YOU CAN'T BLAME KANSAS

By CALVIN TRILLIN

IF A CHILDHOOD IN KANSAS IS THE WAY TO EXPLAIN Bob Dole's minimalist approach to public speaking, as we've been hearing lately, how do you account for my sister Sukey? She has spent more years living in Kansas than Dole ever did, and when she's of a mind to, she can talk the eyeballs right out of your head.

Sukey, I hasten to say, is nowhere near Dole's age. She has gained Kansas seniority over him by remaining in the state to sell real estate while he lives in Washington and works in the Senate. In my experience, taciturnity is not a characteristic often found in people who sell real estate, not even in down East Maine, which is the place the people spinning theories about the regional origins of Dole's speech presumably have western Kansas mixed up with.

Dole does speak in public as if he's translating a passage from Morse code into Gregg shorthand, but I don't think that has much to do with his having grown up on the Plains. After all, Senator Arlen Specter was also raised right there in Russell, Kansas, and when Specter reflects on some incidents in his life--say, his bullyboy cross-examination of Anita Hill--he must suspect that he might have been overburdened with the gift of gab.

Another politician off the Plains, William Jennings Bryan, a man who could make Bill Clinton come off as laconic, remained so closely associated with Nebraska that he was sometimes known as "the boy orator of the Platte." (The Smoky Hill River does run through Russell County, Kansas, but Dole has probably lived in Washington too long to be known as "the adult mumbler of the Smoky Hill.")

If geography were truly destiny when it comes to public speaking, clips of Dole campaign appearances would not bring to mind 1992 stump talks by George Bush of Greenwich, Connecticut, whose approach to public discourse inspired me to write, in a farewell poem to him, "Your predicates were often prone/ To wander, nounless, off alone."

The majority leader is said to express himself quite well in conversation with his colleagues, his specialty being what my daughters used to call the harsh snap. Around the time of the Iowa caucuses, I don't think I was the only consumer of campaign coverage who longed for the capacity to trade a few hundred hours of pundit blather for 30 seconds of what Bob Dole was saying about Steve Forbes in private.

At the podium, though, Dole seems to resent having to stand up in front of everyone and pontificate, as if he, a man of some substance, had been reduced by forces beyond his control to acting like some sort of debate-team show-off. He says he's a doer rather than a talker.

As it happens, a presidential candidate dismissing public speaking as so much frippery is the equivalent of someone who wants to make it to the major leagues as a second baseman expressing disdain for the double play. ("If you want a hotdogger, get somebody else.") Public speaking is part of the job.

Think back on the presidencies of people who did that part of the job well: John Kennedy answering a press-conference question on the Van Allen Belt or Ronald Reagan comforting the families of servicemen killed in a Christmas-season air crash or even Bill Clinton, the debate-team show-off himself, talking to black ministers in Memphis.

There are times when Americans need to be reassured or informed or even uplifted by the President. At those times, being a doer means being a talker.