You don't have to be a right-winger to agree with Bob Dole that America used to be better. That elderly hippie Dr. Benjamin Spock, apostle of disarmament, macrobiotics, daily meditation, and weekly group therapy, was himself an eyewitness to the time of "tranquility, faith and confidence and action" that Dole evoked in his acceptance speech, and Spock too regrets its passing. Born in 1903, he has seen in his lifetime "a progressive coarsening" of speech and entertainment and a "souring of many commonly held beliefs." In every decade of the century, he wrote two years ago in A Better World for Our Children, there have been enormous changes, some for the good but, "in retrospect, even more . . . harmful." Our leftie friends shouldn't worry, though, about dispensing parental pabulum from inside the world of Benjamin Spock; even though the book is subtitled Rebuilding American Family Values, Spock largely blames Republicans for everything that's gone wrong in America ever.