Macarena Politics

It's good to see Bob Dole, known for his off-stage humor, lightening up a bit in public. Like President Reagan after he was shot, Mr. Dole bounced back with jokes after that fall off an insecure platform last week. He's fine, so he can take it if we note a difference with the Gipper.

Mr. Reagan said he hoped the doctors were Republicans. Mr. Dole said he was just trying that Democratic dance, the Macarena.

Perhaps he hadn't noticed that his fellow Republicans have been among the most conspicuous hand-flapping, hip-swaying exponents of the Caribbean craze. Dole supporter Gen. Colin Powell looked great doing it. Republican William Weld, governor of Massachusetts, threw himself into it as readily as he threw himself into the Charles River to demonstrate progress against pollution. The main Democratic Macarena dancer, apart from a sea of conventioneers, was Vice President Gore, who did it without visible change in the stance that he says identifies him in a crowd of Secret Service men - he's the stiff one.

We're too vulnerable to join the twitting of Dole for what happened during one of his other lighter moments. He called Los Angeles's great baseball team the Brooklyn Dodgers, which they were in that bygone America he remembers so fondly. After all, in Boston we still think of Los Angeles as 3,000 miles from the ocean. And some of us still love those Boston Braves. They can't be in Atlanta. That's a thousand miles from the ballpark.