A Bravo for Bob Dole
the weekly Standard A Bravo for Bob Dole It had an unusual and impressive astringent quality, Bob Dole's big announcement last week. Right before a sickly presidential campaign goes terminal, it...
...It won't be easy...
...There are meaningful differences between the two parties...
...Nasty to the point of weirdness...
...And in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, on eight of thirteen major political concerns, voters still prefer the Republican prescription...
...I trust in the hard way," Dole admits...
...And eloquently genuine: the real, unmistakable, citizen Dole...
...It does Dole honor that he would attempt this one final public task with such apparent determination...
...Clinton flack Ann Lewis, always the most robotic of Democratic partisans, accused Dole of irresponsibility: "Faced with the choice between the work of the Senate and his own political campaign, Bob Dole chose campaigning...
...Genuinely eloquent...
...But Bob Dole does not die easily...
...Majority Leader Robert J. Dole's retirement from the Senate, four years into his fifth term, would be a momentous event under any circumstances...
...the morning papers gave no hint it was in the offing...
...Tieless and flush with excitement in Chicago the day after his resignation announcement, Dole vigorously endorsed the general thrust of the 104th Congress...
...But it is not his strategy, and it shouldn't be...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...And "God has blessed the hard way...
...His campaign will not bulk up with wiseman "rescuers" as a prelude to inevitable failure...
...And by its pure surprise, Dole's terse, poignant speech demonstrated truly presidential authority: an impulse to bend American politics entirely to his will-an urge to demand and dominate our attention-and an ability to succeed in the effort...
...It was kept a secret...
...The presidency's glories do not interest him, he said last week...
...The Bush campaign was like this in 1992: fully barnacled with big-time strategists by the end, but still and always empty at its core...
...The campaign "shake-up," all too often, is merely the introductory cymbal crash of a rote, spiritless, time-clock march to death...
...The better to elude responsibility for failure, the candidate's handlers rearrange themselves-and then summon another layer of consultants to headquarters...
...And this year, just about now, you would almost have expected the same fatal process to begin with the Dole campaign, buried double-digit deep in the polls...
...Despite its setbacks in recent months, Republican conservatism retains a basic, broad appeal...
...They were churlish and cold...
...And Dole is not naturally a man of words...
...Bob Dole was born right-handed...
...We wish him well...
...The "Senator Bob Dole" part of it, which has always occupied three-quarters of the campaign's mental office space, will be permanently retired...
...He must only find the right words-a voice...
...Dole" at last, after 35 years in Congress, believes it will be enough...
...The cynic's explanation is that Bob Dole now seeks to separate his reputation from the GOP's Gingrichoid congressional "extremism...
...And "I will do it the hard way again...
...So complete was his success, so riveting was the moment, that no one could initially find anything interesting to say about it...
...The new men immediately make busy with the press corps, in whispered negotiations over personal credit and blame...
...Dole is inescapably implicated in his own career and his party's present platform...
...And preposterous...
...And since manufactured emotion-so much that other fellow's franchise-is obviously the weakest weapon in Dole's arsenal, you have to believe he means it...
...And serious, even collaborative, word-work, remember, has been largely beyond him for more than 50 years...
...I have absolute confidence in the victory that to some may seem unattainable," he promises...
...Even using a pencil is a problem for him...
...He was right to do so, in every respect...
...Right before a sickly presidential campaign goes terminal, it usually gets fat...
...And then his right hand was stolen from him in a war...
...In their spare time, they "focus group" and "conference call" and "trial balloon" a million teensy ideas...
...Wow...
...All that will be left in its place is Bob Dole himself: the man, his convictions, and the future he intends for the nation...
...If that were really his strategy, it would prove unavailing...
...Grown-up help," it's called, though help it almost always isn't...
...Before they quickly fell fully silent, Democrats embarrassed themselves by violating the unspoken but ironclad rule that an American politician is allowed to retire from office pretty much as he pleases...
...He is fundamentally private, diffident, suspicious of the show-bizzier aspects of public life, smooth speechmaking most prominently among them...
...What was best about last Wednesday's announcement was that it came in a form exclusively of Dole's creation...
...Bob Dole, he seems clearly to understand, does not need fancy new arguments or silver-bullet mini-issues to clarify that winning distinction...
...But it's all just a gooey hill of beans, erected on the same rotten foundation of paralysis and resignation...
...He is attracted "rather to its difficulties...
...There will be no typical shake-up, apparently...
...Christopher Dodd, as Democratic National Committee chairman, called Dole's speech "an admission of failure...
...And with so few illusions...
...Instead, the effort will get dramatically smaller...
...He, just "Mr...
...Lewis, after all, works for a man who, in 1991, abandoned a governorship to campaign for his current job, nine months after explicitly promising his constituents he wouldn't...
...In Bill Clinton he is up against a preternaturally gifted talker who has used that talent, all through a long career, to obscure substantive political distinctions...
...It is a good start to a difficult battle...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
