t is a sad thing when the sight of a man kissing his lawfully wedded wife gives rise to unworthy thoughts. But when Vice President Gore grabbed Tipper and went into a deep and prolonged smooch with her, I was instantly reminded of the words that Oscar Wilde puts into the mouth of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest: "The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public."

To be sure, the Brits — and in this context Wilde must be reckoned a Brit — are made notoriously uncomfortable by the sight of married couples expressing affection for each other. There were raised eyebrows in London when President Reagan and Nancy were found holding hands. The commonly expressed view was: Surely they should have got over that sort of thing by now? But nobody doubted that it was real affection being expressed; nor suspected that they were holding hands in order to be seen and photographed.

Alas, Al Gore is such a scripted politician, and the Democratic campaign machine so reluctant to leave anything to chance, that the unworthy thought forced itself into one's mind: I wonder how they did the focus group on this?

Did Al and Tipper personally kiss in front of a demographically accurate cross section of the electorate? Or were look-alikes employed? Did they try out different positions? Or several lengths of time? And did the responses — from the focus group, that is, not from Tipper — vary significantly according to ethno-cultural background? ("The imam from Dearborn is definitely switching to the Republicans; and the woman from Wellesley is switching to Nader; but Al scored big with every stay-at-home soccer mom from every Dullsville in the whole of flyover land who identifies with Tipper. Oh, sorry, Mrs. Gore.")

An unworthy suspicion perhaps, but surely a reasonable one. After all, before the convention, the vice president's weakness in the polls was attributable to two factors: First, he scored very badly among white voters; and, second, this low score was not offset by the "gender gap" — i.e., the strong lead among women voters that recent Democratic presidential candidates have usually enjoyed.

One can imagine how unfair this must have seemed to Gore. Here he is, an apparently faithful married man, loyal to Tipper and devoted to his children; yet women voters were remaining firmly resistant to his respectable charms even as they clearly still pined for Bad Boy Bill Clinton, the White House womanizer, or began drifting away to another rake, albeit a reformed one, in the person of George W. Bush.

Nor was there a great deal he could do in the way of policy to win them back. All that his "women's issues" advisers advised, he had already either promised or performed — up to and including a pledge to allow a pregnant woman on death row to exercise her right to choose by either delaying or not delaying her execution until her child was born. He could list these commitments in his acceptance speech, as he relentlessly did, but he could hardly add to them in any significant way.

Was there anything left? Well, he could make a different sort of appeal to the women's vote. He could go after the Lifetime television audience by making himself the hero of their daydreams. He could become a Harlequin hero for a day.

What, you don't see Al Gore as the romantic hero of a bodice-ripper? Too cold, too calculating, too policy-wonkish? But there are two sorts of Harlequin hero. The first is the Mr. Rochester figure, dark, brooding, sensuous, and above all dangerous. Mr. Rochester is the ravishing hero who carries off the heroine to a fate worse than death despite her protests and in line with her secret desires. Well, back in England I knew Mr. Rochester; Mr. Rochester was a friend of mine; and I can tell you that Al Gore is no Mr. Rochester. Besides which, playing up to the dark fantasies of the Lifetime audience is much too risky a strategy for any candidate today, especially one in political hock to the National Organization for Women.

The second kind of hero is another matter altogether — Dobbin in Vanity Fair. Dobbin is the loyal, dependable, loving man to whom the chastened heroine returns after Mr. Rochester has abandoned her in the slums of Naples with debts, a child, and no return ticket. The heroine naturally saves Dobbin in return; she saves him from terminal dullness.

A hero like Dobbin may still be able to win women's hearts simply by sticking around for the long term. Husbands come and go these days. The more this happens, the more married women (and men) fear it will happen to them, and the more they will be moved emotionally by clear evidence that a particular husband is home for good. The best sign that a husband is not about to take French leave is a clear demonstration that he still loves his wife — not is fond of her, not thinks of her as a comfortable old shoe, but fancies her sexually in the most obvious and straightforward way. Mr. Gore duly provided a demonstration of this.

It is not hard to imagine the collective sigh in the living rooms of America as Al and Tipper went into their clinch. Husbands would have sighed along too, some from the calculation that it would do them no harm to go along with this, others because they have gradually yielded to the feminization of American culture, feel the need to get in touch with their feelings, and guess that this must be what is meant. Only pre-adolescent boys would have remained stony-faced. In any event, the polls are now in — and the vice president's stock has soared with women voters. It was the Kiss Heard 'round the World.

About the only comfort we can draw from this is that if America were facing real, dangerous, and recognizable problems, then a kiss would be just a kiss. If our present politics seem to be shaped under Bill Clinton by Jerry Springer and now under Al Gore by Oprah, that is largely because Americans are enjoying a long vacation from serious anxieties. And while peace and prosperity hum along, Americans will feel that they can afford to choose political leaders on the principle of niceness. But a major terrorist attack, a serious "correction" in the market, a sudden rise in inflation or unemployment, a provocative move by China against Taiwan — and the voters would start asking serious questions and expecting serious answers. If they did not, we would then have to ponder the fate of an earlier Republic. As Browning wrote:

As for Venice and her people, merely
born to bloom and drop,
Here on earth they bore their fruitage,
mirth and folly were the crop:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when
the kissing had to stop?