THE debate between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio was mostly a festival of platitudes until its electrifying conclusion, when Lazio flummoxed Clinton by challenging her to sign a pledge he brandished from his breast pocket banning the use of soft money in the Senate campaign.

She didn’t do it. And Rick Lazio won the debate hands down.

“That was a wonderful performance,” Mrs. Clinton said, her voice dripping with irony – but there was no need for irony, because while the pledge may have been a gimmick, it gave flesh to Lazio’s claim that he “fights for New York” just as Al Gore’s energetic delivery of his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention gave flesh to his pose as a “fighter.”

His key phrase, obviously tested to death with focus groups, was that he “gets the job done.” And he certainly did last night, in ways that do not in any way distort the facts of his candidacy. Lazio has raised not a soft nickel, while advocates for Mrs. Clinton have already spent $7 million in ads attacking the Long Island congressman.

Mrs. Clinton had the nerve to insist that before she would sign the pledge, she wanted letters from Republican soft-money providers guaranteeing they wouldn’t spend their dollars in New York. Meanwhile, she’s not only spending it herself, she’s getting untold millions in in-kind support from public-sector unions like the hospital workers in Dennis Rivera’s Local 1199.

Will Rivera sign a letter pledging to keep out of the race? You bet he won’t, nor will Mrs. Clinton ask him to – because she needs every phone call he can make and every vote he can squeeze out of his members.

Lazio took great pains to stress his moderate-to-liberal legislative record on disability rights and acid rain, among other things, while Mrs. Clinton spent the bulk of her time exhuming Newt Gingrich from the political graveyard to make her preposterous charge that Lazio is a Newt clone.

“Newt Gingrich isn’t running in this race,” Lazio said forcefully. “I am running in this race.” And he pointed out that she, “of all people,” should not engage in the politics “of guilt by association.” What he did not mention, but should have, is that he was made part of the Gingrich’s leadership team in the House of Representatives expressly to serve as a voice for Republican moderates in the Capitol’s councils of power.

While Lazio did what he had to do last night, the same cannot be said for Mrs. Clinton. When she was forced by circumstance to depart from her scripted blather, she was agonizing to watch.

Moderator Tim Russert showed clips of Mrs. Clinton saying in her infamous “Today Show” appearance in January 1998 that adultery in the White House would be properly a matter of grave concern. You would think this would be something she would have long been prepared to answer, but you would be wrong.

Instead, she rambled: “It is something that I regret deeply that anyone had to go through. I wish that we all could look at it from the perspective of history but we can’t yet. We’re going to have to wait for those books. I’m very hopeful that we can go forward in a united way … I’ve tried to be as forthcoming as I could given the circumstances that I faced. Obviously I didn’t mislead anyone.”

Obviously? The only obvious thing about last night’s debate was that Mrs. Clinton has spent 25 years married to Bill Clinton – and has learned exactly nothing from the master of dissimulation. The debate was a disaster for her.

John Podhoretz’s column now runs every Mondayand Thursday. E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com