The Yuckster: Bob Dole, after politics.

When the people behind Bartlett's Familiar Quotations consider whether to put any of Bob Dole's utterances in their next edition-he has none in the current one-they'll have plenty of choices. There's the bitter line from the 1988 GOP primaries, spoken to then-Vice President George Bush: "Stop lying about my record." There's one of the great blunders of recent political history, from the 1976 debate with Walter Mondale: "I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans-enough to fill the city of Detroit." A later, self- deprecating quip on this unfortunate statement may itself deserve status as a minor classic: "They told me to go for the jugular, so I did: mine."

Now there's a very late entry: "Easy, boy."

On March 25, during ABC's broadcast of the Oscars, Pepsi unveiled an ad in which belly-baring 19-year-old pop star Britney Spears vamps about shaking her hips, flaunting her cleavage, and singing her tune. Flash to Bob Dole, sitting in an armchair and watching the same commercial. He appears transfixed at the sight of Spears and her come-hither looks. His dog barks. Dole doesn't budge, except to nod and speak two words: "Easy, boy."

It's the sort of double entendre more suited to a cheap sitcom than to a former presidential candidate, and it's hard to imagine, say, Michael Dukakis pulling it off. Dole can, simply because he's universally known not just as a former politician, but as a septuagenarian pitchman for an erection drug.

What a long way we've come since Dole ran for the White House. Back in 1995, he traveled to Hollywood and delivered a bold speech attacking the entertainment industry for its "mindless violence and loveless sex." It was a fight Dole didn't especially need to pick, and it voiced the belief of millions of Americans that contemporary movies and music pander far too much to people's worst urges. Dole's rhetoric soared, in what remains one of the finest speeches of his career: "The mainstreaming of deviancy must come to an end, but it will only stop when the leaders of the entertainment industry recognize and shoulder their responsibility." "The mainstreaming of deviancy"-that's a nice phrase, and a useful one. So it's too bad that Bob Dole, by portraying a dirty old man in a Pepsi commercial, now embodies a trend he once condemned with such eloquence.

Conservatives never were entirely comfortable with Dole as the Republican nominee-

Newt Gingrich once described him as "the tax collector for the welfare state"-but the stoic Kansan nevertheless earned respect on the right for his rugged Midwestern dignity. He was a plainspoken war hero, a gruff member of the Greatest Generation who seemed attractively out of place in the age of Slick Willie. During one of the debates in 1996, Dole even criticized Clinton's manners: "I'm addressing [Clinton] all evening as 'Mr. President,'" he said. "He didn't extend that courtesy to President Bush." Here was a man who probably would have refused to answer the most memorably indecent question of the 1992 presidential campaign: boxers or briefs? Conservatives also admired his loyalty: Dole was capable of resilient partisanship when necessary, and remained faithful to the first President Bush even after they fought through that rough primary in 1988.