What I thought about for my summer vacation

The summer's major political news was the inability of anointed crown prince Al Gore to get any traction in his campaign for next year's Democratic presidential nomination. Gore's much-vaunted image makeover -- a leaner physique and casual polo shirts -- has actually reduced his viability even further. His old relaxed portliness gave him mass and authority, ` la Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now, with a hyped-up, barking manner and a suspiciously freshened look around the eyes, Gore has lost his soft, slow and Southern sensual appeal. He looks pasty and petty, like a shaved terrier.

Bill Bradley's tiresome, phlegmatic monotone has begun to seem more and more substantive, but his candidacy remains a blank slate to most people outside of New Jersey, which he represented in the U.S. Senate for 18 years. I saw a striking sign of Bradley's potential bipartisan appeal at a family wedding in upstate New York in August: A recently televised Bradley speech was being praised by my older Italian-American relatives -- the very voters whom the Democrats lost in the chaotic late 1960s, when Richard Nixon rode the "law-and-order" issue into the White House.

"Bradley seems presidential," they approvingly remarked -- implicitly acknowledging that the untested Gov. George W. Bush, the likely Republican nominee, does not. If a Bradley nomination can pull these long-disaffected FDR Democrats back to the fold, the Democratic Party will have triumphantly revitalized itself at last.

Another news tidbit from the summer: the preposterous trial balloon of a Warren Beatty presidential candidacy. Much as I adored Beatty in classic films like "Splendor in the Grass" (1961), "The Parallax View" (1974) and "Shampoo" (1975), his track record as a political analyst is pretty dismal, and the evidence of his commitment to public service, or to any group outside his Hollywood coterie, is nonexistent. "Bulworth" (1998), which Beatty directed and starred in, is an awful film, clumsy and manipulative and betraying a grotesquely condescending view of "the people" that is typical of armchair leftism. Warren, please refocus! We need better movies, not gassier politics.

Hillary Clinton's quixotic flirtation with a senatorial candidacy in New York hogged press attention this summer, eclipsing the Gore campaign (perhaps fatally) as well as the pioneering presidential run of Republican Elizabeth Dole -- who, despite her retchingly saccharine persona, deserves a lot more credit for her gritty, sweaty, rumpled take-it-to-the-streets approach, a marked contrast to the cloistered, royalist tour that Secret Service-pampered Hillary is making at taxpayer expense.

As a now-disillusioned early admirer of the Clintons, I contributed a few darts to the Hillary melee via a May interview with Charlotte Hays, editor of the Women's Quarterly of the Independent Women's Forum. The most unexpectedly popular of my remarks seems to have been my description of Hillary's shadowy male cabal -- Harold Ickes, Ira Magaziner, et al. -- as "eunuch geeks," a term Liz Smith seized on to lead off her syndicated column. (With his satiric gift for capturing American speech patterns, Rush Limbaugh did a great imitation of my Brenda Vaccaro-on-a-rampage delivery as he read this extended passage from the interview twice on his radio show.) My most serious charge against Hillary, however, was that she is an "authoritarian" who does not understand how democratic government works.

My favorite TV moment of the summer was philosopher-warrior Christina Hoff Sommers telling the terminally vapid, chokingly mop-tressed rocker Sophie B. Hawkins on the Aug. 16 "Politically Incorrect," "Mother Nature is not a feminist" -- to which Cybele, Astarte and Kali undoubtedly sent up rousing cheers.

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