Can Voters Get Their Money Back?

The other night I sat entranced watching a program on a new workout contraption that a very sincere man assured me would improve my “hard-to-get-at ab muscles.” I wanted one. It was only the next morning that I even thought to question the necessity of perfect ab muscles and to wonder whether that was a news show I had been watching or an infomercial.

That pretty much sums up my feelings about the second and mercifully final presidential debate. Thank goodness Bill Clinton is so telegenic or it would have been truly unbearable. But I’m a sucker for the pause for reflection, the concerned lip-biting bit and the great eye contact that have come to define the president’s winning style. Late at night, and after a few beers, he could sell me anything. I smile when he talks. And you better believe that I want to use my tax dollars to force every 12-year-old in the land onto the Internet and across that bridge into the next century.

Without whatever it is that Clinton is selling, we are just going to remain stuck in this century while other nations pass us by. Being stuck in this century is even worse than having flabby abs. No one can communicate this message better than Clinton, who is a natural born infomercial president, and that’s what the fall schedule demands.

The Bob Dole show is just no competition in the rating sweeps. It’s an out-of-focus black-and-white soap opera that flickers out just when we may be getting to the good part. Will Dole reach back into the character quiver, select the meanest of the charges and shoot an arrow straight through that liberal’s heart?

Lord knows he tried. Dole fired poison-dipped arrows every chance he got--trust, patriotism, pardons, FBI files, affirmative action, gay marriages, flag desecration, school prayer and drugs at the border--but nothing hit the target. He even fired the B-2 bomber at Clinton and missed.

In the end, Dole couldn’t play Evil the way Newt Gingrich and George Will wrote it. Although I thought it was a bit tacky when Will, who obviously had his own contract renewed by ABC, demanded that Dole be fired even before the fall season had come to an end. You just don’t do that to a colleague, even if he is old.

Not that I would watch the Dole show in syndication. I can’t bear the idea of reruns of him going back half a century handing out welfare checks to no fewer than three of his grandparents. Or the tension of not knowing, will he or will he not, kill Social Security, which is the only thing his poor late mother had. Am I the only viewer left wondering why, with a lawyer son in Congress, Mom was so hard up? Or, if his grandparents were deserving of welfare, why poor people alive today are not? Clinton could sell me on that one, but Dole just doesn’t have his contemporary style.

Which is what the moguls who pay for all this want. Somebody young, hip or, if that’s too far out, at least a baby boomer with good demographics. How do I know this? Just look at the money now pouring into the Clinton dream-works otherwise known as the Democratic Party. No one has told Dole the bad news yet, but those corporate jets he’s been flying on will no longer be at his disposal. The big money guys “trust” a winner and that ain’t Dole. But just to cover their bets, a lot of development money is still flowing into Republican congressional side shows.

Hey, it’s a business after all, and the “talent” is interchangeable. The only ones who might grumble are the folks in that studio audience who asked those thoughtful questions. Who hired them? They could have ruined the whole show. John and Jane Q. Public are supposed to be extras; they can’t be trusted with speaking parts. Like Peter Jennings said, the range and seriousness of their questioning was “embarrassing” to professional actor reporters.

Anyway, soon it will be a new season and there’s lots of money to be made for Indonesian bankers, Gallo winemakers, trial lawyers, Archer-Daniels-Midland and the tobacco lobby; they’ll get their market share no matter which party wins. So what if the show called “democracy” is vapid, with plots that are stale? Just give us voters a few beers and we’ll be happy, particularly if that fellow Clinton’s on. He’s got this new high-tech gadget, made from recycled stealth bombers, that will give us the ab muscles we need to lift the country into the next century.