Bozo's Nightmare; Raiders of the Lost Raiders; Up Tahir

Clinton resolved the issue by deciding on his own that he would go. That's why you'll see him addressing audiences in Los Angeles and the Bay Area this week. But both Clinton and those who favor his participation agreed it would be wise to target his campaigning. Clinton would stay apart from Gore and appear only at "get out the vote" efforts. "Get out the vote" is the Democratic Party's euphemism for "get out the black vote," and Clinton is going to show up primarily before black audiences, with maybe a few hyperfeminists from L.A.'s west side sprinkled in for fundraising purposes.

There is only one way of reading this: The Gore campaign is worried that any time Clinton appears before a demographic group that is not reliably 90 percent Democratic, he risks losing votes. What a shocking admission of defeat. And what will Clinton say to such audiences? After years of complaining that every Republican issue?education, anticommunism, crime?was simply a way to "inject race into politics," Democrats now face an opponent who avoids racially tinged issues as if they'll give him the clap.

So what do the Democrats do? They use all their resources to racialize the campaign themselves. The NAACP ran an "independent-expenditure" ad featuring the daughter of James Byrd, the black man dragged to his death behind a truck in Texas. The younger Byrd opined that when Gov. Bush failed to sign a second Texas hate-crimes law?merely consenting to execute James Byrd's killers?it was as if her father were being dragged to his death all over again. Even Al Gore himself is pushing this line in speeches: "It was his state where James Byrd was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck." If Clinton takes this line, is it going to help?

Raiders of the Lost Raiders As much as they seek to stoke black turnout, Democrats' efforts to suppress Ralph Nader's vote?almost all of which comes out of Al Gore's hide?have been truly prodigious. Those enlisted for trips to the upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest include Congressmen John Conyers, Robert Wexler and Barney Frank; Sens. Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone; Jesse Jackson, Melissa Etheridge, Martin Sheen, Rob Reiner, Gloria Steinem, Robert Redford and Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Michelman's involvement is particularly interesting, because Nader is a direct threat to her. He's running against her corrupt style of issue-advocacy every bit as much as he's running against a corrupt two-party system. Aside from a few direct-mail operations, there isn't a foundation in Washington more expressly set up to shake down gullible Middle Americans to win power and influence?not so much for its principles as for its principals. Because, as Nader is honest enough to admit, there is no threat to abortion rights coming from anywhere in this country. Republicans persist in appointing such pro-choicers as Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to the Supreme Court. But even if the Court were to consist of five Clarence Thomases and four Antonin Scalias, there would be nothing it could do to stop Congress and the states from legislating their own abortion laws?which they'd do in a heartbeat if Roe v. Wade were ever overturned.

Nader told CNN's Judy Woodruff as much, when she brought up NARAL's Bush-would-end-abortion ads: "Democratic politicians," he said, "are scaring the women's movement on that issue. I've heard from so many Republican operatives who say to me privately, 'If the Republican Party is ever responsible for reversing Roe v. Wade, it would destroy the party.'"

The assumption Democrats bring to their anti-Nader effort is that Naderites are basically garden-variety leftist hypocrites, only a bit more vain and attention-seeking, and that once they're convinced a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, they'll prefer the party that pretends to protect the poor. In some cases the Democrats are right. Greg MacArthur, the billionaire heir who sponsors the eponymous "genius grants," has been spending hundreds of thousands to rally the troops to Nader. He now says he'll spend the money only in states where Gore is not threatened, and he has pulled the plug on his ads in California.

But Democrats may not be right about Naderite hypocrisy in all cases. That's why, in a fascinating twist, the Republican Leadership Council this week began airing ads in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington?which, along with California, Maine, Michigan and Minnesota, are the states where Gore's people are beginning to sweat the Nader candidacy.

Dumbo One ploy that's definitely not going to work is this Gore use of surrogates to attack Bush's intelligence. Yes, Bush is slow, and I can say that?but Gore can't. Bush is dumb only for a politician; he's smarter than the median voter. So the median voter is going to watch some Al Gore shill talk on national tv about what a dope Dubya is. And said median voter is going to think: "If Gore thinks he's dumb, what does he think of me and the wife and kids?"

The most subtle example of the Dumbo attack came from Treasury Secretary Laurence Summers, who asserted that Bush's Social Security plan reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding of the retirement program." But it's not going to work either, because it's Summers who misunderstands. Look: Either Bush understands budgets and programs, or he doesn't. If he does, then he's far ahead of most presidents on the eve of office?far ahead even of Clinton, who, according to Michael Waldman's White House memoir POTUS Speaks, had a great knack for turning complex economics into simple narratives, yet little mastery of deep economic points. If, on the other hand, Bush doesn't understand the budget, then who came up with his plan for him? That would be former Fed governor Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's top economic adviser, whose resume looks so startlingly similar to Larry Summers' that if they were journalists one would be prosecuted for plagiarism.

Besides, Gore's economic plan doesn't meet the smart test itself. The Washington Post was taken aback to hear Bush describe Gore as a big spender. But "big spender" sounds like a pretty good description of a guy who proposes a trillion dollars in new entitlement spending, and whose plan for saving Social Security is to blow the next 15 years of surpluses, and then dip into general revenues (i.e.?raise taxes through the roof) to make up the shortfall once the inevitable deficits start.

And it didn't exactly inspire confidence last week when Gore, trying to explain how big a trillion-dollar tax cut was, burst out, "?a million billion dollars!" There actually isn't a million billion dollars in the whole world.

Up Tahir Competition in any stupidity contest gets intense as Election Day nears and people begin to run on two hours' sleep. My own prize goes to Jerry Falwell, who told Geraldo Rivera: "I have not seen the religious right, the religious conservatives, as energized as they are right now since Reagan days." If he keeps that up, the Democrats won't need Bill Clinton to get out the vote. The revelation that Hillary held Muslim holiday parties at the White House and took $50,000 from a group called the American Muslim Alliance, which has supported both Hamas and Hezbollah, doesn't mean she's stupid?only that she's devious. The explanation that her spokesman Howard Wolfson gave for the "mix-up" surrounding the White House visits ("I would hope [it] would mainstream their views") doesn't mean that he's stupid?only that he thinks we're stupid.

No, the stupidest Falwell-style crowing in the Hillary camp came from Tahir Ali of the American Muslim Alliance itself, who said he wasn't bothered at all by Hillary's attacks on Yasir Arafat. "The idea is to win the election," said Ali. "She must change her tune. But that doesn't mean anything. It's just at the spur of the moment that she must say these things, and we understand that."