush went out of their way to praise each other during the Manchester session, with McCain lauding Bush's appeal to other GOP leaders and Bush describing the senator as "a good man."

However, their personal cordiality has done little to temper the competition in Arizona, where McCain loyalists have criticized the governor and other GOP leaders supporting Bush, while several of those figures have said that McCain has antagonized them by the tactics he and his staff have used in past intraparty fights.