MAKING THE RIGHT ENEMIES

By MARGARET CARLSON

You're nobody 'til somebody picks on you in Washington, and so this week Gary Bauer was catapulted into the first tier of Beltway players. He had the good fortune to be attacked by presidential candidate Bob Dole, who after last Tuesday's resignation is officially just a man from Kansas--but also a man who needs to find a shortcut from the right wing back to the center of his party. As presidential candidate Bill Clinton proved in 1992, the quickest route from your party's wing to its center is by attacking someone on your side. Clinton took on a little-known rap singer, Sister Souljah, incurred the wrath of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the rest is election history.

Lucky for Dole, Bauer was willing to play his part; indeed it was a confluence of needs--Bauer's for publicity, Dole's for a foil. Bauer, an acolyte of James Dobson's, whose Focus on the Family ministry reaches millions of the faithful every day on 2,000 radio stations, took Dole to task for moving his declaration of tolerance from the preamble of the party platform, where it would apply to a variety of issues, to the antiabortion plank. But just in case this micromovement was too tiny to register with women voters, Dole also took out after Bauer, head of the pro-life Family Research Council. "I don't know where these people come from, you know," said Dole in a local-TV interview in Kansas. "Am I to tell those women they can't support me because Gary Bauer doesn't like it? Give me a break."

This was great for Bauer, who has long labored in the shadow of the other baby-faced Christian activist, Ralph Reed. Yet Bauer professes to be mystified by Dole: "We prayed together in his office recently, and I gave him a lot of help on his Hollywood speech." By making the fight personal, Dole got everyone so caught up in skirmishing that most of the coverage missed the central fact that Dole hasn't changed his commitment to ban most abortions--or the actual party plank--one iota. That's the beauty of making a friend an enemy, however temporarily.

Perhaps appropriately, the Olympic-torch route through Washington is the most convoluted of any city's so far, with the potential to replicate the metaphorical gridlock on Capitol Hill with the real kind as 145 torch runners pay homage at every shrine in hopes of slighting no one. It's a touchier city than most: there are three branches of government to tip your hat to, plus the city administration, the various military services and their cemeteries and memorials, Presidents living and dead and the Vice President, who is said to be alive. Then there is a black college, a white college and a college for the deaf. And who would want to snub the Children's or the Holocaust museum? The carriers will cross the narrow bridges over the Potomac not once but three times in two days. On Thursday the group moves through the red-hot center of the city at 4:09 p.m., the start of rush hour, to inflict maximum harm.

How low can they go? Very low in the Senate race in Georgia, where a Republican candidate, Paul Broun, said of his opponent, former Army Captain Max Cleland: "[He] plays that wheelchair up to the nth degree. He just shows people that wheelchair going and coming...It's certainly worth a lot of points." Yes, points for Cleland and minus points for Broun. Cleland is a triple amputee, wounded in Vietnam, who cannot stand or walk.