PEERING THROUGH THE SMOKE

By ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON

Elizabeth Dole's face was ready to shatter. She was sitting next to her husband while he argued with Katie Couric about smoking--and then argued some more, and some more. "I'm not certain whether it's addictive," Bob Dole insisted, like a mule-stubborn father who won't concede that his smart-aleck daughter is right. Why did Dole dig in so hard on the losing side of the smoking debate? He went through hell to quit the habit, and he used to get into fights with his first wife about her chain-smoking. He even lost his own brother to emphysema--so why play Mr. Tobacco on Today? As the minutes passed and Couric kept at him, he became angrier, knocking the "liberal elite that always buys the Democratic line," accusing Couric of "maybe violating the FEC regulations by always sticking up for the Democrats." Elizabeth Dole swallowed hard. She knew her husband had just invited the entire press corps to tour the dark side of his soul.

Can anyone explain the mystery of Bob Dole? Never mind that he looked into the camera and counseled that "people shouldn't smoke, young or old." What lingered like a two-pack-a-day cough was the clip shown on the evening news of Dole getting testy about the issue. Bill Clinton would no doubt chalk the performance up to Dole's "addiction to tobacco money," but no stack of dollars--not even the more than $400,000 Dole's campaigns and PACs have taken from Big Tobacco during his career--could lure a politician into the kind of trap Dole sprang on himself last week. Off-camera, things were just as surreal. Dole was being stalked by a 7-ft.-tall cigarette named Mr. Butt Man, a Democrat who wheezes and coughs while passing out fake $1 bills emblazoned with a caricature of "Smokin' Bob Dole."

In response, Republicans decided to shower Butt Man with resumes, a none too subtle reference to the White House's own unhealable wound, Craig Livingstone, the White House personnel security chief who resigned in June after his deputy was caught sniffing through the confidential FBI files of some 900 people. Last week it came out that Livingstone's resume boasted of his work as a "Senior Consultant to Counter-Event Operations, Clinton-Gore '92," a fancy way of saying he spent part of that campaign recruiting volunteers to dress up in chicken costumes and taunt George Bush. When the "Chicken George" story broke last week, Republicans behaved as if this kind of cheap political theater were a crime against democracy. "I question the need for such a dirty-tricks operation," said Pennsylvania Republican William Clinger, the House committee chairman investigating the Livingstone flap. Call it Feathergate--and imagine what Clinger's hearings could do with this new scandalette: Mr. Livingstone, are you now or have you ever been an ersatz hen? Tell the committee: What did the President know about Chicken George, and when did he know it?

Dole vs. Couric. Chicken George and Butt Man. Bob Woodward reporting that Hillary communes with Eleanor Roosevelt, and a former FBI man claiming (without evidence) that Bill sneaks out to the Marriott for trysts. The political silly season is upon us--a patch of especially funky Washington weather that is spreading nationwide and reminding Americans why they hate politics. Every election year has one of these strange spells, which always combine high dudgeon and low farce: politicians trading blows over trivial issues while important concerns get reduced to the level of cartoon. What makes this season stand out, however, is the almost complete lack of intellectual honesty being displayed by both sides. But if you peer through the smoke, you can tell a lot about the candidates and their parties by seeing whether they understand the current lessons of the game. Among them:

LESSON NO. 1: IF A STORY HURTS, CUT IT OFF FAST. Dole's tobacco debacle recalls another hapless Republican 20 years ago--President Gerald Ford, who during a 1976 debate with challenger Jimmy Carter denied that Eastern Europe was dominated by the Soviet Union. Ford's campaign manager, James Baker, wanted to immediately correct the mistake, but Ford stubbornly refused--and was hammered for it endlessly. So too Dole, who first remarked in mid-June that cigarettes were not necessarily addictive for all smokers. Instead of correcting himself, as top staff members urged, he dug in deeper, setting himself up as an expert in comparative vice. ("A lot of things aren't good. Drinking's not good. Some would say milk's not good.") It was as if the cunning Clinton adviser Dick Morris had found a way to program Dole's brain, making him take the position that best contrasts with the President's carefully molded save-the-children image. Clinton and Morris will put Dole's tobacco defense to good use. As early as this week, Clinton-Gore will unleash TV spots said to portray Dole as addicted to tobacco money, while Clinton is the strong and independent Good Father. "We weren't planning to go with a tobacco spot for months," says a Clinton media man. "But Dole gives us no choice."

Clinton has been consistent on the subject of kids and smoking--he wants to restrict cartoonish ads, pressure businesses to do away with cigarette machines and classify nicotine as a drug that is subject to federal regulation, all of which Dole opposes. "What I seek to highlight is the difference in our policies," Clinton said last week.

Even so, there's more than a little hypocrisy to the taunting of Dole. Until recently, Democrats were just as dependent on tobacco money as Republicans. The second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Wendell Ford of Kentucky, has reaped $76,057 since 1986, while House minority leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri has received $67,258. The industry's contributions to both parties was fairly even until 1992 when, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, Republicans got twice as much soft money from tobacco interests as Democrats: $1.9 million to $900,000. That gap widened in 1994, when Republicans raked in five times as much as Democrats. In the current campaign cycle, the Republicans have taken in seven times as much-- $3.4 million, vs. $500,000 for the Democrats. But last week the G.O.P. gleefully cited a Wall Street Journal story that showed how the Democratic National Committee was in effect laundering money by directing tobacco lobbies to give to less scrutinized state-party organizations (the D.N.C. denies the charge). The amounts were relatively small, but the message is clear: cigarette money is tough for anyone to kick.

LESSON NO. 2: IF THERE'S BAD NEWS LURKING, LET IT OUT YOURSELF. Like Dole, the White House has had trouble containing its most damaging story. In the FBI-file scandal, by failing to explain who hired Livingstone and by failing to release the delicious fact that Livingstone was a Chicken George co-conspirator in 1992, the White House handed the Republicans an extra week of controversy. "I know, dump it all out fast and make it go away," says press secretary Mike McCurry. "But they're not letting this go away. If we had got the facts out quickly, the Republicans would have investigated our investigation. We had to sit it out." White House officials say they never pulled Livingstone's personnel file and so didn't see his boastful resume, which apparently went in for some title inflation: no one at Clinton-Gore '92 seems to recall a division of counterevent operations. The Chicken George operation, in fact, was cooked up in a Detroit tavern by two unemployed young men, "civilians" unaffiliated with the campaign. Strategist James Carville fell in love with the idea, and field workers like Livingstone began scouting for chicken suits. But when the White House didn't come clean on Feathergate, the Republicans saw an opening. But they tripped over another key rule of silly engagement.

LESSON NO. 3: SELECTIVE LEAKING CAN BACKFIRE. By holding back key information, Republicans tried to capitalize on the Administration's utterly confusing explanations about who hired Livingstone. (The White House pinned the deed on the late Vince Foster, for example, when Livingstone himself testified that he'd never met Foster.) Last week William Clinger sent an outraged letter to Clinton suggesting that George Stephanopoulos had been responsible for the hire. As evidence, he pointed to a 1994 letter from Livingstone to Stephanopoulos that requested that Livingstone be considered for a job as director of the White House Military Office, the outfit that looks after the President's nuclear "football." Clinger said this proved that Livingstone and Stephanopoulos had a "close personal relationship." Clinger, however, chose not to release a note passed between Stephanopoulos and his secretary. The secretary asked what she should do with Livingstone's request. Stephanopoulos' reply: "Nothing."

Another document in Clinger's possession also tends to clear Stephanopoulos of involvement in the hire. Livingstone's resume, a White House source told Time, includes eight names offered as references, many of them mid-level Clinton-Gore operatives. Stephanopoulos is not on the list, which Clinger didn't see fit to release. His partisan ploys just made the scandal seem frivolous.

LESSON NO. 4: SOMETIMES IT PAYS TO BLAME THE PRESS. When Dole went after Couric and the "liberal elite," he was merely falling in line behind the Clinton White House. The week before, Stephanopoulos had gone on a loud campaign to save the soul of American journalism, decrying the responsible news outlets that were rushing to publicize the unsubstantiated gossip and hearsay in the tell-all book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, a "congenital liar," thundered Stephanopoulos, whose story "couldn't get past the fact checker at the National Enquirer." Stephanopoulos had a point, and the mainstream media began slinking away from Aldrich. G.O.P. strategists are now divided about whether to invite Aldrich to testify before their committees.

LESSON NO. 5: THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD; IT'S NOT EVEN PAST. A son of the South like Clinton must know William Faulkner's adage by heart. If it ever slipped his mind, events in Washington and Little Rock would bring it rushing back, along with its political corollary: Don't trip over your skeletons. Livingstone and the Filegate scandal, after all, represent the chaos of Clinton's first year in office swarming forth to infect 1996. So too the current Whitewater trial of onetime Clinton cronies Robert Hill and Herby Branscum, who are charged with defrauding a bank in order to make illegal contributions to Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign, allegedly in exchange for state jobs from Clinton. Voters know politicians reward contributors with sweet government positions; they just don't like to be confronted with the seamy details. That's why Branscum, who gave Clinton a cash infusion during his tight 1990 race and became Arkansas' highway commissioner a few weeks later, is so painful to Clinton, who was scheduled to provide video testimony in the case July 7.

For Dole the past is present any time he loses his temper and the country recalls his snarling performances in long-gone campaigns. Another politician might get away with the side-of-the-mouth accusations Dole made on Today. Not Dole. After the show, one Dole adviser contended that his man "wasn't that bad." He was bad enough.

LESSON NO. 6: TAKE THE LEAD AND KEEP MOVING. Not long ago on the campaign trail, Dole asked reporters not to "worry very much about what I say," because "we're trying to get good pictures." They immediately hammered him about his most vulnerable issues. (Reporters on Dole's plane have been joking that each day's news is a coin-toss: heads, tobacco; tails, abortion.) "Obviously, I could do a better job of covering myself," he complained to CNN last week. "I thought the media were on the plane to cover me."

While Dole has been trapped in a vacuum of his own making--no policies, no message--Clinton has plugged away with two new family-values proposals a week. They are popular, conservative, small-bore measures designed to show his concern over truancy, deadbeat dads, burning churches and whatever else is polling well. "You guys [in the press] don't always pay much attention," says a Clinton adviser, "but people eat this stuff up."

This may help explain why Clinton, despite what Dole calls the "drip, drip, drip" of Whitewater, is still about 15 points ahead in most polls. Voters are making sophisticated, even jaded judgments in favor of Clinton. Half believe the President is misleading them about Whitewater and Filegate, but many don't much care. More than half of Americans approve of Clinton's job performance. Unless he is directly implicated in wrongdoing, voters seem ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. They may not be fully comfortable with him so much as impressed by his ability to stay afloat.

--With reporting by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/ Washington and Tamala M. Edwards with Dole

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE