Peggy Noonan

That sound you’ve been hearing, that wind softly rattling the window panes—that’s New York state’s three million registered Republicans breathing a sigh of relief. Rick Lazio’s got what it takes.

He won Wednesday’s debate. He not only won it, he won it by winning and not just by coming out even. He didn’t treat Hillary Clinton with kid gloves; he treated her like a pol who deserved a punch, and he swung. Crossing the stage with the agreement not to take soft money was masterly, reviving an old debating tactic—surprise your foe and don’t let go—and making every front page in the state. But most of all, Mr. Lazio engaged—he looked at her, talked to her, put the spotlight on her—and laughed.

All of it good stuff. But the most riveting moment, and the one that will be long remembered, was NBC’s Tim Russert’s use of videotape to confront Mrs. Clinton with her famous Matt Lauer “Today” Show interview when the Monica story broke. This was something new—I don’t remember ever seeing a debate moderator use taped clips of a candidate’s past interviews, and I’m surprised Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Lazio agreed to it, if they did.

Mrs. Clinton’s angry visage in that two-year-old tape, her bitter hardness, were fascinating to see after all this time. (So was the way her face has changed, which I don’t think was lost on anyone watching. It made you think of the old chameleon charge, “This woman will do anything and be anyone to win.”) And it is that—how she acted in the Lauer interview, the charges she made, and how she would now have to address her actions—that made Mrs. Clinton gulp, not the general subject matter, which she’s been handling smoothly for two years. But then she’s never once been pressed on her part in the Monica matter, or pressed for an apology for her statements.

She was very lucky in Mr. Russert’s choice of clips; he did not include the “vast right-wing conspiracy” but only referred to it later himself, and he did not include the most deadly quote from that interview, when Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Lauer: “When this is over some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.” Still, when Mrs. Clinton’s answered Mr. Russert, she floundered and lost her footing—”That was a very, a very painful time for me, for my family and for our country”—which was fascinating to see, because Mrs. Clinton is very smooth and doesn’t flounder. But she probably didn’t think anyone would ever play that old footage right in front of her and then insist on a response.

What a moment. Mrs. Clinton’s people are hopefully spreading the spin that Mr. Russert’s challenge will start a new round of sympathy for Hillary, who, they say, was a victim of that scandal. But one senses that people no longer view Mrs. Clinton as a sympathetic figure, that 18 months of seeing her operate as a hardball, hard-gut pol has diminished her ability to seem the victim.

*   *   *

Here is why I think the debate was important, even crucial. Mrs. Clinton had a strong voice and a steady gaze and she touched on all her issues and she looked attractive. But she was cold, and programmed, and when she tried to be tough and assertive she seemed sarcastic and Madame Nhu-ish. She did not lose any friends in the debate, but she didn’t make new ones. If you tuned it not liking her, you didn’t like her when it was over. She pleased her base. She didn’t didn’t move forward.

If you tuned in not liking Mr. Lazio, you may have changed your mind or begun to change your mind. He’s not sleazy or dark; he’s bright and winning. He was equal to his opponent, and maybe more than that. When he was tough with Mrs. Clinton he seemed not snarky but strong—”I agree that Mrs. Clinton has a record in education, and it was a disaster.” “I think that, frankly, what’s so troubling here with respect to what my opponent just said, is somehow that it only matters what you say when you get caught.” He seemed like a normal person, not like a programmed political windup doll. And though he still looked young, did you notice the hair in front that’s suddenly going gray? He wanted you to, I think. He combed his hair in front in a way that seemed to accentuate the grayness. (He’ll be on the stump upstate today saying things like, “Yeah, my first gray hairs—I’m calling each of ‘em Hillary.”)

He made new friends and showed doubters he was big enough to take Mrs. Clinton, which is half of what he has to do in the campaign.

Both candidates, stuck at about 45% in the polls, needed new friends. I think he got them and she didn’t.

But the other half of what Mr. Lazio has to do in the campaign—prove he’s big enough to hold the Moynihan seat, prove to New Yorkers that he has sufficient heft to be their senator—really remains to be done.

*   *   *

Mr. Lazio must more forcefully communicate his brand of compassionate conservatism, which he speaks of with engagement and feeling in private and inadequately on the stump and in commercials. I have had one private conversation with him, and he told me that he is a Republican who wants to help with the “rungs.” He said it is a legitimate function of government to help new immigrants and people in crisis to grab a few rungs on the ladder and pull themselves up and out. But he didn’t believe in the old-fashioned ways of doing this, the old tax-and-spend bloated government ways; there are other approaches that are both more effective and more constructive. It was really interesting what he said, and he ought to share it on the stump.

He also flattered me by saying—I didn’t take notes, so I quote from memory: “I have a big question that’s been on my mind and if you have any thoughts I’d like to hear.” I said sure. He said, “How do I on the one hand maintain the right level of combativeness toward an opponent and at the same time effectively communicate how the new Republicans think and what we believe? How do I break through on my philosophy?” I didn’t know what to say, because I was so surprised. I have heard politicians ask questions in private about the big thing that’s on their mind, and it’s always fund-raising or how do I get the teachers union or if I do this will the press say that. It’s never about meaning or philosophy.

I told Mr. Lazio this, and he started to laugh but continued to press: How to make his beliefs clear, how to show what new Republicans, the young Republicans, believe in? I said I guess he just has to start talking about it.

He was refreshing. Yet while I don’t see him much on the stump, it’s not my impression that he’s breaking through in this area as he should.

*   *   *

There will be another debate. A chastened Hillary will fight back hard. Next time she’ll have her own version of crossing the stage with a soft-money agreement, she’ll have her own version of Happy Warrior. Her aides are focus-grouping the debate right now, and they’ll be giving her lines and advice to counter what didn’t work this time.

It will continue to be close. It ain’t over until the first lady sings. But I will be surprised if Mr. Lazio doesn’t get a boost in the polls from Wednesday’s performance. And if he uses that boost to make it a stronger, deeper campaign it could mean everything.

*   *   *

Wednesday’s debate was the best in New York since the Lewis Lehrman-Mario Cuomo debate of 1982. That meeting was wonderful, in part because it served the public by focusing on meaning. Messrs. Lehrman and Cuomo spoke of the big things—the proper role of government, what it should expect of us and do for, and to, us. The Clinton-Lazio debate showed us two people, to the advantage of one and the disadvantage of the other. It was revealing in part because there was a moderator who pressed each candidate to reveal and respond and answer. But neither candidate really dealt enough with belief—she, one suspects, because she knows her true beliefs would not be attractive to a lot of voters, and he I think because he falls into the unconscious defensive crouch of Republicans in New York. They are a minority group; they fear being misunderstood; better just to smile. But they can’t, or rather their leaders can’t.

New Yorkers were well served in this first Senate debate. They got a sharp sense of who was at issue; next time, one hopes, they’ll get a sharp sense of what is at issue.

Memo to: Hillary Clinton, Rick Lazio
From: Lee Atwater
Re: Tonight’s debate

OK, listen up. Where I am you don’t root for Reps or Dems, you root for the truth and hope for a show. With you two I’m still waiting on both. This whole campaign you’ve been waging has been kind of . . . demure! Kind of “Who’s the nicest girl at Wellesley?”

Now you got to mix it up. The contest you’re in is so close, such a tossup, that it could actually be settled by what happens tonight in the ring.

That’s how I see you, as fighters. That’s what all good pols are, ultimately. Right now, Hillary, you’re on your stool in your corner and Harold’s whispering in your ear and Mandy’s adjusting your mouthpiece. Rick, you’re over there nodding to Murphy and moving your head left and right to unkink your neck, as fighters do.

OK. Here’s my last-minute advice before the bell.

You walk out there and you’re both so pumped with adrenaline, excitement and fear that your hands are shaking. Hillary, you walk over to Rick as soon as you get on the stage. Laughingly, real friendly, put out your hand and maybe try to kiss him, to show you’re warm and he’s a wuss.

Rick, don’t let her walk to you. You walk over to her instead, like a man. Don’t give her the big-tan smile, give her a small smile and a nod. Then pivot to the audience and wave to them with the big smile.

Go back to your podiums. Rick, if you wear reading glasses put ‘em on now, and look at your notes. Hillary, if you wear reading glasses, don’t.

*   *   *

It begins: “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”

All right, psychology. Rick, in your head she’s a tank. Fine. But her steering’s busted and she’s running out of gas, so don’t worry about her. Hillary, you’re not exactly nervous when you think of him. One of the great things about the Clintons is they never run against anyone they respect, because the minute someone becomes an opponent of the Clintons the Clintons understand he’s a bad person, an idiot. When it comes to Lazio—let’s face it—you think you’ve scraped more interesting things off your shoe. Fine.

Strategy. Rick, pols do what they know how to do. Hillary will fight and aggress. You’re still one of those white guys tying himself in knots on how tough to be when you’re debating a woman. Forget that, it’s not a question. No one thinks Hillary Clinton’s a woman, they think she’s a phenomenon, like the weather. Treat her like you’d treat a guy.

She’s smart. She’s going to take the issues on which she is most vulnerable—trustworthiness, etc.—and flip ‘em, pretend that they are the areas in which you are most vulnerable. She always does this, because it clouds things up and makes them confusing.

She’s going to accuse you of having a weak record, of being untrustworthy, of being a hypocrite. She’ll start out strong and say that in comparison with you she has a 30-year record of achievement in education and in other things.

Fine. Let her come out and land a few. That will establish that she is the aggressor. Then you get on the balls of your feet and unleash a serious critique of all that she is and represents. She says she has a record in health care, you say she tried to take away the right of patients to choose their own doctor and to decide their own treatment. She says she can work with the big boys in Washington, you say: “Your own party wouldn’t work with you in the House and the Senate.”

This is important, Rick: Look at her, and engage. Normally I tell debaters not to talk to the opponent but to talk to the camera, to the viewers. But in your case, look at her. Put out your arm and point sometimes. Don’t forget the camera, turn to it and play to it occasionally, but engage her. It’ll unnerve her a little.

And don’t always be smiling. Look serious, because this is serious business—you’re gonna save the people of New York from more high tax, high spend, high promise, high disappointment.

Lately, Hillary’s taken to talking about “what we do with our surplus.” But it isn’t her surplus, and it isn’t a surplus. It’s billions in overpaid taxes yanked out of the pockets of the people of Buffalo and Amityville. Challenge her: Why can’t the people have their money back? Why should they believe she and her friends will spend it better than they will?

Another thing. Hillary is completely used to talking in one-minute and two-minute speeches. She does this because she has spent the past eight years being the First Lady and not being interrupted. And before that it was 12 years as the governor’s wife.

So interrupt her, press her, knock her off her stride. Do it politely, but persistently. “Oh, Mrs. Clinton, that is only rhetoric. The truth is—.” She may well reveal the imperious temper that rattles her staff. It ain’t a pretty sight. Help her show it.

*   *   *

Hillary, you have to be careful. But you can win this. Rick Lazio has that fatal politeness, that disheartening good cheer. He’s one of the Love Republicans. They’re just so happy and eager they could burst. You go wipe the smile off his face.

Go in hard, right away, and destabilize him. Remember, no one thinks you’re a woman, they think you’re a toughie. Fine, be tough. Tough, but pretty. ‘Cause in a funny way, the prettier you look, the more competent you look.

People aren’t sure Lazio has enough heft to fill the Moynihan seat. One of his problems: Like most Republicans, he is palpably bored by the complexities of public policy and legislation. But Democrats—position papers are their pornography.

Dazzle and impress people with your grasp of the arcana of public policy. When he says, “We have to cut taxes,” you just smile and shake your head and assure him you want to cut taxes as much as the next guy but it has to be done in a way that helps working families and not the rich. Then say we have to protect the Kilicott Amendment within subclause 746 of the IRS Code as amended in 1982 by Ronald Reagan. I just made that up. But it sounds real. You can make one up, too. Rick’ll get that earnest look and try to puzzle it out and by the time he catches up you’ll be on a woman’s right to choose. He’ll be so confused he’ll stutter. People who stutter in debates don’t have heft.

You know that he’ll try to hit you with what his people and your people know are your weak points. A public perception that you’re dishonest, a user, too clever by half. But I like the way you’re going to turn it on him—that he’s untrustworthy on campaign funding, untrustworthy in his support of abortion, a maneuverer who got along with Newt Gingrich. You charge first. Then he has to say, “I know you are but what am I?” like a kid.

Look beautiful and smiling. The bright colors, that pastel-sweater-thrown-over-the-jacket thing you’re doing, it’s good. It heightens and warms your color. A solid hour for makeup—the eyes, the eyes. Smile a lot—a smile is your best friend, makes you look not fierce but friendly.

Hillary, you need humor. Rick, you need wit. Both of you should walk in with three good jokes or three good lines. Hillary, two of yours should be self-deprecating. Try to have a line about Lazio so good that it makes even him laugh. An opponent laughing is half taken.

Hillary, watch your voice. I saw you with Charlie Gibson on “Good Morning America” yesterday and believe me, the uninflected suburban school-board drone is wearing thin. Try to use your voice in a way that has more . . . woman in it. Don’t mean to be sexist but you sound preachy: “The Wellesley class of ‘68 tells us how to floss.” Don’t be patronizing. A little humility wouldn’t hurt.

If he gets on the scandals don’t look stricken, just shake your head sadly. “This isn’t about the past, it’s about the future.” “He can try to drag us down into this whole world of unproven allegations, and if that’s how he wants to spend his time then I think that’s just sad. I will spend my time trying to improve life for New Yorkers who aren’t as lucky as Rick Lazio, or me for that matter.”

*   *   *

Remember to thank Tim, and all the network news shows hooked in. Thank the people for their time and attention. It’s homework for them, remember. They do it because they want to be good citizens.

You be good citizens, too. Talk about the meaning of this election, and what’s really at issue.

Hillary, if you win this debate you probably win the election and reach straight for the presidency. Rick, if you win this one you stop Clinton II in its tracks, you win a moderate presence from New York in the U.S. Senate, and you settle down to being great, which is what you want on your tombstone. “New York’s Great Senator.”

That’s big, on both sides, for both of you.

Make it sound as big as it is.

Has George W. Bush bottomed out, and is he starting to come back? There is reason to think so, and not only because every newspaper in America has “Bush Done For—GOP Panics” stories on the front page which, considering your usual journalistic time lag, suggests his comeback is well under way. Mr. Bush’s campaign this week took on an urgency, with substantive proposals on Medicare and education, and an aggressive look at Al Gore’s programs. And the debate debate, which looked flaky at first, seems to deserve greater scrutiny, and bears the potential for dividends.

I think this because I’ve been reading transcripts of “Meet the Press.”

*   *   *

Mr. Bush agreed to debate Mr. Gore in a prime-time version of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” hosted by Tim Russert, because he had to make a virtue of necessity. Mr. Gore is a gifted debater—disciplined, seasoned by four national political cycles, possessed of a killer’s instincts. Mr. Bush is not a great debater. He hasn’t even shown himself to be a good debater. In the primary debates he looked like he was sliding down in his chair so teacher wouldn’t notice him. And when he tried to speak candidly, saying for instance that Jesus was his favorite philosopher, he couldn’t explain why except to assert that Christ had changed his heart, which seemed both believable and inadequate.

So Mr. Bush is bad at debate and Mr. Gore is good, but the latter has reason to fear a grilling from a persistent questioner and the former doesn’t. Mr. Gore wants to debate but not to be interviewed, and Mr. Bush wants to be interviewed but not to debate. The brilliant answer: have a “debate” in which Mr. Russert, who has his own killer instincts, asks questions. That way Mr. Gore, who has the talent to dominate, will not be allowed to. It won’t be Big Al versus the Shrub. It would be a moderator with two equals.

Mr. Gore had clearly agreed to this format and venue. In an interview with Mr. Russert on July 16, he even pushed for the CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC, to get Mr. Bush to agree:

Mr. Gore: I’ve accepted for two or three months now your invitation to debate on this program. Have you gotten a yes from Gov. Bush yet?

Mr. Russert: His campaign says he will debate you, and the request is under active consideration . . .

Mr. Gore: “Well, how are you going to persuade him to say yes, Tim?”

Mr. Russert: “Well, maybe you’re helping today.”

Mr. Gore: “Well, do you think so? But what kind of approach—can you get Jack Welch involved?”

But when Mr. Bush accepted the debate this week, Mr. Gore suddenly refused to take part. The media are letting him get away with it for several reasons, including (a) the other broadcast-network shows failed to get the debate and are not happy, and (b) the debate would be good for a competitor, and helping Tim Russert isn’t their job. It isn’t mine either, but getting both candidates in a setting in which they will reveal things about themselves, their history and their thinking is.

*   *   *

In the 40 years since John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon, presidential debates have declined as venues in which revelation and insight occur. They are now what was once said of flying—hours of boredom punctuated by a few seconds of sheer terror. (“Mr. President, are you saying that Poland is a free country?”) Modern debates consist of a 90-second sound bite in which one candidate asserts, followed by 60 seconds in which another rebuts, followed by 30 seconds of answer to the rebuttal. It is rote, ritualistic, unrevealing. It is perfectly suited to Al Gore, the human Conair 2000, who opens his mouth, flips the switch and blows, and who also wrote a college paper on how presidential news conferences can be handled through prefab sound bites.

But what has frozen and hardened in these debates could be broken up and made fluid again by the presence of a seasoned interviewer. Mr. Bush thinks Mr. Russert is tough but fair; Mr. Gore thinks Mr. Russert is—well, he thinks he’s the man who put him through this:

Mr. Russert: “I want to ask you a very simple question. Do you believe that life begins at conception?”

Mr. Gore: “No. I believe there is a difference. You know, I believe that the Roe v. Wade decision wisely embodies the kind of common-sense judgment that most Americans share.”

Mr. Russert then showed a letter Mr. Gore had written in 1987, in which he said he consistently opposed federal funding of abortions because government shouldn’t take part in “the taking of what is arguably a human life.” Mr. Gore answered that he had changed his mind on that “10, 15 years ago.”

Mr. Russert: “But you did vote to define a person as including an unborn child.” Mr. Gore said it was a “procedural vote.”

Mr. Russert: “When do you think life begins?”

Mr. Gore: “I favor the Roe v. Wade approach, but let me just say, Tim, I did—”

Mr. Russert: “Which is what? When does life begin?”

Mr. Gore did not answer, but referred instead to changing his position on federal funding of abortions. The interviewer pressed again.

Mr. Russert: “But you were calling fetuses innocent human life, and now you don’t believe life begins at conception. I’m just trying to find out, when do you believe life begins?”

Mr. Gore replied that Roe v. Wade “proposes an answer to that question.” Asked what it is, he replied that there is “a developmental process during which the burden kind of shifts over time.” He vowed to protect “a woman’s right to choose.” Then Mr. Russert changed approach.

Mr. Russert: “Should there be a restriction on minors getting abortions without parental consent?”

Mr. Gore: “Difficult question, because there are all kind of circumstances where you have some children kind of raising themselves in situations where their families are fracturedÝ.Ý.Ý.”

He added that the decision needs to “be worked out in the context of a woman’s right to choose.”

Mr. Russert: “But a child needs permission to have her ears pieced.”

Mr. Gore: “I understand.”

Mr. Russert: “You don’t want parental permission for an abortion.”

Mr. Gore said some proposals on this “have been a backdoor effort to eliminate a woman’s right to choose.” Mr. Russert asked why not support parental notification in which a judge could intervene in the kind of cases he refers to. Mr. Gore said, “Well, I’d want to look at that.” So Mr. Russert changed approach again.

Mr. Russert: “Right now there’s legislation which says that a woman on death row—if she’s pregnant, she should not be executed. Do you support that?”

Mr. Gore: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mr. Russert: “It’s a federal statute . . . that if a woman is pregnant and she’s on death row, she should not be executed.”

Mr. Gore: “Well, I don’t know what the circumstances would be in that situation. I would—you know, it’s an interesting fact situation. I’d want to think about it.”

It was stupendous, an hour of relentless and informed questioning on Social Security, the surplus, tax policy, and whether the Boy Scouts should be allowed to exclude gay members (Mr. Gore couldn’t say). It was the most revealing presidential interview since Roger Mudd met Ted Kennedy in 1980 and showed us Mr. Kennedy’s utter inability to make a case for his own candidacy.

*   *   *

Mr. Russert is becoming the first indispensable television journalist since Walter Cronkite. With his happy-killer mug, and his desire to bore in, he makes you think of what was said of Lenin: “He could exhaust you by listening.” (Idiotic but defensively necessary note: I worked for MSNBC, which is part of NBC, during the political conventions this year; I also did a half-hour interview with Mr. Russert when my book on Hillary Clinton came out, and emerged exhausted though not horrified.)

Mr. Gore has his reasons for not wanting to be subjected to another grilling; but the public might benefit greatly from it, as it would be what we want all such events to be: revealing.

Mr. Bush, at this point, should speak frankly of his underdog status in whatever debates finally occur. He should start making jokes about it, too, and making people laugh at the difference between his lack of gifts in that area and Mr. Gore’s abundance of them. He might even come right out and declare Gore the winner going in. Mr. Bush should also explain frankly how you can be both best candidate and worst debater, the right man with the right ideas and the lesser talent for asserting them.

Which brings us to the old empty-chair gambit. Mr. Bush says he’ll show up at the debate time with an empty chair, put it down on the sidewalk and offer to debate. Some joker has already answered, “Watch out, the chair will win!” That is one great line, but it begs for a comeback, and perhaps if Mr. Bush meets with the press for an hour or two that night and takes all questions, the comeback will be his.

We approach Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the American political season. Labor Day of course used to be a holiday with parades and picnics at which politicians celebrated the virtues of the working man who for once was getting a day off.

There are still parades, but Labor Day now is mostly a matter of the last day of summer vacation; Americans are at the beach or packing up the lake house or taking the kids to Target and Staples for school supplies. Most Americans this Monday will be preoccupied with coming or going, with planning the packing or navigating their way through traffic jams. But their cars have radios, and radios have news reports, and there’s no news on Labor Day but what politicians are charging and asserting, and so Labor Day is still Labor Day, and it still counts.

Politicians will have to try harder from here on in, and think smarter. Now they’re competing not with summer’s distractions but with autumn’s realities—school, and work, and the new TV season, which isn’t important everywhere but is in America. Also, they’re running out of time. Monday is Sept. 4; Election Day is Nov. 7. Sixty-four days. From now on there is no long-range planning in campaigns, just planning.

The two most fascinating and compelling races remain the presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore and the New York Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. The polls say both races are neck-and-neck, which may in fact be true.

Mr. Bush’s presidential bid continues in the Perils of Pauline tone that has marked it since the beginning. He is always the strong, probably unconquerable frontrunner being surprised by the unexpected strength of the opponent. In the winter he couldn’t be beaten—until he got beat, by John McCain in New Hampshire. Then he came back in South Carolina and couldn’t be beaten—until he got beat, by John McCain in Michigan. Then a good convention and a good speech and he couldn’t be beaten—until Mr. Gore bounced out of Los Angeles and beat him in the polls.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush always seems hurt, jarred when he falls. His syntax, normally frail, collapses; thick tongue sets in, “hostage” becomes “hostile,” thoughts collide. His father was like this; when pressed about the closeness of his friendship with president Reagan he tried to say they have “excellent discussions” and wound up saying, “We’ve had sex.” It is not the sound of dumb, it is the sound of quick thoughts crashing into each other and producing verbal accidents.

Still, the Democrats and many in the media have been in a new round of the attempted Quayle-ization of Gov. Bush, and to some degree it has taken hold. Part of it is inevitable: clips of candidates fumbling are irresistible, and fun to see; they brighten every news and chat show, and so are repeated. But part of it is the way Democrats have learned to operate in the Clinton era. Rush Limbaugh isn’t wrong, he’s a big fat idiot. The Democratic operative Paul Begala has a book called “Is Our Children Learning?” that offers not a serious case for Gore or against Bush, or even a passionate one, but that simply asserts that Mr. Bush is a dullard. Democrats have learned the past eight years that you don’t have to make a serious case for or against; all you have to do is change the focus of the argument and heighten it. (When I went on call-in shows to talk about my book “The Case Against Hillary Clinton,” none of her supporters ever made the case for Hillary; instead they would say, “Mary Bono didn’t deserve her husband’s congressional seat either.”)

And part of the attempt to Quayle-ize Bush is simply tradition, and in a way an understandable one. Dwight Eisenhower was spoofed by Eastern eggheads as barely coherent, Gerald Ford as a fumbling idiot, Ronald Reagan as retarded, George Bush pére as a ninny. Bright Democrats do this because they don’t really understand how Republicans think, or why they think what they think; their answer, by now a tradition, has become: Because they’re stupid.

Democrats and media folk have been equally quick and keen to laud the intelligence of Democratic presidents. Jimmy Carter was brilliant, a nuclear engineer, probably the highest-IQ president ever to live in the White House. Or that at least is what they were saying in 1976 and ‘79. The same is said of Bill Clinton today, in almost the same words—”He’s probably the most brilliant man we’ve ever had as president,” a close friend, a doctor and no fool, told me recently. I pointed out that it was therefore a real accomplishment that he has never, in eight years, said anything intellectually interesting. My friend the doctor blinked, and thought, and did not dissent. We did however agree that Clinton has said interesting things in depositions.

*   *   *

Anyway, I don’t think any of this matters much. Voters don’t expect Republicans to be intellectuals, don’t seem to admire intellectuals greatly, and seem to have the sense that an extremely high IQ can be an encumbrance in the presidency, as in many other great leadership positions. Intellectuals are always tying themselves in knots, missing the obvious, discovering new things to believe in. Presidents have to have good heads, good hearts, solid beliefs, courage; they can hire brilliance and cleverness.

The Dan Quayle problem isn’t Mr. Bush’s great challenge. He doesn’t have to prove his intelligence. He’s obviously bright, he has had two successful terms as governor. But he needs to show solidity. He needs to show that he’s got a strong and even keel, that he is serious about policy because it grows from philosophy that grows from experience.

Mr. Bush doesn’t talk enough about his philosophy. I don’t believe he ever has, in any extended way. Most conservatives and libertarians, for instance, believe in general that that government governs best that governs least. They also know why they think this. Assuming Mr, Bush thinks it, I’d certainly like to know why. Why is it better that your federal government not take more power from people? Should it give some back? How?

When you explain the predicate to the American people they listen, and understand; and they work your positions into the predicate for you, as long as the positions make sense.

That’s what they did with Ronald Reagan. They understood what his conservatism was, what it was about, where it came from. And so they could fit his tax cutting logically under his philosophical umbrella. Thus Mr. Reagan cohered.

I am not sure Mr. Bush coheres. I don’t think he does, fully.

Mr. Gore is getting at this when he presses Bush to be specific. The vice president is trying to say of the Texas governor, “There is no there there.” But Mr. Bush is specific, and comes followed by a paper trail of dense issue papers, as Mr. Gore well knows. What Mr. Bush isn’t is abstract and thought-filled. But Mr. Gore can’t challenge Bush to be more philosophical and thought-filled because .Ý.Ý. well, he might do it, which would help him beat Mr. Gore.

*   *   *

Mr. Gore is like Mr. Bush in that he seems affected, perhaps unduly, by what the press is saying, by whether or not he’s thought to be on a roll or in a dive. (Politicians are amazingly frail, or at least frail for tough guys. They really care what’s being said about them. You’d think by the time a man is running for president he’d be less impressed by what’s in Tuesday’s paper.) Right now Mr. Gore is on a roll, enjoying the Lieberman bounce, which sounds like a new dance. The vice president is, as Maureen Dowd points out, newly moussed, his hair thicker, his chest broad and his buns steely. He looks energetic and attractive, like a model in a boomer khaki catalogue, stepping forward as he looks at his wristwatch in a peaked-pecs pose.

I keep wondering why, since Al Gore first became vice president eight years ago, Tipper has made it a point to talk about how sexy he is, how virile. What have their focus groups been telling them that she has to keep telling people how hot he is? Haven’t we had enough of hot? One of the funniest moments of the political year was on David Letterman’s show the other night, when two of his stagehands read an “Oprah” transcript of Tipper telling Oprah how passionate Al is. The Clintons used to flaunt their passion in order to prove they have a marriage and not an arrangement. But why do the Gores do it?

Since I appear to be on a rant, why does Bill Clinton keep holding Chelsea’s hand and giving her little smiles? Did you see them in Africa? They even get off Air Force One now holding hands. Chelsea is a grown woman now, and it’s kind of creepy.

But to be fair, all this hand holding started at least as far back as the Reagans, who just liked to hold hands. Some political operative found out people liked it, so when George and Barbara Bush came in they had to do it too. It looked absurd. Every presidential couple has had to do it since. Could we just allow future presidents and their wives not to hold hands in public? Thank you.

*   *   *

Mr. Gore’s people say, and he himself said in his acceptance speech, that this election is not a personality contest. This has led some observers to state that Mr. Gore’s people know Mr. Bush’s personality is better. But Mr. Bush doesn’t have a glittering personality—he doesn’t dazzle us with his good humor or his homespun ways or his self-deprecating charm. I think when Mr. Gore talks about personality he really means character. And Mr. Bush’s character does seem to work for him—he seems transparently a good person, a genuine fellow who isn’t hidden or crafty or sneaky or mean, a person of appropriate modesty. He seems like a normal man, imperfect but normal, and rather nice.

Mr. Gore’s character, on the other hand, is a question mark. In part because of whom he’s been close to the past eight years and how well he fit in with them. In part because of the constant swirl of changes he’s shown us, both in terms of style (the alpha man) and of substance (where he stands on free trade, where he once stood on abortion). A man well into his 50s who changes so much seems odd. And not very solid.

I suppose some of the presidential campaign will come down to which candidate voters feel they can trust personally. And so I have been wondering which candidate would be most likely to lie to me. My impression of Mr. Bush is that he doesn’t lie because if he did he’d feel so guilty and so insecure in his ability to pull it off that his face would redden and his eyes shift and he’d break out in sweat. But Mr. Gore seems to me capable of telling a lie, of spinning just about any fiction, and with utmost conviction, too. This is a talent, but not a good one.

*   *   *

So where do I think the presidential race stands now, as Labor Day approaches?

I think where it stood last spring. Mr. Bush has to prove that he’s solid. People I know whom I trust with good reason have long told me he is. He has a record, which might illustrate his solidity. Maybe he ought to talk about it more. Maybe he should explain how Texas is a triumph, and not a squalid environmental disaster where barefoot children beg for pencils on the way to dilapidated schools. Maybe he could tell us how his philosophy yielded his positions, which have helped his state.

And Mr. Gore, I think, has to show he is good. That’s a tall order, too.

They both have a lot to prove to us. So I guess I think Labor Day really is the final beginning, the real kickoff.

Everyone seems to have something to say about “Survivor,” and I don’t see why I should be any different. It seems to me the popularity of the show rests on two things. The first obviously is that it’s kind of fun, or at least not without interest, to watch sandy people in shorts squabble, scheme and eat rats. The other is that viewers can’t resist making unconscious connections between what they’re seeing on the screen and what they’re doing in their lives.

I don’t mean to sound like Al Gore, but I believe the power of metaphor is alive here. I think the wild popularity of Wednesday night’s show is due in part to people seeing the attempts of the folks on the island to survive as crude expressions of their own attempts to succeed, to achieve lives of satisfaction and meaning. Some of us are tough and assertive, like Susan; some are cold and calculating, like Richard; some resourceful like Rudy or sweet and kind like Sonja or a bit of a mixture, like Kelly. We don’t want to harm anyone, we just want to win. Sometimes we find ourselves caught in the snares of others; sometimes we throw a snare or two ourselves. I think people rooted for the person most like them, or the person most like what they’d like to be.

Last night Susan gave the most memorable speech by an American so far in this political year. Her—I’m paraphrasing—Richard, you’re a snake, and Kelly, you’ve become a rat, and I think we should do as nature intended and let the snake eat the rat is already famous and was talked about in offices across America all morning today. But Richard’s speech—again paraphrasing—I did what I felt I had to do, and I hope you can respect that—and Kelly’s—I’m not proud of all of my actions here, but I was trying to do well while also doing right—were also solid, and memorable.

No one was trying to be eloquent. They were just trying to get their point across. They did. Some politicians could learn from this.

*   *   *

Since this column is called Hillary & Company, I think it’s time to discuss Mrs. Clinton. I have been thinking about her . . .

I have been thinking about a candidate for the U.S. Senate who was a nationally known figure, had never run for office before and was not in fact a native of the state in question. The candidate had been a central figure in a White House scandal and had garnered both a hard-core following of passionate supporters and an army of critics spurred to great effort by great loathing; they said the candidate was using the Senate run as a stepping stone to the presidency.

The candidate had a relatively weak opponent, one who already held state office but whose record was lackluster.

This candidate fought hard, with solid television commercials paid for in part by thousands of donors from outside the state who felt they had a stake in the election. Gales and torrents of money came in to help the candidate, gales and torrents of money sent in, too, to help the opponent. Everyone cared about this one.

The nation watched and waited; the Tuesday in November came. And when it was over, the candidate—Oliver North, a Republican—lost by 50,000 votes of two million cast to his opponent, the incumbent senator, Democrat Charles S. Robb of Virginia. (Final tally: Robb 46%, North 43%.)

*   *   *

Interesting, yes? The North-Robb parallels to Clinton-Lazio aren’t perfect by any means, and we’ll discuss that in a moment, but one thing that is interesting about the North-Robb race is how broadly and deeply hated Ollie North was, and how the passion he inspired determined the election. More than half of Mr. Robb’s own supporters told exit pollers they were voting against Mr. North, not for Mr. Robb. I think it was Richard Nixon who observed that voters are motivated more by dislike than affection, and this race would seem to illustrate the point.

Mr. North was called dangerous, a threat to constitutional governance. When we think of him now, a lot of us see the smiling, thick-eyebrowed man who joshes with Paul Begala on commercials for their TV talk show, “Equal Time.” But a dozen years ago Mr. North was one of the goofier players in a goofy scandal about trying to get Western hostages out of Lebanon by offering U.S. arms to Iranian “moderates” in exchange and dedicating profits from the transaction to the contras of Nicaragua, a ragtag group who fought for and ultimately witnessed the ouster of the communist Sandinista government run by the vain and limited Daniel Ortega.

It was a scandal to be sure, and a disheartening one; America’s president was humiliated, his foreign-policy establishment rocked. To me it seems so long ago, a generation. But only six years ago, Mr. North was still castigated as a monster of history.

Here is a representative critique, from retired army colonel David Hackworth, in a piece published four months before the 1994 election in Playboy: “North’s career shows an undeniable streak of deceit and misuse of the trust of colleagues. . . . [He] would become a threat if he were to succeed in a bid for the Senate. . . . He’s smarmy. . . . He boasts that he was a can-do guy when he was in the White House, but the record spells no-can-do.”

Much the same of course has been said of Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Hackworth foreshadowed another frequent criticism of the first lady by targeting Mr. North’s Northern Virginia home, saying it was not a “plain old farm” as Mr. North maintained, but a million-dollar estate likely funded by campaign donors.

Among many people, Mrs. Clinton is rather roundly despised too. Even her supporters would agree she is a dramatic and divisive figure.

*   *   *

So should she be discouraged by the parallels to the North-Robb race? And should Rick Lazio be encouraged by them? Not necessarily.

True Mr. North and Mrs. Clinton both raised and are raising record sums in their campaigns; and true, out-of-state giving is very high; and true, the rise of both Mr. North and Mrs. Clinton seems to their foes to represent unfortunate trends in our democracy. But the differences between the races are big. For one thing, there was a third candidate in the Robb-North race, Marshall Coleman, a Republican who disapproved of Mr. North and won 11% of the vote. Most of those voters were Republicans, who, had they been denied a third-party option, might have held their nose for Mr. North. If two-thirds of them had done so, he would have won.

Mr. Robb got almost 90% of the black vote and more than half of the women’s vote. Mrs. Clinton hopes to do as well, and still could. Mr. Robb ran as a relatively conservative Democrat in a relatively conservative state; Mrs. Clinton portrays herself as a moderate liberal in a liberal state.

Mr. North didn’t run with the glamour and apparatus of the White House behind him, as Mrs. Clinton does. Mr. North’s bid was complicated when the incumbent Republican U.S. senator from Virginia, John Warner, came out against him and backed Mr. Coleman. Mrs. Clinton has the support of Sen. Charles Schumer and of retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose seat she seeks.

But Mr. Moynihan is less enthusiastic than he was a year ago, when he said, “She’ll run, and she’ll win, too.” In a little-noticed-on-these-shores interview with Roy Hattersley, published in the Times of London on Aug. 11, Mr. Moynihan muted his trumpet. Here are the first three paragraphs of Mr. Hattersley’s piece:

At the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name the temperature in Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s office dropped by at least ten degrees. I had naively assumed that, after 24 years on Capitol Hill, and on the point of retirement, the Senior Senator for New York would enthuse about the Democratic Party’s choice as his successor. But he was uncharacteristically non-commital.

“I’m a Democrat. Of course I support her.” That seemed to me a less than enthusiastic endorsement. So I asked him if he had encouraged her to stand. “I was there when she announced that she was standing,” he replied in his strange, hard-edged New York accent. And that was as much enthusiasm as he was prepared to counterfeit.

He was equally half-hearted about Mrs Clinton’s prospects of success. All he would say about the First Lady’s chances of election was “We’ll see.” And, when he warmed to his theme, his faint praise was even more damning: “Somebody had to run. We took Bobby Kennedy from outside and he won. He got fewer votes than LBJ won in New York that year. But he won.”

Sen. Moynihan is a talker, a gentleman of delicious offhand eloquence who likes to share his doubts and enthusiasms, which are uniformly interesting and usually buttressed by historical references. Perhaps he thought his comments might go unnoticed in an English newspaper; perhaps he thought if they were noticed he’d say, “Ah, ah, the newspapermen of Britain are a rather exciteable lot, and I’m sure the interpretations of my comments by this particular fellow reflect that tendency, which is now a tradition. Except of course in the case of the Irish famine, whose ferocity they managed to downplay with startling uniformity.”

But that interview—that’s something Mrs. Clinton perhaps should worry about.

*   *   *

We are deep into August; autumn beckons. But neither Mr. Lazio nor Mrs. Clinton seems to have distinguished himself or herself lately. He has nice soft commercials portraying himself as a warm caring spender of tax dollars. She has commercials portraying herself as a warm and friendly person who’d like us to know her, and to remember that her opponent is a hard-right ideologue.

Neither seems to be breaking through in any big way, not yet. Neither has given a speech half as memorable as Susan’s on “Survivor.” But few in life get to give a speech that memorable, at least in public.

The problem is that neither has given a speech to the tribe quite as persuasive as Richard’s or Kelly’s.

We are waiting, Mr. Lazio. We are waiting, Mrs. Clinton.

*   *   *

I will end on a happy note. I had a moment of great affection for Americans last night as I watched the interminable post-”Survivor” special on CBS. Listening to all of them analyze the show and their parts in it, hearing them discuss the generational differences between the older survivors and the younger ones, I thought: If I were new here I would think modern Americans practical, tough, bright and funny. They have wit and irreverence and insight. They’re really quite hardy. They are the kind of people who could win a war. It was a happy thought.

So is this. In a country with 167 channels, with a fractured marketplace in which we’re all part of a niche, a sliver, a particular demographic at which is aimed particular programming, it was a relief last night to realize half the country was watching the same thing. Blockbusters still bust blocks; “Survivor” is a blockbuster, and every demographic from grandma to kids was watching.

It is good when these seemingly small cultural moments occur, and when we’re all talking about the same thing the next day. These things help hold us together, like the Evening News did in the 1960s and “Roots” did in the ‘70s. Or like big earthquakes in California, and murderous hurricanes back east. They are things we can refer back to, commonalties we share.

Politics does this too, when it works. It can hold us together with interest so that even the least engaged of us manage every few years to work up an opinion and vote.

This is good. It can make you feel gratitude you don’t fully understand.

I left the Philadelphia convention two weeks ago thinking George Bush would probably win. I left Los Angeles fairly certain of it.

In tone and feel the Philadelphia convention was like that of 1980, the Reagan convention of spectacular unity in the face of high stakes. Philadelphia too was unified, and not only by hunger. The Christian Coalition was over here and happy and the Log Cabin Republicans were over there and happy; peace reigned, primarily for two reasons.

One was that Republicans have been concussed to a degree still not fully appreciated by Bill Clinton, whom they think of not only as probably disturbed but strikingly unconcerned about our nation’s security (the nuclear secrets gone, the president uninterested in moving toward protecting us from nuclear attack, etc.). Modern Republicans have never felt this way about an American president, and it shocks them still. It has also concentrated their minds, making internal battles seem secondary and self-indulgent.

The other reason is that the overwhelming majority of Republicans have come to respect George W. Bush, and get what he’s about. He is the next step after Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan spent his time awakening an economy in deep REM sleep and beating back Soviet communism. He knocked down walls. Now Bush the younger will spend his time building, doing the unfinished business of greater prosperity and freedom.

So that was the Republican mix in Philadelphia, antipathy plus agreement. Not to mention the hunger that comes from eight years out in the presidential cold. But that time, the convention seemed to suggest, was spent rethinking, bringing up new talent, questioning old ways. When I saw Condoleezza Rice address the convention as the expected next head of the National Security Council, saw Rep. J.C. Watts (R., Okla.), saw so many other fresh talents, I thought of what Andre Malraux told Whittaker Chambers after reading the galleys of “Witness”: “You did not come back from hell with empty hands.”

*   *   *

Los Angeles was different, though equally revealing. The Democrats have returned from heaven with empty hands. Schedules slipped, Joe Lieberman was brought to heel by Maxine Waters, the perpetually enraged California congresswoman who emerged as a party powerbroker, and the best speech of the week, the cleverest and most worthy of deconstruction, was not that of the presidential nominee but of the president, who had a chance to boost Mr. Gore through anecdote and example, and did not.

Gone was the discipline and cleverness of the Clinton era. During big speeches the podium area was crowded with donors and party hacks hugging each other, throwing high fives and blocking the view of the delegates massed to the right and left of the stage. The night of the Gore speech I watched two little black kids happily tossing Lieberman signs in the air as they waited for the candidate. That’s better than the Republicans, I thought, little kids with front-row seats. Then Gore came bounding through the crowd and, pivoting like a man who’d been fully briefed on where his marks were, squatted down to the children and patted their heads. The kids weren’t just props; when Mr. Gore was through, they were obvious props.

Mr. Gore’s speech all but announced the party was returning to habits and assumptions that were not just pre-Clinton but pre-Carter, offering an estimated $1 trillion in new programs. The pose was populist but promised to be problematic: If you’re going to wage class warfare you’d better do it with the passion of George Wallace or Pat Buchanan, and you probably shouldn’t do it at all when the biggest demographic shift in America is the number of new investors.

*   *   *

Bill Clinton was like a big magnet floating over the conventions of ‘92 and ‘96, and whichever way he moved all the pieces of iron filing followed. But in Los Angeles, Mr. Clinton disappeared, and took his magnetism with him. All the pieces of metal on the floor went this way and that and finally slid to the left, just as they had before 1992.

Al Gore is not a magnet. It isn’t just the lack of shades-wearing, sax-playing charm. Mr. Gore lacks the confidence of a great man, or a psychopath, that he should be adored and followed. He is full of doubts and constantly shifts shapes. And he doesn’t have 12 years of loss behind him to help him spur his party. Mr. Clinton played savior, but now the party has already been saved. Now it’s smug.

*   *   *

This is what I realized in L.A.: It wasn’t a newly unified Democratic party that produced a victor named Bill Clinton, it was Mr. Clinton who produced a unified party. He unified them through their hunger, which he matched with his own.

But the changes he brought were not serious, and so not lasting. They were not grounded in the desire to change but in the desire to win. His party could now change back so quickly, could pivot back to the past, because that, now, seems the way to win, at least according to Mr. Gore’s strategists. Clintonian moderation was as evanescent as a Clintonian promise or a Clintonian statement: It was just meant to get through the moment.

It was said of Jimmy Carter when he left the presidency that he’d left no footprints. I thought Bill Clinton was a real bigfoot, he left a real impression, but in Los Angeles it looked as if his footprints too had been washed away in the tide.

*   *   *

The Democrats in Los Angeles also showed another attitudinal change. They acted as if they deserve to lead, not as if they’d better hustle to win leadership. They remind me of the Republicans in ‘92. They seem to have lost their edge, and lost a lot of the bright young men and women of the War Room. A lot of them are gone, some of them broken by the Clinton experience, some in television and consulting. The Democrats’ talent coffers are depleted.

In the 1970s and ‘80s the Democrats weren’t as good as the Republicans at the stagecraft of conventions; they didn’t approach the level of sophistication of the Reagan era. By 1992, however, they’d learned how to have a slicker, smarter convention production, and in ‘96 they blew the Republicans away in stagecraft. They even invented a new art of campaign film biography, with the brilliant Linda Bloodworth-Thomason creating a classic of political propaganda with “The Boy From Hope.”

But this year in Philadelphia the Republicans beat the Democrats at stagecraft, with a message of clarity that broke through the screen: We are diverse and young and moving forward, breaking out of the old era.

*   *   *

There will be dramas in the coming months; it will not be a quiet campaign. There may be government shutdowns and fierce debates and amazingly negative advertising. It isn’t over. But I think I saw the modern Democratic Party begin to crumble again in L.A., and I think I saw the modern Republican Party being born.

Now the campaign proceeds at greater speed and with greater urgency. At the end of both conventions, a hunch. If the Clinton-Gore apparatus is facing its end, its death throes won’t be pretty. Some living things quietly die when badly wounded, but many animals are most dangerous when most endangered.

Al Gore’s acceptance speech was a rhetorical failure and, in my view, a strategic blunder of significant proportions.

It failed as rhetoric not, as his defenders quickly claimed, because it lacked “poetry” and “song,” but because it lacked thought. It was relentlessly banal and formulaic, its sound shaped not by the simple speech of the honest man but by a reflexive politico-bureaucratese: “The future should belong to everyone in this land. . . . We’re entering a new time. We’re electing a new president. . . . In our democracy, the future is not something that just happens to us, it’s something that we make for ourselves together.”

It was boilerplate boob-bait punctuated by tired vows. It has been called specific but was only declarative—specific only in the way a shopping list is. Would that seasoning, even just a bit of pepper, had been on the list.

It seemed written by a committee of second-tier communications aides, but Mr. Gore says he wrote it, and we must take him at his word. It certainly didn’t have much Shrum in it. I had imagined reading it with reporters and producers when the text was released before it was delivered and, finding a word that’s just right or a passage in which thought was linked to feeling, shouting with delight, “Shrummy! Page three, graf seven, Shrum strikes!” But Bob Shrum, the fabled Democratic speechwriter, did not strike—or, if he did, it was perhaps in the second way in which the speech failed, its seeming strategic miscalculation.

Mr. Gore’s speech seemed to aim purely at his base, at the left of his party and the more leftward part of the electorate. The text hit every liberal pleasure point—from creation of a national health care service to affirmative action to no school vouchers to a woman’s right to abortion to a federal pre-school daycare system to class warfare featuring greedy polluting nicotine-head oil-company gangsters vs. decent people like you and me.

It was unleavened by any hint of doubt and unshaded by the assumption that decent people can disagree. It was, in short, amazingly . . . retro. It sounded not at all like what one might have expected—a post-Clinton era rallying cry informed by the insights of the Democratic Leadership Council, and brought to a new level in the new century.

Instead it sounded like Walter Mondale in 1984, or Teddy Kennedy in 1980, or even Hubert Humphrey in 1968. It sounded like something untouched by the history of the past 15 years or so. It sounded like something Rep. Maxine Waters would like. It was playing to the base in a way that seems so narrow, so constricting and unsophisticated that it has left me full of questions I did not expect to be asking at the end of the Democratic National Convention.

Why would Al Gore on his big night play to the left of his party, and ignore most of the assumptions and views of the middle—of independents and Republicans who are still looking around, of McCain people and young professionals?

Because he had to forestall the threat of Ralph Nader on the left and Buchanan on the blue collar-protectionist right?

Because he believes he doesn’t really have his base, even now, and must win it?

Because he thinks he can, in the coming weeks and months, pivot to the center, hoping no one will remember his acceptance speech? Was the speech therefore brilliantly boring in that it effectively communicated to the left in such an unmemorable way that no normal person could be expected to remember any of it? Was it deliberately boring as a tactical matter—that is, did he anticipate that America would turn it off 14 minutes in, while the left would like it and remember it?

Or, as some are asking, does he think he’s going to lose, and if you’re going to lose you might as well lose standing for something? But if he thought he was going to lose, why did he choose Joe Lieberman?

In the entire speech Mr. Gore mentioned Bill Clinton only once, at the very beginning of his speech. He used the word “future” 12 times. By contrast, in his 1988 acceptance speech Vice President George Bush mentioned Ronald Reagan three times by name and devoted several paragraphs to a discussion of the Reagan-Bush administration’s accomplishments. Mr. Bush admired and respected Mr. Reagan and sought to be associated with him.

Clearly in this speech Mr. Gore sought to break from Mr. Clinton, and he at least achieved that. All of those wholesome family films and speeches by family members conveyed the message: I am not a weirdo like Clinton. But to break with Mr. Clinton, was it necessary also to break with the DLC insights Mr. Gore once cared so much for, and to return to the old Mondale-era sound and reality of the Democratic Party?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I suppose time will reveal them—or whether the questions were the right ones.

But I must tell you that right after the speech I did some talking-head commentary and tried to express my disappointment, and was told by pols and pundits alike that “this is the real Gore,” and that we should feel some satisfaction that he showed us who he is. Well, if that’s who Mr. Gore is, he’s a loser.

Watching Bill Clinton at his big speech Monday night, and seeing him in the big campaign handoff in Michigan Tuesday afternoon, I realized that though he always wishes to be likened to John Kennedy, he is really like another famously successful operator in American political history. He is like Huey Long, the Kingfish, “the friend of the working man.” Bill Clinton, like Long on the stump in Louisiana, talks about what he gave you, what he did, how he made it all better, and how those bad people tried to stop him but he fought them off, for you.

Al Gore of course apes this, but awkwardly. He is like the white guy who can’t jump. “The powerful interests are gonna go after us with everything they’ve got,” he warned at the handoff, with a dramatic, down home tone. But he looked like the Vice President in Charge of Fear for the Powerful Interests, with his crisp suit and his fitted shirts and his steely pecs and blow-dried hair. He always seems calculating, incapable of candor, spontaneity, the ingenuous.

Mr. Clinton can fake those things because he is the best actor in all of American political history, the prince of the podium. Mr. Gore does not fake them as well. But he does his best, and he and Mr. Clinton together sounded so 1930s, so Southern agrarian populist, that afterward I wondered, as all those in politics and journalism do, How do normal people receive this? Are they impressed? Do they believe what they’re being told? Do they resent being told by Bill Clinton that they have what they have because of him and Al Gore?

*   *   *

Because Mr. Clinton so often tells us what he did, it is remarkable that he cannot explain how he did it. Monday night he took a stab, but only a small one. He suggested he unleashed the economy by raising taxes. But in 1992 he excoriated George Bush for raising taxes, and indeed after Mr. Clinton raised taxes in 1993, he later admitted he’d raised them too much. So the suggestion that we owe our wealth to his tax hike was not fully satisfying.

Normally both parties torture logic, but they stick to the logic they’re torturing. Mr. Clinton seems to throw out old logic and bring in new logic all the time. So he can always keep changing the argument in a way you don’t expect, which leaves his opponents confused when they try to answer him.

I don’t mean a classic political fudging of the facts. Mr. Clinton, for instance, said in his speech over and over that he got rid of the deficit. But he didn’t get rid of the deficit, it was going down when he walked in and continued to go down as he went to fund-raisers. We will continue to build a surplus as the economy expands. What he grew is the budget, but the unstoppable economy overwhelmed even that.

What is slightly confusing is that the federal deficit was so at the center of all of Mr. Clinton’s remarks the past few days, the surplus so at the center of his bragging, that you had to sit back and wonder: When did the Democrats start to care about budget deficits? When Jimmy Carter left office in 1980 with what was at that point a huge federal deficit of $58 billion, the Democratic Party never said boo. The Democratic Party I cheered in the 1960s and 1970s never cared about green eyeshade things like deficits. Only cold, it-all-comes-down-to-money Republicans did. Democrats cared about people.

Now Mr. Clinton and the Democrats, all they care about is the deficit. This is not a change in rhetorical tack but a complete change in the logic of the party.

What is always fascinating is the blithe confidence with which Mr. Clinton says what he says, as if he’s been saying it all his life. When I listen to him I think he’s been saying it all his life, even though I know that’s not true.

*   *   *

But the American people tend to give credit to a president for what happened on his watch, and there is a rough fairness to this. And in truth Mr. Clinton deserves credit for not messing the economy up. He could have. He could have tried to raise taxes again and again and done the bidding of his party on trade and fired Alan Greenspan. But he didn’t. He could have thrown a wrench in the machine. He didn’t. Or not much and not often. The machine booms along.

*   *   *

More attention should be given to the president’s televised walk through the bowels of the convention hall as he made his way to the podium, while his people superimposed phrases like “longest economic expansion in American history” and “lowest unemployment rate” on the screen.

It was majestically tacky and embarrassing, and seemed almost made for the delectation of the brilliant young men and women of Comedy Central, who know goofiness when they see it. (Imagine their “supers”: First president impeached in this century . . . Lost our nuclear secrets and showed profound indifference when he found out . . . Used US military might to distract attention from his scandals . . . Sold access to the presidency.)

I thought that they must be doing it to excite the base, and yet I also thought, Only stupid people would like this, and then I wondered if Mr. Clinton’s people assume their base is stupid. At any rate, the long walk reminded me of the evening Giscard D’Estaing left the presidency of France. He said his farewell in a nationally televised speech and at the end, rather than saying good night, he abruptly walked away from his desk, leaving for the audience to ponder an empty chair. All of France was meant to weep. All of France broke out in laughter.

And yet it was the perfect Clinton moment. He will do anything to convince the American people that he is a success.

*   *   *

I have been surprised in L.A. to find that Democrats on the floor and in the television booths often refer to Monica. You’d think they wouldn’t but they do. They mention “the Monica scandals” a lot. And the reason is this. If they talk about Monica enough it will distract from the other and more dangerous scandals: the selling of the Oval Office, the leaving America undefended from missile attack.

It isn’t Republicans who talk about Monica, it’s Democrats, and they have their reasons. A whole future generation is absorbing the mantra: The guy was a genius who did nothing wrong but make a mistake with a girl, a girl, a girl.

*   *   *

The night of Mr. Clinton’s big speech Democrats were shaking their heads and saying Gore just isn’t like Clinton. But they’re wrong. Mr. Gore is like a Clinton. Unfortunately it’s Hillary. In her speech Monday night she was flat-voiced, dull, predictable, pedantic. “We’ve made great progress in the last eight years but we still have a lot of work to do.” “They made the hard decisions to renew our economy.” Everyone in Los Angeles thinks she delayed her speech in order to get on prime time. If this is true it was a miscalculation, as the speech was a kind of walk through the worst of Mrs. Clinton on the stump.

She was supposed to introduce her husband and speak highly of him; she was supposed to endorse Al Gore, and speak highly of him. Instead she spoke highly of herself—”I worked with a bipartisan coalition . . .” “I thought of the first foster child I represented back when I was in law school . . .” “Years ago, when I worked for the Children’s Defense Fund . . .” “I’ve talked with mothers and fathers on front porches, factory floors and in hospital wards . . .” “I’ve held the hands of mothers and fathers . . .”

At first I was taken aback by what seemed over-the-top solipsism, which could be heard even in the smallest asides, e.g. “I first met Joe Lieberman 30 years ago when Bill and I were law students.” Um, what was Joe at that time? That’s not important. What’s important is Bill and I went to law school.

Then I realized it was very much the kind of speech Mrs. Clinton’s aides would craft after finding out from the latest focus group that Mrs. Clinton strikes them as a cold post-yuppie with no biography, only hunger.

She made a lot of references to her mother and daughter and family and children. Mrs. Clinton was forced to start speaking like this in the 1992 campaign, when a focus group revealed that they thought she was a woman without a family; it was news to them that she even had a child.

It sounded Monday night to me that eight years later the focus groups are still seeing something she has spent eight years trying to knock down. That is not good news for her New York campaign.

But it was all saved in a way by Bill Clinton’s speech, which I think was the best political speech of his presidency in that it was disciplined, had a point, and he stuck to the point. And he was so confident about it that he didn’t fuss with the wording and keep desperately adding words, as he is famous for doing in the back of the limo and in the holding room, but let his writers keep it simple. Which suggested confidence and even, for him, happiness.

On Monday night you deliver the last big speech of your presidency. Or rather the last big political speech in front of a huge crowd, with the whole country listening.

There is in truth one other big speech after Monday night, your farewell address, in December. That, by tradition, is a sober address from the Oval Office. That’s where Eisenhower and Reagan did theirs, and they were the last of the two-termers before you. You probably won’t feel able to speak from the Oval when you say goodbye. what people think about when they see the words “Bill Clinton” and “Oval Office” in the same sentence, or on the same superimposed network caption.

They think of—well, the fundraising things, the meetings with foreign operatives who gave you money. They stood there with their shiny $400 shoes on the presidential seal on the rich blue carpet. And they think of the intern, and all the trauma and embarrassment. So just speaking from the Oval Office, as a president does, makes your constituents think of things you don’t want them thinking of. So maybe your farewell will be inevitably somewhat muted, and maybe you’ll make it in the East Room, or the Press Room, or some other place.

*   *   *

But Monday night—Monday night is a political speech, and you’ll speak where you’re most alive, where you’ve always wanted to be: The man at the big-miked podium, the cynosure of all eyes. You’re probably pumped. You can really help Gore with this speech, and Hillary too.

This is your last speech to the troops, to the Democratic Party that elected you, defended you, derided you behind your back but held high your colors through all the long battle.

You owe them a lot. If they had abandoned you the way the Republican Party abandoned Nixon during his scandals, you’d have been finished. The Republicans in those days couldn’t stomach the whole seamy mess and told Nixon he was over. But the Democrats stayed with you; they were tough and disciplined and went out and took your talking points onto the airwaves. They drew a lot of blood for you.

*   *   *

And maybe you’d like to tell them and us why, what the larger meaning was. This is your chance. You can, looking back from the high point of eight years, define what it is you meant to do, and what it is you did during these two administrations. You can define, if only for three pages of a 15-page speech, what you think Clintonism is, and was. This would implicitly make the case for its continuance—via the election of Al Gore.

It’s amazing that eight years in, most people still don’t know what Clintonism is or what you meant it to be. If asked what word or thought they associate with Clintonism they’d say “Well, the economy’s good,” and then they’d say some variant of “Well, he sure kind of . . . went wild in that place, didn’t he?” With Reagan it was, “Well, the economy’s really come back,” and “He brought down the Wall, Russian communism fell,” and “He made us feel that America was a good force in the world.”

What words or thoughts, in your view, should Americans think of when they think of what you stood for or tried to do?

It would be good for history if you explained this.

*   *   *

You’ll probably have a few pages with a lot of official-sounding numbers. This is where you’ll make the argument Gore does, that before Clinton-Gore, America was in a depression, with Wall Street guys jumping out of windows and unemployed fathers selling apples on the street.

That’s what Gore says, not exactly in those words, and with a blithe and energetic disdain for . . . well, for facts. He knows what the Carter era was, and what the Reagan era was after it. But he’s out there every day saying he and Clinton were FDR and Bush and Reagan were Hoover, and he makes some headway when he says this. The great reason behind the assertion is the wisdom Gore and his people have learned from watching Jay Leno. They watch Mr. Leno’s monologues, as all who are in politics and can stay awake do, in order to get a sense of what middle America is laughing at, and what can be inferred from that laughter.

Gore and his people have watched Leno and seen those street interviews he does where he asks people: “Which American President was in the White House when we fought Hitler?” and a nice 25-year-old guy who’s a paralegal scrunches his brow and says, “George Washington?” And Jay says, “What was the U.S. Civil War about?” and a 30-year-old woman says, “Um, they were killing the Jews? Like, you know, the Schindler list thing?”

Gore and his people seem to think Americans have grown very, very stupid. That’s part of why Gore talks so slowly, so we’ll be able to understand him. Anyway, they clearly think telling people in their 20s and 30s that 1980 marked the beginning of the Reagan depression will work, and really so far there’s no particular reason to think they’re wrong. The crowds cheer when Gore says it.

Will you say it, Mr. Clinton? And if you do, do you think history will notice and correct you?

*   *   *

You probably think: Politics is politics. Don’t matter what’s true as long as what we say seems to be true. All the rest is just some argument on “Crossfire.” Why shouldn’t I fudge the facts? Enough lies were said about me over the years. I’ve been through a dozen campaigns, and like I tell my friends, I can’t take my T-shirt off in public cause they’d see the marks from the flayings.

Actually I heard you say the last part, about the T-shirt and the flayings, way back in 1990, to friends, before you were president. I thought: This fellow sure has a sharp sense of his sufferings.

And you do. But you could give us all a sharp sense of how you see economic history in your speech, and I hope you do. I hope you offer not just the red meat but the hard spine of logic.

*   *   *

After you make the case that the Clinton-Gore administration ended a depression and brought America to new levels of wealth, you’ll probably echo Al Gore in that line he says: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” It’s a great jaunty line. Gore’s people stole it from Reagan in ‘84. He’d remind people of the recession of the Carter years—inflation and interest rates that topped 20%. Reagan called it the misery index, and as much as anything it did Carter in. All Reagan had to do in ‘84 is point out he’d cut unemployment and inflation in more than half, that interest rates were way down, that the misery index was a thing of the past.

It was true, and he won. Bush did much of the same in ‘88, and what he said was true, and he won.

And now Al Gore is using Reagan’s and Bush’s arguments, and their language. But the facts don’t stack up. Gore is telling the truth when he says things are even better than they were in the ‘80s, at least economically. But they were good in the ‘80s, too. And people knew what Reagan did to get the economy going again. He slashed taxes, and he cut regulation. The economy took off, for the first time in a generation.

Gore has to convince people that you and he did something to make the economy good. He has to explain exactly what you did to make things better, because a lot of people don’t think the Clinton-Gore administration did much of anything. Or rather, they think you kept the economy good by getting beaten back when you tried to raise taxes, beaten back when you wouldn’t balance the budget, and beaten back when you wouldn’t back welfare reform. When these things were forced on you, you did them. The economy moved forward.

This is true, but it’s hard to say you got things better by getting beat.

*   *   *

It would be good in the Monday night speech if we could hear the Clinton-Gore argument for how you created this era of riches. You could tell us in your speech. I wish you would so that we could all look at it and think about it and turn to each other and say, “What do you think, does this hold water?”

I suspect half the country thinks we owe our riches to three things, the fact that entrepreneurial genius can flourish only in freedom, and we’re free; the fact that Silicon Valley has transformed the world; and the fact that investors, stockbrokers and Wall Street guys take Prozac now, so they don’t wake up like bears anymore but like bulls, charging into the day.

A lot of other people think it all began 19 years ago, when President Reagan lowered the top tax rate from 70% to 35%, cut marginal rates and helped free up the money that allowed Silicon Valley to become what it is.

But a lot of Americans have a kind of rough fairness: If you were president when the good stuff happened you get the credit, period. Tell them how they’re right to give it to you and Gore. And tell them what Gore will do to continue these bounteous years.

*   *   *

So you’ve said thanks and you’ve claimed triumph and you’ve bragged on the economy and explained how and what you did to make it expand.

One more thing would be good.

You’ve shown all these years that you’re intelligent and energetic and riveting in terms of your character and personality. But you’ve never shown . . . grace. Courage. Class. A generosity of spirit.

You could on Monday night, though.

And in showing you have some grace, courage and generosity you could do Al Gore a big favor.

You could talk about the triumphs of your time but then admit the things you’ve done that you shouldn’t have done, and claim them as your own, and take responsibility for them. The whole deal, from fundraising to losing our nuclear secrets to girls to . . . unleashing the fierce energy of your hatred into the national bloodstream, and getting all your people out there on television every day to hate for you and bringing the national conversation a few rungs lower.

You really pulled the country into some bad places, and sometimes, at some point, you must know this and admit it to yourself.

Maybe you could admit what went wrong, and point out, if it is true, that Al Gore wasn’t there. And then talk about what did work, and say, if you can, that Gore was there for that, and had a part in it.

Maybe you would, through this honesty, take Gore off the hook. Every day he wriggles like a caught fish because of the things you’ve done, things people associate with him. He can’t turn on you; that would finish him. And he can’t not be honest about you, because if he continues that he’ll lose.

So why don’t you be honest for him. Turn on yourself. You’ve got nothing to lose, really. And you have the respect of history to gain. Historians always smile on candor and kindness, have you noticed? They’re human, and recognize acts of grace.

You could do Hillary a favor, too. Of course you’ll talk about her Senate race, and maybe you’ll throw her a kiss and mouth “I love you” again. Democrats seem to like that a lot, so it will get applause. But I’ll tell you, everyone else cringes. Here’s a way to help her. They liked her a lot in New York when they thought she was your victim. Then the past year when she looked like just another blunderbuss pol, just another maneuverer playing games with things like the FALN terrorists—well, she looked like a much worse version of your average pol.

You’d better remind New Yorkers she was once first lady, and met with people and was nice to them, and you better remind them she’s a victim, if that’s how you and she still see her. She really was more liked when people felt sorry for her. So that’s another reason you might be gracious, and candid.

*   *   *

Why would you do such an extraordinary thing? Because if Gore wins and Hillary wins then you know what History’s headline will say: “Clintonism Endorsed! The People, Yes—They Demand Eight More Years of Good Leadership!” And if Gore and Hillary lose, you know what that headline will be: “Clintonism Rebuffed, America Throws The Bums Out, Clean New Era Begins!”

You’re fighting for history’s headlines. And there’s another thing that motivates you. If the Repubicans win they will be happy. Those greedy narrow-minded frightened bullying hypocrites will be smiling all over the tube.

And you can’t have that. Because you hate them, you really hate them. That’s why you call them Nazis. That’s why you’re thinking, as you prepare this speech, They ain’t gonna win this. You watch. Bubba came to play.

The choice of Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as Al Gore’s running mate is so smart, so clever, so good, so satisfying, so striking that it just may turn this election a bit on its head for a while. Certainly its most immediate effect is going to be a successful Democratic convention next week in Los Angeles, because now the Democrats, badly hit by their own form of Clinton fatigue and acutely aware of the particular charmlessness of their presidential candidate, have something to cheer about. They respect Joe Lieberman. They think he has a center, a moral and ethical view of the world. He is experienced and articulate. He is decent and intelligent. He is independent. The media love him. He is a regular co-star on Imus, and all of the columnists and reporters for the elite newspapers, and all of the electronic pundits and anchors, know him and admire him.

But that is not what is most wonderful. What is most wonderful is that he is an Orthodox Jew. What does this mean? It means a lot of people who love America more than they love parties or politics are happy that a big and great breakthrough has occurred. A friend, a journalist who is politically conservative and Jewish, e-mailed me to tell me he had been weeping all morning, that he’d cried when he heard the news. Another friend, a producer at a TV news show, called and told me she woke her father in California to give him the news and they both got choked up. “This is like 1960,” she said, and I said I know, and I got choked up. It is wonderful when America is at her most American, and breaks down another barrier and says “What’s in your heart is most important.”

If Joe Lieberman had been Joe Lee, and an Episcopalian, Al Gore would have been smart to pick him. He would have been an obvious choice. The only reason he would have hesitated over Mr. Lieberman is that he’s Jewish. Mr. Gore decided that was just fine. I think that I have never seen Al Gore do such an elegant, intelligent and original thing. Well done, Mr. Gore.

*   *   *

I have to tell you, this really does feel like a 1960 moment to me. I was a little girl when a Catholic got chosen to run for president, and I had gathered from the conversation of grownups that You Don’t Elect Catholics to the Presidency. When it happened, it’s hard to describe how exciting and moving and idealism-inspiring it was. It gave a lot of people a lot of joy. It opened things up more. That was a good thing. So is this.

And because this is such a good thing, I hope everyone of whatever politics or persuasion sits back for a few days and feels good about it. Everyone should be nice and not do any political bashing until . . . Friday.

However, I think it’s okay and maybe even helpful to note the following.

Network producers are going to decide, in their bright and touchingly uninformed minds, that the big opponents of the Lieberman choice will be Christian conservatives. That’s where they’ll go for the negative sound bites. But Christian conservatives love Joe Lieberman. They’ve been arm in arm with him in the great cultural battles of the past decade. He was just about the only Democrat who’d give them the time of day. He was on their side.

The last time I saw Mr. Lieberman was last spring, in New York, at a symposium on Hollywood and the culture. I moderated and introduced our guests—Joe Lieberman and Bill Bennett, who are close friends and co-warriors in the values battle. Lieberman and Bennett very frankly talked to the audience of producers and writers and network people and movie stars about how to make television and film and music more decent, more helpful. This is how people on the right think of and have experienced Mr. Lieberman—as a good guy with his head screwed on right.

Many conservative Christians—I think most conservative Christians—see all of those who love God as part of the same “cultural minority.” Conservative Christians don’t feel they have much in common, in terms of their political desires, with atheists and agnostics and leftist Episcopalian bishops and such. But they think they have a great deal in common with Orthodox Jews. They crowd around Rabbi Daniel Lapin when he speaks at a conservative gathering; they crowd around Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, David Horowitz and scores of others. One of the biggest heroes of conservative Christians is an Orthodox Jew called Dr. Laura; the last time I saw her she was wowing them at a born-again Christian assembly at the National Prayer Breakfast last February.

*   *   *

A powerful and respected political officeholder told me Monday that there’s “no upside” to the Lieberman choice. I told him there’s no downside. He was surprised and said, “He can’t even campaign on Saturdays!” I said so what, America would love to see a politician who actually put God first one day a week.

I wish I’d added this: Remember Sandy Koufax? Joe Lieberman not campaigning on Saturday is Sandy Koufax not pitching on Yom Kippur. There were a lot of great sports moments in the 1950s and 1960s, but none greater than the day in 1959 when Mr. Koufax put God before the World Series. What a great guy, what a lesson for a generation of Christian and Jewish kids. And Muslims and everyone else too.

*   *   *

Yes, it’s good news for Hillary. It’s great news for Hillary. It enlivens part of her New York base, it says to New York Jews that the Democrats are the party that did this great thing, it excites people—and may help them forget, or at least not remember so vividly, that the Democratic senatorial candidate has, shall we say, a not fully satisfying relationship with New York’s Jews. A historic choice like the Mr. Lieberman can overwhelm a lot of previous bad static.

But let’s not care about that for now. The headline is not “Is It Good for Hillary?” The headline is: “It Is Good for America.” It is a wonderful country that does something like this, that takes a good man who is a member of a small ethnic/religious minority to be one of its two major vice presidential candidates, and that greets that choice with resounding hurrahs.

This is really a great day. We should all be happy. We really are a maturing democracy.