What a gutless wonder Al Gore is turning out to be. Instead of rising to the defense of an administration that deserves to be celebrated, he turns for his running mate to Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a carping Clinton critic. It's a misguided attempt to distance the Gore campaign from Bill Clinton, but what Gore has never understood is that it is Clinton people like, and Gore who bores them to tears.

Clinton is a live one, sometimes too much so, but there is to the man an infectious ebullience implying optimism and change that, by comparison, makes Gore seem asleep at the wheel. Perhaps in desperation to appear relatively awake, Gore has managed to find a vice presidential nominee who is even duller and more sanctimonious than he is.

At a time when the vice president could be--and should be--boasting about the record of the Clinton-Gore years, Gore instead has picked someone whose anti-Clinton sound bites, including attacks on the Clinton health plan, not to mention condemning Clinton before the impeachment proceedings in the Senate, could make up the entire ad campaign for George W. Bush.

The fact is, Clinton has been a great president, presiding over eight years of unprecedented prosperity and progress toward world peace. Under the Republicans, pundits were writing books about the need to learn Japanese. After Clinton, the Japanese are desperate to emulate the US economy.

Clinton has stopped the far right in its tracks, reduced Newt Gingrich to a fading memory and propelled the Republican Party back toward the center, at least in appearance. He did all that despite a reactionary Republican Congress that fights him every inch of the way, denying the man an ounce of credit and continuing to smear his reputation.

Why then should Gore pick as a running mate the very senator who betrayed Clinton at a time when the right-wing jackals could taste the president's blood? Because Lieberman is a Cheney-like concession to the politics of the right. Like Cheney, he is in favor of spending more on defense even as we search the world for an enemy worthy of a battle with the California Highway Patrol. Like Cheney, Lieberman belittles the accomplishments of the public schools and would undermine them with vouchers. Like Cheney, he has joined in the bashing of the entertainment industry for perverting our social values.

It is as a preening moralizer that Lieberman is most obnoxious. He has attempted to outdo his ally, William Bennett, in the culture wars that have censorship as their end game. That was Lieberman's message when he rose to denounce Clinton in the Senate, employing the same arguments as the Christian right moralizers that the president's transgressions were part of a national moral decay brought on by the right's favorite scapegoat, Hollywood. Lieberman said that he had risen many times to make the same point: "That our society's standards are sinking, that our common moral code is deteriorating, and that our public life is coarsening. In doing so, I have specifically criticized leaders of the entertainment industry for the way they have used the enormous influence they wield to weaken our common values."

What were those "common values" embraced by society and Hollywood in the good old days? Racial segregation and anti-Semitism were certainly among them. Jewish actors were compelled to change their names to be accepted on marquees. Hollywood promoted an all-white world in which racial minorities were mocked in the most vicious of ways and, indeed, African Americans, Latinos and Asians were as a rule played by whites.

Racial segregation extended into the ranks of the US military. But that--as well as the denial of the vote to African Americans in the South and tolerance of the blatant discrimination in the North--were taboo topics in Hollywood.

The Democratic Party, it should be recalled, was then run by the same Southern racists whose ideological heirs now form the Republican congressional leadership. Racial, sexual and anti-Semitic barriers at the leading universities, influential private clubs and major places of employment were also rarely commented upon. Even the Holocaust was ignored.

As for sex and violence, who's Lieberman kidding? The gunfights and heaving bosoms of westerns, and the gangster flicks and their slinky molls, have been our major cultural offerings to the world since the time of silent movies.

The Hollywood bashers like Lieberman never explain why the crime rate went way down during the very period when movies and lyrics were supposedly making us more violent. Or that women's rights and their treatment in the home, school and workplace have improved markedly during that same period. Not to forget increased tolerance for gays, who were never permitted to come out of the closet in the old Hollywood. In 1994, Lieberman voted for a Jesse Helms' bill that barred federal funds to schools that used materials "supportive of homosexuality." Did they have Tennessee Williams' plays in mind?

Sure, there is a lot about mass culture that is ugly and degrading, always has been and always will be, because that's the marketplace for you. It's the price we pay for capitalism and unfettered consumer choice, a big price but far less than that paid when the censors take over.

Gore did not need another prude at his side. He already had Tipper.

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