GOODBYE TO WHATEVER MAN

By MARGARET CARLSON

It hurts so bad. It was O.K. when Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon blamed liberal media bias for their troubles. But to hear that from Bob Dole, after all we did for him, it really hurts.

Bob Dole knows that Bob Dole is being unfair here. To the extent that the Washington media like anyone, they like Dole. Forget the simple man from Kansas. Bob Dole is one of us--hothouse specimens of the genus Beltway, with nearly identical customs, habitats and native costumes. We ate the same Senate bean soup (on the menu since around 1903 and still only $1 a bowl) and grazed at the same receptions. We overlooked the fact that he seldom spoke a complete sentence or used a personal pronoun--and I'm not just talking about I, but also he, she or it--recognizing that he had so mastered his craft that the mother tongue was no longer a sufficient form of expression. Dole saying in Hill Esperanto that S.R. 32 had been marked up and would be fixed in committee was music on the Sunday-morning talk shows, for which he held the record for the most appearances. When he cut deals, he told us he was making deals, so no big deal. He could be snide and cynical--just like us! When we wrote that Dole was mean for zinging that tinny lapdog George Bush (so labeled by George Will), we meant it as a compliment.

It's true that when Dole resigned and traded in his tie for leisure wear, we were temporarily thrown off balance. But we snapped right back when he said that if his resignation had leaked, he wouldn't have done it. Now, that's our guy. When he threw red meat to his right wing, he winked and said he was hitting "wedge issues" so we would know that he was aware of how craven it was. By the time he was handing out deodorant for the 96-hour torture tank, Dole had resumed his visits to the press section at the back of the plane, which had been cut off after a summer of gaffes. Even when he subversively confided that he couldn't afford to "have fun anymore," we understood.

Until the end, he kept railing against the New York Times. When you think of what they could have run in the daily "In His Own Words" section--and I'm thinking of "When he [Strom Thurmond] ate a banana, I ate a banana," or, in a glass factory, "blow in, blow out, blow whatever"--he got off easy. By the way, the word whatever?--he got it from us.

Funny how the little things we shared turned out to be liabilities outside the Capitol, where those real people we hear so much about like full sentences and stories of picture-perfect holidays (not a tree in the lobby of a Bal Harbour, Florida, condo and mail-order frozen steaks for his only child, back in suburban Virginia). Instead, Dole lives in a three-room apartment in the Watergate, where room service is just a call away, with a wife who looks younger than his daughter. The Doles are apart so much they fax each other their schedules--the kind of yuppie coping the peripatetic press can identify with. We'd forgotten that outside the cocoon of the Senate, his life might look shrunken and inadequate.

Dole finally calmed down, remembering perhaps that it was the press that anointed him the inevitable candidate. Don't know how he feels; probably won't say. But from us: sorry we won't have you around anymore. Really.