Stretches and Sighs

By MARGARET CARLSON

A few things led me to mistakenly conclude that Gore had won Tuesday night's smackdown. It was clear that Bush didn't fully understand the peril of making Russia our broker in Serbia, especially since Russia remained so sympathetic toward the defeated Milosevic. The RU 486 question tied him in knots. He didn't want to remind such a large audience that his official position on abortion is to recriminalize it if he can change enough hearts. So he fudged his earlier statement that he would seek to overturn approval of the drug, saying a President is powerless to do so against the Food and Drug Administration. He got lost in a hypothetical financial crisis and said he would hug his way out of a domestic one. On his signature tax cut, he kept criticizing "the man's" (that would be Gore's) "fuzzy math." But when he couldn't rebut the Gore argument that nearly one-half of his tax cut would end up enriching the top 1% of Americans, it was Bush who was fuzziest of all.

So where did I go wrong? My biggest mistake was grossly underestimating the weight that would be given to any Gore exaggeration. Going in, he had been warned by the press that he had used up his lifetime allowance of melodrama with his sister's deathbed story, with his claim to being the model for Love Story (he was in part, the author confirmed, but Tipper wasn't) and with his boast that he took "the initiative in creating the Internet" (although even Newt Gingrich says Gore did so in the Congress). Gore is assumed to be exaggerating even when he's not. We're hypersensitive to the flaw, having just finished seven years with his boss, who really knew how to ice the cake.

Gore served up several juicy targets--that standing-room-only classroom in Florida, Winifred Skinner's picking up cans to buy medicine, his being in Texas during the floods with James Lee Witt. Bush's truth squad quickly put the word out that Gore had not gone with Witt but with FEMA's regional director (although he had gone on 17 other Witt trips to disaster areas). In fact, Kaylie Ellis isn't still standing at Sarasota High School, but her lab built for 24 is squeezing in 36, and other students are still deskless. Kids at that other school Gore mentioned are eating lunch at 10 a.m., not 9:30. And when a well-off son appeared to cast doubt on Winnie's need to recycle aluminum, she reiterated her desire not to take charity from anyone.

In my warped view, Gore fell within the margin of political error by scoring 95% for anecdotal accuracy, although I don't want to suggest for a second that his overall affect, especially the sighing, didn't make me want to shake him. He looked like Sylvester Stallone, absent the Uzi, as made up by Madame Tussaud. The format brought out the worst in him. Put him in front of a podium and out of his Dockers, and he reverts to his smartest-guy-in-the-class mode, impressing the teacher with factoids for extra credit, like Serbia plus Montenegro equals Yugoslavia. His excess verbiage actually detracts from the more important point that he would be better handling the crisis in Serbia.

For Gore, there's zero tolerance for anything but the literal truth. Reagan, the President who told the tallest of tales, won his debate by employing the famous line "There you go again" against Jimmy Carter, who told the fewest tales. Reagan claimed he took pictures of Nazi death camps and was happy like other vets after the war to be able to finally "rest up, make love to my wife...," though he never left the country. Biographers say he got away with it because he was so emotionally accessible. But he was that way only with Nancy (or Mommy Poo Pants, as he calls her in a just published collection of his love letters), not with anyone else, even his children. He was a better actor.

Bush is also seen as more emotionally open, ingenuously self-deprecating, so his larger distortions--about skewing his tax cuts, raising less money than Gore for his campaign, giving more seniors drug coverage--do not annoy people as much. Embellishment takes a certain amount of calculation, and most of Bush's RAM is used up trying to remember who's covered and who isn't under his own Medicare prescription plan. Bush, who boasts of his preference for one-page memos over books, obviously wanted the bell to ring badly on Tuesday night. He affably admitted he needs help, naming everyone but the Texas Rangers bat boy on the list of experts he would call on in a crisis.

In the end, Gore's fibs, which have to do with his life, should matter less to voters than Bush's fibs, which have to do with our lives. At the end of the debate, Gore was showered with affection from his kids and Tipper, which can't be conjured up for the cameras. His utter inability to extend that emotion outward leads him to make up stories, which he then tells in slow motion, to seem more real. In the process, he ends up seeming less so. It's not sincerity he lacks, it's the insincerity to fake sincerity in a league with Reagan. It leaves him speaking so remotely that we can't feel a word he's saying.