THE UNKNOWN CANDIDATE : Wanted: 1992 Democratic Presidential Hopeful. Must Be Able to Define ‘Liberal.’

So Gov. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia has succeeded in clearing his good name of the ugly slander that he was considering running for the 1992 Democratic Presidential nomination. It was a cruel and thoughtless charge, the kind of allegation that could render an otherwise decent man a pariah in his community.

The Democratic nomination, after all, is damaged goods. Its street value must be less than the rerun rights to “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Being one of our two major parties’ candidates for election to the highest office in the land is not only no longer a privilege, it’s a sentence to a lifetime of ridicule and obloquy, the sort of thing the Justice Department might seek as fit punishment for Manuel Noriega.

Simply losing could not bring a party so far down so fast. In the ‘60s, the Republicans suffered two losses--a squeaker and a drubbing--and still hotly contested the next nomination. The Democrats must have done something to make their top prize sink in value faster than a Charles Keating junk bond.

And they have done something. More accurately, they’ve forgotten to do something--like be an opposition party. Never recovering from their astonishment that America actually fell for Ronald Reagan, they spent the last decade hoping it was all a bad dream. They roused themselves only to read the polls and then, with a shudder, they nodded off again.

Poll reading is a well-known sleeping aid for timorous liberals. Zev Yaroslavsky read a poll that told him Tom Bradley was unbeatable and, just like that, he retreated from the last non-race for mayor into well-earned dormancy. A week later, the Far East National Bank white-out scandal came to light in a now-dark newspaper. But nobody told the people in the poll that the Herald was going after His Honor’s hiney.

It’s not just politicians who enjoy a cojonectomy under the knife of the genial Dr. Gallup. At a dinner in Washington in the mid-’80s, a respected White House correspondent for a then-respected network was spinning disturbingly amusing anecdotes about the foibles of Ronald the Elder. Handed one of those opportunities you dream about, I asked the correspondent why he didn’t report any of this stuff to, oh, let’s say the American people. “Come on,” he said, with the tone of a man who knew his audience’s attitude index all too well, “they don’t want to hear any of this. They love the guy.” A reporter who insisted on the less-than-lovable truth might find his own poll numbers heading south. Better to lay low, and get some cosmetic surgery.

Amid these profiles in courage, the Democratic Party still stands proud and--well, timid and short. The liberal embodiment of that phrase was the lately unlamented Michael Dukakis. When Ted Koppel asked for his definition of the dreaded “L-word” of 1988, Dukakis scrambled to say that, like any sensible person, he was liberal on some issues and conservative on others. And he was, at that very moment, working on being undecided on the rest.

It is possible to construct a plausible and unashamed statement of something that might be called liberalism. A liberal, some imaginary candidate might say, believes that the money that deregulation sent spinning through crooked S&Ls; into the construction of thousands of empty office buildings should have been spent on schools, bridges and trauma centers. A liberal thinks that, as magic as the marketplace may be, it often has trouble coming up with either rabbits or hats beyond the end of the next fiscal quarter. A liberal is not embarrassed to be disturbed that, during the 1980s, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. A liberal thinks the Cold War ended because Gorbachev, watching his economy have a near-death experience, got out of the empire business, not because Ronald Reagan bought every weapons system with a capital letter in its name. A liberal is not reassured by the fact that most of the nation’s airlines are using Chapter 11 as their major hub.

You don’t have to agree with any of this. Me, I’m liberal on some issues, conservative on others. But you might notice that this is the kind of critique the Democrats have rarely dared to speak aloud. Who’d want to be the candidate of a party whose most heartfelt attack on the incumbent President is that his last TV spot was unfair? Not even a Rockefeller.