The Dole Spectator/Leave Him Alone
York, Byron
Leave Him Alone by Byron York L ately conservative political activists have been falling over each other in a rush to kill the presidential candidacy of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. One insider...
...Favorites like Quayle, Bennett, Cheney, and Kemp aren't running—and conservatives can't seem to bear the man who woos them most ardently, Texas Senator Phil Gramm...
...They've seen this happen before...
...The moderate Dole, the whispers say, doesn't stand a chance of being elected...
...Dole was "mean" and Byron York is a writer and television producer in Washington...
...86 The American Spectator December 1995...
...No more Mr...
...He is still pulling, although it is hard for an outside observer to know why...
...Does anyone remember Ronald Reagan denouncing abortion and then not doing too terribly much about it, beyond speaking—by phone, not in person—to the yearly Right-to-Life rally...
...So for the moment they've turned their attention to Colin Powell...
...Dole knows a presidential candidate has to knit together an almost impossible coalition of people with an almost impossible number of interests...
...Infections and blood clots almost killed him several times as 1945 passed, then 1946, then 1947...
...So he pays lip service to some...
...Later, when Clinton came to power, it was back to Bad Old Bob...
...Dole seems resigned to doing it...
...Certainly it is sometimes embarrassing and painful to see the price he's willing to pay to win, especially given the puny stature of some of his opponents...
...But conservatives have no use for him...
...Nor have they mustered much enthusiasm for any of the other politicians chasing the Republican nomination...
...He was the GOP hatchet man of the '70s...
...For liberals, Dole again became the bulwark against the radicals, this time the ones running the House...
...but he would just keep on...
...Does anyone think Colin Powell or anybody else running for president wouldn't do the same sort of thing...
...One insider reports that anti-Dole whisperings dominate inside-the-Beltway gatherings, from Grover Norquist's breakfasts to Paul Weyrich's lunches to R. Emmett Tyrrell's dinners (and perhaps even between meals...
...But he goes on, fighting at age 72 for something he most likely won't ever get...
...Now here was somebody the liberal press could hammer, and almost at once the daily parade of stories lamenting the rise of extremism focused on the new Speaker of the House...
...For years Dole has suffered from the label "moderate...
...In the '80s he became the voice of Republican reason who tried to talk sense into those Reagan zealots...
...He voted to raise taxes in hopes of avoiding the horrendous deficits that came anyway...
...But Dole needs conservative support...
...He was too willing to make deals with Democrats...
...How could a Reaganite true believer not hate him...
...And to get elected you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle, because only about four percent of the nation's voters are on the extreme right wing...
...Mean...
...His mother would say, "Bob, don't you want to rest...
...What to do...
...A Dole White House and a Gingrich Congress might be the type of divided government a conservative could learn to love...
...How characteristic...
...At the same time the mainstream punditocracy has alternately embraced and vilified Dole...
...ith so many people arrayed W against him—except, so far, the voters—Dole seems to be slipping...
...Why, he could have been killed...
...As his hero, Richard Nixon, told him, "You have to run as far as you can to the right, because that's where forty percent of the people who decide the nomination are...
...It's impossible to answer that question without asking another: Why do they hate Bob Dole...
...That was the last straw for Dole's conservative enemies...
...He was notoriously suspicious of ideologues at a time when ideologues came to dominate his party...
...Does anyone remember his straight-faced appeals for a Balanced Budget Amendment...
...The current occupant of the White House, for example, has to peddle stories to a women's magazine about being in the room when his step-daddy took a potshot at his mama...
...It's a tradition...
...He couldn't move, had no feeling in most of his body, and lay for months in a body cast...
...Maybe that's what it takes...
...That's not quite in the league of a genuinely courageous man like Dole...
...But then Newt Gingrich burst into power...
...cold" and lacked the compassion that Democrats had in such great supply...
...Just read Richard Ben Cramer's astonishing portrait of the young Bob Dole in What It Takes.' Cramer describes Dole, grievously wounded in World War II, returning to Russell, Kansas in 1945...
...Who knows...
...He didn't buy into supply-side in the early '80s...
...now they really can't stand him, because the people they hate have again begun to like him...
...So, in one of the terrible rituals of politics, he is courting the activists who view him with contempt, signing their pledges, bashing Hollywood, and rejecting a donation from the Log Cabin Republicans...
...They've always distrusted his moderation...
...II 1 The Dole section of this 1992 book about six presidential contenders is now available in a new paperback edition entitled Bob Dole (Vintage Books, 165 pages, $11...
...After first revealing himself to be essentially a New Democrat, a sort of Clinton with character, Powell now appears to be tailoring his message to appeal to the right...
...And that's a shame, because Dole's experience and skills—after all, he really does know how to make a deal—could be quite useful in the presidency...
...Later, when he got better, he worked days and nights pulling on ropes and weights set up in the backyard, trying to make his arm work again...
...In those years, Dole often looked at the other disabled veterans in his hospital ward and struggled with a nightmare vision: "Sometimes," Cramer writes, "he could actually see himself on Main Street, Russell, in a wheelchair, with a cup...
...Some of them are buying it...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
