THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 15, 1996 TAG: 9604150138
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
If Bob Dole has good sense, he will have rehired Mary Matalin by the time this column appears.
He had intended that she have a major role as a campaign strategist. If he doesn't persuade her to withdraw her resignation, word of which was in Sunday's papers, Dole will have hurt his chances of beating Bill Clinton.
In mid-April, having routed all GOP candidates, Dole ought to be left to focus on denouncing Clinton and plotting a fall campaign.
But he is hounded by Republicans objecting to Matalin's marriage to Clinton operative James Carville. Where is their respect for family values on which they harp?
In a note Friday to the GOP command, Matalin, who came aboard last week, noted that her volunteering had proved ``an instant distraction'' to the GOP cause in ``the most important election in a lifetime.''
Just a few hours earlier, Dole had defended her as a friend ``who will do a good job. We are going to win the election.'' Asked if he was bothered that Carville worked for Clinton, Dole smiled and said, ``He has to work somewhere, I guess, or else he'd be unemployed.''
That is Dole at his best, sloughing off Republicans' complaints as if Carville and his job with Clinton are of no consequence. Now he can rehire Matalin and tell the rigidified critics to mind their own business, lest he lose his.
In the 1992 fall campaign, when Republicans were frantic over the success of Clinton and Al Gore in a bus cavalcade around America and George Bush was too tippy-toed diffident to get in a ``campaign mode,'' Matalin jumped into the fray as the second leg of the bus tour was starting.
Ridiculing Clinton's weight problems, she called him ``the one-man landfill'' and alluded to his alleged infidelities as ``bimbo eruptions.''
Republican leaders were gleeful that she had set off the blast on a Sunday without conferring overly much with middle-aged males.
Next day Bush took a high-minded stance against sleaze, which gave the media the chance to air again her charges. It checked Bush's free fall in the polls and obliged Clinton to pause in his issue-oriented campaign and return to trying to efface the image of slick Willie.
Republicans had been sorrowing the loss of Lee Atwater, their devilish operative with the choir-boy face, and they realized they had his protege in lath-thin, raven-haired maven Matalin.
She issued a bristling apology about as contrite as a slap across the chops.
Walking away from reporters pressing him for comment on their star-crossed romance, Carville said, ``You know it was pretty inevitable something like this would happen.''
Irises from him appeared next day on her desk.
Now there's an idea for Dole. by CNB