Bush Could Win, But He's Not Trying Too Hard; Hillary's Feminine Wiles; RAT Patrol

Unfortunately for Dubya's camp, he seems to be making that effort. Bush insists on running the election on Al Gore's issues?which is Electoral Mistake No. 1. If you attack someone for stuff he's proud of, he gets to talk about it twice as much. Bush set the tone for this wrongheaded strategy when, in the only false note of his Republican convention speech, he accused the President and Vice President of "squandering" the last eight years of prosperity. (To which a Democrat could reasonably have replied, "Well, what did your father do? Take full advantage of his recession?")

Last week, Bush traveled to Washington state to attack Gore for letting our national parks system go to rack and ruin. Bush offered to spend a fresh $3.75 billion on national parks himself. "For eight years," he intoned, "this administration has talked of environmentalism while our national parks are crumbling." Well, that happens not to be true. Clinton and Gore have added the equivalent of a Northeastern state's acreage to the park system. Bush, meanwhile, presided over the 49th-best state park system in the country. It's a mistake for Bush to stipulate that (1) our beauty spots are in deep trouble and (2) the solution is to shower money on them. Al Gore would love to start one of the debates by saying, "You seem to want to talk about parks!"

Bush has a strange, magnanimous urge to pay for his opponent's campaign advertising. There was the story last week that Bush is planning to claim that Clinton and Gore are not doing enough to bring down high gas prices. But the pollster Ed Sarpolus found that Americans have a pretty clear feeling about who's to blame for petrol at one-eighty-nine-nine. It's a hierarchy: first OPEC, then "big oil" and finally the Clinton administration. Big oil?out of which Bush and Cheney both made their fortunes?has been very good to the American economy over the past decade. But it's in bad odor now, and this is a debate the Gore camp would love to have.

Finally, when Gore and Lieberman used to their own demagogic ends the FTC's report on Hollywood's advertising of R-rated movies to teens, the Bush camp tried to echo them, and wound up with the only losing corner of the whole (phony) issue. The trumped-up FTC report follows an old pattern of progressive attempts at prohibition: Don't attack the product (which most everybody likes), attack the money-men (whom nobody knows). Prohibitionists claimed they didn't dislike liquor (the National Consolation) and would never dream of banning it?it was just those conniving "liquor trusts" (which didn't exist). Today's smoking prohibitionists claim they're not against cigarettes (which console a third of Americans)?only the "merchants of death" (as if the dangers of cigarettes were occult wisdom known only to a dozen Philip Morris board members).

Not that Gore and Lieberman would (or should) lift a finger against Hollywood in office. Last Thursday, the pair went directly from the hearing rooms and hustings to a New York fundraiser held by Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein, who makes several of the movies that the Democrats are so upset to see advertised. So Lynne Cheney and other Republicans were on solid ground in claiming hypocrisy. But then Mrs. Cheney took the ultra view that it wasn't just the way the movies were promoted that was bad, but the movies themselves. That reverses the political wisdom gathered over decades of puritanical meddling. Democrats attack rapacious businessmen preying on "our children"; the Republicans attack the most treasured cultural products in the world. I'm not thrilled at the way cinema has squeezed out other art forms, but billions of people worldwide sure are, and the movies are?in their combined cultural and economic might?America's greatest industry. For an American hack to run against American movies is like an Italian politician running against Italian cuisine, or a French politician proclaiming "Our wine sucks." For all Republicans' invocations of Reagan as a latter-day "Happy Warrior," this is a grumpy approach Reagan would never have countenanced. It leaves Republicans with the slight disadvantage they seem able to wring out of any issue.

Certain tone-deaf Democrats are falling into the same trap. In Missouri's Senate race, probably the most vituperative in the country this year, the Christian-conservative Republican incumbent John Ashcroft attacked his rival, Gov. Mel Carnahan, for taking money from Christie Hefner of Playboy. An indignant Carnahan aide shot back that that was nuthin', since Ashcroft had taken money "from the Motion Picture Association of America." Oh, yes, the Motion Picture Association of America, the NAMBLA de nos jours!

Fell Lazio Maybe feminism hasn't triumphed, after all. There was a consensus in the days following the Buffalo debate that Rick Lazio, firing off lines like, "You of all people shouldn't try to make guilt by association," had been way more aggressive than expected against Hillary, "despite Hillary's gender," as Geraldo Rivera put it. Of course, by feminist logic, Lazio should have taken no account of her gender. Maybe he's the feminist in this race. Because what was even more striking than Lazio's manly mannishness was that Hillary, when her back was to the wall, fell back on what used to be called "feminine wiles." Tim Russert asked her if she hadn't misled the country in blaming a vast, right-wing conspiracy for the allegations that her husband had been involved with Monica Lewinsky. Did she "hit back at him"? Did she "give him what for"? Did she "look him straight in the eye"? No. She gave a wounded look as if she were swallowing a sob, and replied, "That was a very, very painful time for me, for my family and for our country. I've tried to be as forthcoming as I could, given the circumstances that I faced." In other words, I'm too emotional?not to mention flighty?to answer that question, and you would have to be a real cad to ask me a follow-up.

But let's not let Lazio off the hook. There's a nonfeminist reading of what he was trying to do by pumping up the volume. A certain brass-tacks school of thought?in both parties?holds that woman candidates have to guard their womanliness to win. When they engage like men, they lose. A male candidate who raises his voice and points his finger is "fighting for his constituents." A female candidate who does the same is "strident," "shrill," "abrasive." So Hillary's pouting self-effacement may be strategic rather than natural.

Or it may just be the prissy, sissy, pussyfooting thin-skinnedness that all candidates are showing on the trail this year?along with their journalistic sycophants. Tim Noah pointed out in Slate a few weeks ago that The New York Times' Adam Clymer was surely "pompous and insincere" when he mewed about how "disappointed" he was to hear George W. Bush referring to him as a "major-league asshole." Most journalists would be delighted to have such a moment in the sun, and a few might not like to be spoken ill of on principle. So "thrilled" is likely and "angered" is plausible, Noah thinks. But there's not a journalist on Earth who'd be "disappointed" to see his coverage singled out by the candidate he's covering.

RAT Patrol That's why Al Gore's statement following the Democrat-stoked non-scandal scandal over RATS is equally pompous and insincere. "I find it a very disappointing development," Gore said, when The New York Times reported that the letters RATS?which visibly take up center-screen as the word BUREAUCRATS swims back from the viewer in one of Bush's attack ads?constitute subliminal advertising. I downloaded the ad and have now watched it 15 times. You can see the word moving, read it with the naked eye. It's there, but there's nothing subliminal about it, and it does seem an accident that the words are in the middle of the page. After all, the same effect is visible?again, visible: you don't have to stop the player to see it?with the letters W IT earlier in the ad. What exactly is so disappointing to Gore? That the most powerful newspaper in the country is so deep in the tank for him that it will publish a story that none of the editors and reporters who've seen the ad can possibly believe is true? Is it that his rival had to spend the day fending off embarrassment and wound up sounding like an illiterate when he couldn't pronounce the word "subliminal"? Or is it that the Bush camp, fearing a backlash, had to pull prematurely what it thought was one of its most successful ads?

Disappointed's an understatement. Gore must have been just crushed.

The same business is going on in Minnesota. Multigazillionaire Democrat Mark Dayton won his senatorial primary last week, and now gets to run against Rod Grams, one of the lamest Republican candidates. (So lame, in fact, that he even suggested as a campaign slogan, "Smell what 'The Rod' is cookin'." No joke.)

Grams last week began referring to Dayton as "Mark Liberal." Well, Dayton is liberal. And since most Minnesotans are, too, you think he'd wear it as a badge of pride. But instead he pouts: "I don't think that's the caliber of campaign Minnesotans deserve. I'm disappointed that he's off to that kind of start."

Then Florida's floundering Republican senatorial candidate Bill McCollum, a gun control foe, took issue with ads his opponent Bill Nelson was running. Those ads describe McCollum as a gun control foe. You'd think McCollum would take that as a cue to say why gun control was a bad thing. Nope. He took it as a cue to say how badly his feelings were hurt. He lashed out at Nelson in a debate last week, saying: "You should be ashamed. I again call on you to take those ads down, apologize to the people and return that soft money you took."

Times Change When I first moved to Washington, the Post was a more liberal paper than it is now, and The Washington Times was an indispensable corrective. What's more, lavishly subsidized by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, the Times actually broke news and scooped the Post regularly. (Such late-night events as the invasion of Panama made it onto the front page of the Times' early editions, but not the Post's.) Now the Post has the most varied editorial page in the country, and the Times, underfunded by the Moonies, has resigned itself to serving Washington's military ghetto. It must sell half its copies at the Pentagon and Fort Meade and Andrews Air Force Base. But just how far the paper had fallen became clear only last Wednesday. That day, The New York Times led with: "Chase Is Reported on Verge of Deal to Obtain Morgan." The Post had: "Firestone Narrows Flaw Probe." The Washington Times, with its infallible news sense, bannered across all six page-one columns: "Sloppy Sailors Threaten Navy's Urinals."