Easy, Breezy, Beautiful Cover Guy

Bob Dole should not have to play hide-and-seek about a nip-and-tuck.

The ever so taut 74-year-old should not have to put up with gossip columnists slipping in back of him to look for scars behind his ears.

Of course the man is going to deny having a face lift. Didn’t he deny during the ‘96 campaign that tobacco was more addictive than milk?

In a capital where President Clinton’s second term has been pronounced moribund and the issue du jour is a snooze called fast track, speculation over Bob Dole’s facial transformation has feverishly filled the void.

In Hollywood, bandaged plastic surgery patients have coming-out-of-the-hospital parties. But in Washington, appearance consciousness has always been frowned upon as frivolous.

To clothe their quest for a cosmetic scoop with high-toned purpose, gossip writers say that Dole should fess up to “demystify” male face lifts, just as he helped demystify prostate operations by talking about his during the ‘96 campaign.

But for me, the issue isn’t whether he had plastic surgery. (Even his oldest friends don’t believe his lame line about looking so different because he lost 12 pounds and had a couple of moles taken off.) The issue is why he did it.

And that’s the beauty part. Bob Dole did it because he really, really wants to be first lady.

Even as mean and adder-tongued as he can be at times, Dole would certainly be one of the nicest first ladies we’ve had in recent memory.

He never really seemed comfortable trying to be president. But when he talks about playing Denis Thatcher to Liddy’s Iron Magnolia, he sounds as if he means it. Trophy wife shtick suits the Kansan’s subversive, black humor.

“I am going to take one of these little bells with me and put it on my wrist, so they know that I’m there,” he told The New Yorker, spinning out a scenario where he is the first male first lady. “I want a car and a driver, and that’s all I want. Just call me for all the official dinners. I’ll be in charge of the entertainment and the movies.”

He added, on “Meet the Press,” that he’d need a beeper, “in case somebody leaves me behind.”

The notion of surgery seemed a little out of character at first. I had a mental image of Dole as the sort of sardonic, Lettermanesque guy who would sit back in his majority leader’s office with Alan Simpson. “Aagghhhh,” he would say, making vicious fun of seamless pretty boys like Dan Quayle.

But on the other hand, he was the George Hamilton of the Senate, spending so much time bronzing on his Capitol balcony that it was dubbed “Dole’s Beach.” In ‘96, he seemed far more interested in sun decks than rope lines.

He must have reckoned that while his old look worked OK for a World War II veteran running for president, a millennial spouse has to be sleek and perky.

He’s given up that bridge to the past for a graft to the future. He’s traded in all that old Glenn Miller, ice-cream-social, crusty, stammering authenticity for the narcissistic boomer obsession with turning back the clock.

Unfortunately, face lifts usually don’t make people look younger, just tighter, with the smooth skin and tilted eyes of space aliens.

On “Meet the Press,” Dole did not have his old appealing range of facial expressions. His aw-shucks smile was excruciatingly tight.

Like actors, politicians face a dilemma on plastic surgery. They want to look young and attractive, but if they have a face lift, they risk limiting the mobility of their instrument.

A Hollywood producer I know wanted to hire a famous - and much altered - actress. But first, without telling her, he tested her with a list of questions designed to make her laugh or get irritated, to see if she could still express any emotions.

But Bob Dole can be forgiven a little vanity in his quest to get to the White House solarium.

At least we wouldn’t have to worry about this presidential spouse “borrowing” any designer clothes. He seemed perfectly happy in the same Johnny Carson powder blue jacket all through the ‘96 race.

And any attempts he made to grab health care from President Dole would be reassuring; the guy knows domestic policy and he knows how to make a deal. Though it seems unlikely he’d try to be a co-president. After all, he didn’t seem to want the job even when he was running for it.

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