THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 8, 1996 TAG: 9610080295
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 57 lines
At the end of Sunday night's debate, the sight of the Clinton and Dole families mingling and smiling might have led someone, just tuning in, to conclude they were celebrating a common victory.
In a way, they were. Each candidate had emerged no worse than he was when the debate began. Neither made a monumental gaffe by which the debate would have been identified hereafter.
Their overwhelming emotion must have been relief.
Bill Clinton could rejoice that Bob Dole had not scored a breakthrough. With light, wry asides, Dole had showed he was no grump.
Both had lived to fight another day.
Even their expressions had been under severe scrutiny. Michael Deaver, grooming Dole as he formerly did Ronald Reagan and George Bush, had instructed Dole to smile, smile, smile.
To one not given to incessant smiling, nothing is as difficult as trying to do so on command. One wonders if one's forced, fixed smile is coming across as a strange and grotesque grimace, sort of floating about one's face on its own.
Dole was game, but most of his smiles were thin, knife-edged. And, under fire, he looked exceedingly glum. His sensitive face reflects the inner man. Dole's mug is the dark mirror on the wall into which Snow White's stepmother peered and bade it speak the truth - and got it in the smacker.
Clinton, ever facile, smiles in the teeth of an everlasting critical blizzard. In trying to cover up after a foe scores a point, the president is apt to assume an irritating smirk.
Clinton's handlers should show him a video of his dissembling and tell him, ``Mr. President, wipe that fatuous smirk off your face. Be content to look intent, serious.'' Clinton could do it; practice of a morning in a mirror that isn't dark.
When moderator Jim Lehrer asked Dole to describe any personal differences between himself and Clinton, Dole folded, much to his camp's chagrin. Maybe he chose to pass up the opening out of a sense of courtesy or because he is not altogether invulnerable.
Against Clinton's multiple, mind-benumbing infidelities place Dole's cold notice to the wife who helped nurse him back to health after the war and rehearsed him through law school: ``I want out.''
And if Clinton wavers on issues at the drop of a percentage point, Dole took that breath-taking flip-flop from fiscal conservative to the supply side in espousing the 15 percent tax-cut plan.
Early, long before the moderate, sensible Dole resigned as majority leader of the U.S. Senate, I noted that the major hindrance in his campaign for the presidency was the insistence of far-right extremists to reshape him in their image.
Let him be himself, I urged.
It is not too late.
On a bus trip Monday through New Jersey, Dole told a crowd, ``I felt good last night when an impartial observer told me I had won the debate.
``And Elizabeth generally knows what she is talking about.''
KEYWORDS: PRESIDENTIAL RACE 1996 DEBATE by CNB