Bob Dole was back in the news on Tuesday after an unnoticed long absence, earning a few final headlines with some pointed criticism of the Republican party, and it evoked a nostalgic feeling. The name still provokes strong feelings for everyone here in Kansas, where Dole dominated the political landscape for more than a generation, and for some of us it rekindles very personal memories.
Way back in the sultry summer of ’78 we were interns in the office of Sen. Dole, who had already achieved national prominence as the vice presidential candidate of the Republican party just two years before, and we remain grateful for the enriching experience. Among our fellow interns were two future governors of the state of Kansas, as well as several other soon-to-be eminent personages, so perhaps it didn’t enrich us as much as it could have, but it was a teenaged blast. We got to ride through Washington in a limo with the Senator, write a speech that he read verbatim on the radio, do a bit of pointless research, and get paid for little work and responsibility. The job also allowed us to enjoy his famously acerbic sense of humor, quake at his fearsome temper, and develop a generally favorable impression of his personality.
During our years working for a large state newspaper we crossed paths with Dole often, and it was almost always less pleasant. At one news conference during a minor scandal over a rather inconsequential violation of some obscure fund-raising regulation we wound up in a locally legendary spat with the senator, fueled by his characteristically personal animosity toward the paper, which had admittedly been making more of the story than was warranted, and by one biographer’s account we wound up getting the better of it. Dole never courted the Kansas press as assiduously as he did the big city papers back east, and we suspect he still holds the grudge.
He still got our vote in every race he ever ran, including the ill-fated presidential campaign against Bill Clinton in ’96, but that was mostly because he was running against Democrats. Most reporters were resistant to Dole’s charms because he was a Republican, and he probably assumed that his occasional disputes with us were for the same reason, but we were frustrated that he wasn’t nearly Republican enough. As the Fox News reporter noted in the recent interview, Dole was a longtime champion of the food stamp program, Social Security, and the Americans With Disabilities Act, and he was always willing to cut a deal with bigger government and fought hard against the Gingrich House’s efforts cut back. Although he could be admirably conservative on some important issues, and was always well to the right of anyone he ran against, Dole became an exemplar of the squishy moderate Republicanism that the party faithful are now rebelling against.
Which is what brought Dole back into the news on Tuesday. In an interview with the Fox Network he offered some mild criticism of President Obama for insufficient schmoozing with congressional leaders, but saved his harshest words for his own party. “I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘closed for repairs’ until New Year’s Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,” he said, adding that the party has moved so far right that it wouldn’t nominate Reagan or Nixon today. For good measure he criticized the parliamentary maneuvering that has allowed the Senate Republicans to thwart several of the Democrats’ worst ideas, and called for the same sort of backroom deal-making that marked his own career.
It was infuriatingly nonsensical, especially the bizarre notion that the same party which nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney in the past two elections has gone too far right for Reagan, but it probably served Dole’s purpose of garnering some last favorable reviews from the purveyors of bien pensant opinion. Even before the interview we’d been hearing the local progressives lament the demise of the respectable Kansas Republican party epitomized by Dole, William Allen White, and Dwight Eisenhower, which they much prefer to the decidedly more rock-ribbed variety of Republicanism afoot everywhere in the state except the Kansas Senate, and Dole’s remarks will further endear him to these people. They hated him back in the day, of course, and always portrayed him as the arch-conservative “hatchet man” he’d been when he was the last Republican go to down on Nixon’s sinking ship and then as Gerald Ford’s stir-the-base running mate, but now that he’s safely in the past and no longer a threat to any Democrat he can be safely praised by his former enemies.
Why the 90 year old Dole still clamors for the approval of his enemies, rather than the respect of those disreputably right-wing Kansas who reluctantly supported him through his career, is less clear. Listening to the interview we were struck by very frail and aged Dole sounded, a stark contrast to the physically intimidating presence we recalled from his days in office, when he dominate any room he walk into just by projecting a palpable power that was only enhanced by the crippling injuries he had sustained during his heroic service in Italy during World War II, but he has neither mellowed with age nor hardened into the true conservative his admirers always wanted him to be.
Much respect is due to Dole for his service to the country in the past, but his counsel on the politics of the present should be rejected. There are no deals to be cut with the softly tyrannical quasi-socialism being imposed on the nation, no accommodations to be made that will fend off the impending insolvency of the national economy, and the Republican party has nothing to offer but the staunchest possible resistance. This won’t win the party any friends in the newsrooms of the big papers back east, but in the end they didn’t do Bob Dole any good, not when came down to him or a Democrat such as Bill Clinton, and such people are of absolutely no use in the current crisis. Dole’s fighting spirit is much needed, but he’s fighting the wrong people.
— Bud Norman
