DOLE: THE MOVIE, PART II

By MARGARET CARLSON

What do you want to see?" "I don't know, what do you want to see?" That's a conversation I don't mind having on a regular Saturday night, but I'm hoping for something more on my 60th birthday--dinner in Paris, a play in London, an island getaway in Maine. But when you're Bob Dole, trailing in your race for President, even your wife's birthday has to give way to politics. If seeing an All-American hit is what morals consultant and vice-presidential possibility William Bennett orders, then it's off to Independence Day.

At first glance, the selection makes sense. As the biggest movie of the summer, it would resonate with the maximum number of voters. Normal folk buying tickets to the PG-13 film (no sex, please, we're the Doles) and indulging in Goobers and popcorn makes for an excellent photo-op. Culturally clueless--his favorite entertainers, Glenn Miller and John Wayne, are dead--Dole was taken to task after his first Hollywood "nightmares-of-depravity" speech for criticizing movies he hadn't seen and music he hadn't heard. Now that he was planning to do a back flip with a one-and-a-half twist from his earlier position--Hollywood isn't so depraved after all--he needed to do his homework.

So as he emerged blinking into the bright sun from his matinee last Monday, Dole gave a thumbs-up to ID4, not just as diverting summer fare, but--as he later called it--the type of movie that "lifts up our country instead of dragging it down." Of course, those words were written before he actually saw the film. In the version of ID4 that I saw, the country wasn't just dragged down, much of it was demolished by a fire-breathing spacecraft resembling a large piece of pita bread. Millions of our compatriots were blown away in a quite grisly fashion. The First Lady, not a bit like Liddy, was zapped by aliens. There's no explicit sex, but the hero is a commitmentphobe who sleeps with a woman who is not his wife in a house with a small child in the next room.

Singling out ID4 for special praise is as curious as his commendation for True Lies in his earlier Movietown foray. Well, maybe not: both have heroines who strip and both were produced by 20th Century Fox, the studio controlled by Rupert Murdoch, a schlockmeister and heavy G.O.P. supporter who has contributed to Dole.

Rather than get a defining moment out of this stunt, as Dan Quayle did with his allusion to Murphy Brown, Dole hardly got 24 hours before he had to backtrack, admitting that perhaps the movie was too violent for children under 13 or 14, after which attention faded. We may finally be entering a period when flogging values issues creates less and less of a stir. Yes, people are disgusted with vulgar entertainment and its impact on society, and yearn for a simpler time. But to look to government to allay those concerns is to divert it from the things it can do. While the religious right was busy with prayer in classrooms, enforced motherhood for pregnant teenagers and a boycott of Disney, Americans saw their jobs being downsized and their schools falling apart. In any event, it is hardly appropriate for Dole, in the age of real bombs, to be applauding a movie in which the White House blows up (while he's also demanding that the security barriers in front of it be removed). Did he sleep through that part, or does he somehow know he's never going to live there?