Election Year That’s Satirically Incorrect

President Clinton was looking good on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” but it didn’t last.

First came the lead interview by Dan Rather, which found Clinton coolly staking out an above-the-fray position when asked to comment about tough criticisms of him at the recent Republican National Convention. As for that constant sniping at First Lady Hillary? The president gave the impression that he was personally wounded by such attacks, but defended his wife behind an impenetrable wall of noble family values. Very dignified, very presidential, very much the high-road runner.

Then, in something of a rarity for the CBS series, its first segment’s subject resurfaced briefly in the second segment. The topic, illustrated by somber footage of apparent lung cancer victims gasping for air in hospitals, was embattled U.S. tobacco companies expanding their market to China. It was a move that Mike Wallace said GOP presidential hopeful Bob Dole had supported as Senate majority leader, with Clinton later favorably described on “60 Minutes” as being America’s first anti-smoking president.

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Score another one for Clinton. He was on a roll, really cooking. Until. . . .

The third segment.

Clinton was there, too, but not as a hero. This time he was the one smoking--not regular cigarettes, but, uh oh, marijuana.

Well, it wasn’t really him, though the good ‘ol boy voice and caricatured likeness were unmistakably Clintonesque. Instead it was a hybrid of realism and outrageous hyperbole courtesy of “Spitting Image,” the life-sized puppet satire whose departure after more than a decade as a British TV series was being noted by “60 Minutes” in this rerun reported by Morley Safer.

The Clinton excerpt--showing him with a scraggly bunch of lit-up hippies from the 1960s, sputtering, coughing and choking while insisting he wasn’t inhaling--was at once devastating and hilarious.

It was everything that syndicated radio host Don Imus wasn’t in his notoriously wretched monologue that covered First Family blemishes at a televised banquet with the Clintons looking on last March. What you can’t do in their presence, though, you can do to them as puppets, as “Spitting Image” once affirmed by having Clinton unzip his fly to reveal the red, white and blue boxer shorts he was wearing for a night on the town.

This attention to Clinton was not typical of London-based “Spitting Image,” most of whose subjects, from the Royal Family to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her successor, John Major, were British. Everything worked. The writing, voices and puppets were exceptional. And so was the courage of the producers, who believed nothing and no one was sacred.

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If only such bold and devilish political satire were a staple on U.S. television, especially now as the drum roll grows ever louder in advance of the Nov. 5 election. But it isn’t. Those Leno and Letterman one-liners, spongy impressions by mimics, occasional sketches on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and even sharp digs by Comedy Central’s “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher” hardly fill the void.

In fact, there’s been nothing on U.S. television the likes of “Spitting Image”--nothing, that is, except “Spitting Image” itself, which had a wee fling on cable’s Cinemax before delivering a two-part Americanized spinoff that ran on NBC in 1986. It was uniquely brilliant, creating nonpartisan, sidesplitting parodies of celebrities and political figures here, ranging from self-impaling Democrats (portrayed as hypocritical and foolish) to a fawning George Bush and a dysfunctional, infantile President Reagan. One memorable sequence had the president playing with his dog. The dog tossed the ball, Reagan fetched.

Extraordinarily funny, wickedly mean.

Too mean for U.S. television, it seems, for no more “Spitting Image” specials reappeared on NBC after this brief outing, nor did it show up elsewhere in the United States, although a pale, much softer American rip-off, “D.C. Follies,” had a brief life in syndication in the late 1980s.

The common wisdom, apparently, is that U.S. viewers tolerate politicians slashing at each other, but not satirists getting back at those same politicians with slashing wit. Go figure.

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Yet what an opportunity for satire, given that Clinton, Dole and Reform Party candidate Ross Perot and their minions are such plump foils.

“Spitting Image” left the air overseas saying it no longer could outdo the ceaseless burlesque of its most frequent targets, the British royals, the point being that nothing could be written as funny or outrageous as these self-mocking upper-crusts were in real life.

Yet in the United States, political leaders continue to lead with glass jaws that invite shattering in a TV arena where acute lampooning rarely can be found.

Wallace said Sunday that “60 Minutes” offered Dole equal time to rebut the inevitable propaganda from next week’s Democratic convention. If he accepts, though, “Spitting Image” won’t be there posthumously to puncture his balloon as it was with Clinton.