Dole, the GOP, and the Genetically Endowed
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Dole, the GOP, and the Genetically Endowed By John Podhoretz Last week, a 72-year-old man decisively took the reins of a party that has lately completed a little-noted but stunning transformation....
...I dee-jay at a club on my days off...
...And these surprises were overshadowed by a metasurprise: the fact that it was Dole pulling off the surprise...
...And that is why what Bob Dole did last week was so important...
...Their role is, in part, to defend the traditional structures of American life against the sustained attack over the past four decades by cool itself-for it is cool's ceaseless desire for novelty and its loathing of the everyday that have helped atomize the institutions that stabilized and enhanced bourgeois life...
...I have been there before, I have done it the hard way, and I will do it the hard way once again...
...And besides, conservatism and Republicanism aren't really cool, nor should they be...
...If pop culture was proving slow to acknowledge the political and ideological shift in American life, it would come around eventually-naked commercialism would demand it...
...The Genetically Endowed rarely become president for the same reason that they are rarely good conversationalists-they have nothing to prove, and they don't have to work at being interesting, because people gravitate to them naturally...
...They are a lagging indicator-a sign of predominance...
...The Genetically Endowed are aristocrats at the most basic, deoxyribonucleid-acid level, and they have effected a change in the character of the conservative cause...
...Remember how we thought we were never going to make it...
...One of the reasons that, as Dole himself said, his victory began to seem unattainable is that the Bob Dole we had seen before could not win the presidency...
...Which is why, finally, Bob Dole truly became their candidate and their leader last week when he said: "This is where I touch the ground, and it is in touching the ground in moments of difficulty that I've always found my strength...
...Now that the Republican party and conservatism have attained ideological and electoral ascendancy, they do not have the pessimist's luxury of the long view...
...He certainly has done it the hard way, but most people in the Republican party-most Americans- have not...
...like everyone else, they believe they have a tough life...
...When these things all come together, you and the people around you will begin to throw away caution and act with almost reckless abandon, so sure are you that your goal is in sight...
...The 22-year-olds look like winners because they are: They are eye-catching, they speak well, they are quick if not deep...
...She expected, as did everybody else, that Dole would make the most grudging kind of separation from the Senate-that we would see another version of the hemming-and-hawing Bob Dole whose Beltway reputation for stinging wit was belied every time he appeared on television and spoke some version of his characteristic statement in the face of controversy: "We'll have to take a look at that, see how it works...
...In our time, the Left has monopolized youth, energy, and beauty- or at least the world has thought so...
...consistency is what you expect, and mulish consistency at that...
...All Republicans in Washington had been unwillingly brought face to face with a genuinely sobering idea-the possibility that the Republican Revolution was an illusion, that the results of 1994 did not represent a shift in the political culture but simply another symptom of the instability of contemporary American politics...
...This is precisely what, in 1996, the Republican party had lost to an enthusiastic Bill Clinton, whose brazen theft of Republican issues and brazen lies about the Republican budget have been delivered with remarkable self-confidence and demagogic good cheer...
...This is what happened to Bill Clinton when he jumped on that ridiculous bus after the Democratic convention in 1992, and it's what happened to George Bush when he decided to spend every day for three weeks at a flag factory in 1988...
...The second of the fund-raisers was held the night before Dole's announcement, and the Genetically Endowed greeted the misleading news with wary optimism: "He had to do it, I guess," a House aide told me...
...And if Bob Dole prevails in November, the Genetically Endowed will turn to each other at one of the 25 inaugural balls in January 1997, fall into each other's arms, and say: "That was hard...
...In fact, in the United States in 1996, the Republican party has become the party of the young, the energetic, and the beautiful...
...Six hundred people came to the first of the fund-raisers, 400 to the second...
...It's about electing a president who, once he takes office, will keep his perspective and remain by his deepest nature and inclination one of the people...
...That's the meaning of his almost tic-like use of the word "whatever" as coda and punctuation-it's almost as if he wants to let us know that the words he has just spoken were merely a speechwriter's blather or the nonsense talking points of a staff aide he barely knows...
...For the Genetically Endowed are not a leading indicator...
...Seventy years ago, Evelyn Waugh caustically dubbed such types the "Bright Young Things," capturing with a satirist's eye how a diamond-like glitter can mask a diamond-cold soul...
...For a time, this attitude seemed a little greedy...
...They publish op-eds explaining how cool Republicanism and conservatism truly are...
...Maybe he can, like, focus now or something...
...But that was another era, when joining the ranks of conservatives meant feeling like a loser much of the time...
...And this: "My campaign is about telling the truth, it is about doing what is right, it's about electing a president who's not attracted to the glories of the office but rather to its difficulties...
...Republican woman" is a pop-culture oxymoron...
...Older Republicans and conservatives have long since grown used to this fear...
...This has gone largely unremarked because the popular culture-usually preternaturally wise in the ways of the young and the beautiful-doesn't seem to know about it...
...That cause less resembles a battle than, let us say, a cocktail party...
...And despite Dole's message in the speech-"I will be the same man I was when I walked into the room, the same man I was yesterday and the day before, and a long time ago when I arose from my hospital bed and was permitted by the grace of God to walk again in the world"-this was a different Dole...
...You start seeming like a winner...
...Make no mistake: The elected politicians and party officials may have gone on television and talked about how Bob Dole was where he wanted to be and the race would narrow and that anybody who worried about the bad poll numbers was an inside-the-Beltway sourpuss, but there was no comparable serenity on the part of the people who make their living working in Republican circles...
...Throughout these evenings, baby political consultants chewed on stogies and downed martinis (straight up with two olives) while talking free-market health care with blonde lobbyists sporting Rachel-from-Friends hairstyles...
...It takes a weird combination of ideology, timing, competence, good fortune, and sheer stage magic to get elected president...
...For the past couple of months, though, one has had this odd sensation, around Washington and at these fund-raisers: that the Genetically Endowed have looked at the party and the cause they proudly joined and have thought nervously to themselves: Have I gone with a loser...
...So when, in the words he devised with Mark Helprin, one of America's most ambitious and rhapsodically prosodic novelists, Dole said he had "nowhere to go but the White House or home," the surprise was compounded by the fact that it was Dole speaking that well-crafted phrase...
...By seizing center stage with a dramatic and unexpected announcement delivered in the most eloquent words spoken by any American politician this year, Dole last week restored some self-confidence, good cheer, and brazenness to a Republican party desperate for them...
...For those of us who came of age when Republicanism and conservatism had little cultural or social purchase, the move of the Genetically Endowed into our ranks is more than a little unsettling...
...They don't like to think such things of themselves...
...And if there is anything the Genetically Endowed cannot abide, it is the GOP's pop-culture image of uncoolness...
...Victory has its own distinct feel and style, a feel and style just like those of the Genetically Endowed themselves-it is both preceded by and the progenitor of an ineffable self-confidence, cheeriness, and a special brazenness that comes from feeling anointed, charmed...
...You need well-designed campaign events, which you can control, and you need good weather for them, which you can't...
...You don't expect surprise from a septuagenarian...
...Their troops, the Genetically Endowed especially, have joined up in spite of the popular culture's decision to brand them as uncool because they found they could take pleasure in other things-ideas, certainly, but also the adrenalizing charge of victory...
...In fact, given the GOP slide since the budget shutdown and the seemingly sclerotic presidential candidate who emerged from the astoundingly vapid presidential primaries, many wondered if the party and the cause themselves had somehow gotten crosswise of history...
...They are desperate to be taken seriously...
...By belying his own self-definition as a "doer, not a talker...
...Think-tankers next to them argued about digital television licenses, while youngish married folk with babysitters minding the kids sat on couches in upstairs areas and wondered just when it was that 22-year-olds began smoking cigars and drinking highballs, and just why they looked so good doing it...
...It has attracted the Genetically Endowed, by which I mean those lucky creatures who have drawn a great biological hand...
...This is because I have seen victory and I have seen defeat, and I know when one is set to give way to the other...
...As a speaker, whether on talk shows or at a podium, Dole usually takes back in one parenthetical phrase what he gave in the sentence before...
...Instead, this deliberate, disciplined, remarkably cautious man proved himself capable of surprise, the scarcest political commodity in the modern media era...
...And as nature's winners, they think it is their birthright to be winners at the political level as well...
...No, the idea that they might have backed a loser went beyond Bob Dole...
...What has drawn hundreds upon hundreds of young Washingtonians to these fund-raisers are invitations listing the names of two dozen young conservative Republican women on the "host committee"-that is to say, two dozen remarkably attractive conservative Republican women who cover the right-wing waterfront from the Hill to the K Street lobbying firms to the non-profit interest groups...
...It was not only resigning from the Senate and putting all his chips on the final bet of his career that constituted a surprise, but the way in which he did it: by speaking a beautifully conceived speech and delivering it well...
...But the Genetically Endowed are conventional, in the deepest sense...
...He designed, planned, and led a news coup that dominated the political coverage for days...
...But it is a fact of human nature that the fortunate don't really believe they are fortunate...
...Wasn't it enough to be a part of a political movement and a political party that seemed to be in the ascendancy...
...After all, there was a time many thought, like Whittaker Chambers, that they were on the losing side of the Manichean battle against communism...
...Still, they like to think themselves part of a great struggle...
...And this: "I have absolute confidence in the victory that to some may seem unattainable...
...The word "Republican" is, after all, Hollywood shorthand for "pasty-faced white guy who can't dance...
...They were certainly not thinking about Bob Dole specifically-though Dole's lack of energy and frustrating inaction in the face of a resurgent Democratic party has been the primary subject of discussion in Republican Washington for two months...
...They have bestowed their bounty on the GOP in the service of conservatism...
...Case in point: The best Washington parties of my 10-plus years here have been thrown in the last couple of months-fund-raisers for non-profit groups held in upscale Washington venues and featuring a 15-piece big band headed by a young trombonist who has recorded two jazz albums but makes his living writing editorials for the Washington Times...
...The only question is whether it was a different Dole for only a day, May 15, 1996, and we will know this soon enough...
...You must figure out ways to connect your views to whatever is going on in the American consciousness that day, week, month, and year...
...The circumstances surrounding his resignation from the Senate were all these things- self-confident, cheery, and brazen...
...He misled the media into thinking he was taking yet another Dole-like half-measure by letting the story spread that he would give up some of his duties in the Senate but not all, keep the title of majority leader but not really fill the office...
...They want to be taken account of in American culture, which, to them, means pop culture...
...But the Bright Young Things were aristocrats the old-fashioned way-by inherited title and old money...
...Not for a moment did he seem to be the Dole Republicans had come to know-the political version of the grandfather you didn't like, the gruff one, the one who muttered things under his breath when your grandmother made a fuss over you...
...Called by an interviewer from the Washington Post or CNN just looking for ways to score a "gotcha" against them, they loudly defend their cool: I sing in a rock band when I'm not working on the Hill...
...That monopoly no longer exists...
...And the omnipresence of the Genetically Endowed is testimony to the fact that the party that most closely reflects conventional American views is the Republican party...
...Only a different Dole could, and 72-year-old men rarely change...
...Its outraged members swing into action...
...Your ideas must be in sync with the views of the electorate...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
