Elizabeth Dole's face was ready to shatter. She was sitting next to her husband while he argued with Katie Couric about smoking--and then argued some more, and some more. "I'm not certain whether it's addictive," Bob Dole insisted, like a mule-stubborn father who won't concede that his smart-aleck daughter is right. Why did Dole dig in so hard on the losing side of the smoking debate? He went through hell to quit the habit, and he used to get into fights with his first wife about her chain-smoking. He even lost his own brother to emphysema--so why play Mr. Tobacco on Today? As the minutes passed and Couric kept at him, he became angrier, knocking the "liberal elite that always buys the Democratic line," accusing Couric of "maybe violating the FEC regulations by always sticking up for the Democrats." Elizabeth Dole swallowed hard. She knew her husband had just invited the entire press corps to tour the dark side of his soul.
Can anyone explain the mystery of Bob Dole? Never mind that he looked into the camera and counseled that "people shouldn't smoke, young or old." What lingered like a two-pack-a-day cough was the clip shown on the evening news of Dole getting testy about the issue. Bill Clinton would no doubt chalk the performance up to Dole's "addiction to tobacco money," but no stack of dollars--not even the more than $400,000 Dole's campaigns and PACs have taken from Big Tobacco during his career--could lure a politician into the kind of trap Dole sprang on himself last week. Off-camera, things were just as surreal. Dole was being stalked by a 7-ft.-tall cigarette named Mr. Butt Man, a Democrat who wheezes and coughs while passing out fake $1 bills emblazoned with a caricature of "Smokin' Bob Dole."
In response, Republicans decided to shower Butt Man with resumes, a none too subtle reference to the White House's own unhealable wound, Craig Livingstone, the White House personnel security chief who resigned in June after his deputy was caught sniffing through the confidential FBI files of some 900 people. Last week it came out that Livingstone's resume boasted of his work as a "Senior Consultant to Counter-Event Operations, Clinton-Gore '92," a fancy way of saying he spent part of that campaign recruiting volunteers to dress up in chicken costumes and taunt George Bush. When the "Chicken George" story broke last week, Republicans behaved as if this kind of cheap political theater were a crime against democracy. "I question the need for such a dirty-tricks operation," said Pennsylvania Republican William Clinger, the House committee chairman investigating the Livingstone flap. Call it Feathergate--and imagine what Clinger's hearings could do with this new scandalette: Mr. Livingstone, are you now or have you ever been an ersatz hen? Tell the committee: What did the President know about Chicken George, and when did he know it?