The Lessons Of Oprahland

It has come to this: the Washington Post's David Broder, dean of political reporters, last week hit the road to cover... Regis Philbin. Never mind that candidates have been appearing on funny TV shows at least since Richard Nixon said "Sock it to me!" on "Laugh-In" in 1968. Something profound has changed in the way we elect a president. From Mayor Daley to "The Daily Show" in a generation.

Soon sober Jim Lehrer will ask the candidates something that actually relates to the job of running the country. But before I offer up a few curves and sliders for Lehrer to throw at George W. Bush and Al Gore, a kind word for the softball questions and genial patter heard in the battleground entertainment states where this race is now being fought. With a little imagination, voters can actually use the TV cotton candy as a foundation for evaluating the candidates' answers to more substantive questions.

Bush did well with Oprah; it helped that he leaned forcefully into the camera (Gore leaned back, a bit haughtily). Even so, Oprah didn't shy away from the questions about "luck" and "being smart," the touchstones of all the doubts about Bush. The queen of the new kingmakers was too nice to point out that what Bush called the "defining moment" in his life--the birth of his twin girls in 1981--apparently didn't change his behavior immediately. It would be almost five years before he turned 40, quit drinking and started acting like a real grown-up. Despite his success as governor of Texas, the period of his life when he could be considered a serious person has been disconcertingly short, leaving gaps in his preparation for the presidency. Despite his father's foreign-affairs background, which offered Dubya great opportunities to grow intellectually, Bush has traveled overseas only three times in his 54 years. Mexico is the only foreign country he has visited often and knows well.

Only one of Oprah's questions really threw him. When she asked for an example of a time in his life when he felt self-doubt or overwhelmed, Bush stalled (perhaps censoring the time his oil company went bust and his investors got creamed), then answered: when "I got to a place called Phillips Academy, Andover." Think of modern presidents and the challenges they overcame. FDR: polio. Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush: combat. Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton: searing childhoods. Dubya is centered and sane, but it's hard to see where presidential greatness would come from. He may be too comfortable in his own skin. All the great ones had demons and real complexity. With Bush we'd get a Bobby McFerrin presidency, which might work as long as there was no reason to worry or be unhappy or doubt the unerring magic of the marketplace.

Gore is sane, too, but he has demons and complexity, which makes him the risk/reward candidate. He'd be more likely to soar--or crash (or both). He'd save lives with intervention abroad--and probably cost lives, too. Where Bush has too little gravitas, Gore has too much grandiosity, though he tries to hide it. As president, he might well vacillate between being too bold and too cautious, making him both exciting and exasperating.

When David Letterman started asking him about global warming, Gore joked that Letterman was acting like "a wonk." Gore was obviously smart enough not to get too serious; he knows how to make fun of himself. Onstage, he's now moved from a one-speed to a three- or four-speed performance bicycle, learning how to change gears a little better than he once did. But while Gore understood that "Letterman" was a bad venue for proselytizing, we know what the "real" Al Gore would have preferred to do that night had there been no election: preach to millions of people about the Internet or biotechnology or the threat of global warming detailed in his 1992 best seller. His book, "Earth in the Balance," is the truest expression of his political passions, but he feels forced to run away from it.