GEORGE W. Bush finds himself in a bit of a bind — not much of one, but a bind nonetheless — when it comes to Al Gore’s challenge for continuous debates between now and November.

His refusal to agree to Gore’s terms is both wise and prudent. It’s wise because too many debates would turn the presidential contest into one long episode of “Crossfire,” casting it as a squabble between two spin-doctors rather than a really substantive airing of partisan and ideological differences. And it’s prudent because unless and until Bush can master the debating form, he risks calamity by going into the ring with the unscrupulous but effective Gore.

Unfortunately, by ducking the debate proposal, Bush has given people the sense that he is frightened of an open and no-holds-barred exchange. That diminishes him as a candidate. But there is a way to answer Gore and go him one better, and that’s to take a leaf out of the old Ross Perot playbook.

Bush should, in April and May, buy television time on the networks to deliver 30-minute speeches on matters of policy — defense, foreign policy, education, welfare reform, taxes and Social Security. Delivered without an audience, in a setting that subtly suggests the Oval Office, these speeches will help answer Gore’s attack on his supposed lack of fitness.

Given that Bush’s campaign is, in every particular, more substantive and nuanced than Gore’s, the Texan would force Gore to put up and shut up — to stop mouthing nonsense platitudes and start speaking about what Naomi Wolf’s favorite Alpha Male might actually do as president.

The Bush speeches would give a hungry press something new and exciting to write about in a fallow time. Most important, they’d highlight his greatest strength as a candidate rather than accentuate his primary weakness — his difficulty in improvising before TV cameras.

Since he announced his presidential candidacy last year, Bush has excelled not only in political organization, but in the depth and seriousness of his campaign proposals on areas of profound concern to the American people. He doesn’t just mouth platitudes about education, but has developed a remarkably detailed plan for reforming the way Washington and the states can work together to raise standards.

He explained his ideas in a fine speech here in October. A version of it broadcast on NBC — with charts and graphics and bells and whistles — would put such subjects as Title I reform and school choice at the center of the presidential contest. And he can challenge Gore’s systematic refusal even to consider changing our unacceptable education system — and his kowtowing to the special interests who profit from the system’s failure.

On defense matters, Bush clearly has the upper hand, especially with trouble brewing between China and Taiwan that the Clinton administration has a unique difficulty dealing with — considering the fact that it’s in hock to the Chinese military for campaign contributions. Bush has said he wants to move away from a notion of China as a “partner” to a view of that country as a “competitor” — surely the right attitude at a time when it is menacing the smaller, freer, better island nation off its coast.

And Bush’s commitment to strengthen our armed forces and to work hard to deploy missile defenses against rogue states like North Korea are also hard to argue with.

But all of these matters, and Bush’s tax cut, are best discussed at some length, not in soundbites or defensive ripostes to Democratic attacks. That is why prime-time speeches, which would cost the campaign something like $2 million each, would be well worth the money. They would introduce a much-needed element of seriousness into the campaign. They would allow Bush to grow in the eyes of the American people, including the undecided and independent voters who would get a chance to see he’s not the Christian-right ogre of caricature. And they would be the talk of all pundit-dom for weeks.

He would need to work on his delivery a bit, to make it more fluid. And with powerful and ringing rhetoric supplied him by his talented speech-writing team of Mark Gerson, Matthew Scully and John McConnell, Bush can put to rest forever the ludicrous canard that he is a lightweight. But to retire that canard, he has to stop acting like a lightweight and start behaving like a president.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com