DON’T COUNT ON DOLE

Dole will have better moments. But what about his supporters? Obviously America’s conservatives will — and should — hope that Bob Dole wins in November, if only because there is no other way for Bill Clinton to lose. But Dole could not possibly be signaling more clearly his indifference to, even his disdain for, the conservatives for whose support he once begged. The real risk conservatives are running this election season is not that Clinton will be reelected; it’s that he will be replaced by a man uninterested in conservative ideas, hostile to conservatives as individuals, and bent on breaking the conservative grip on the Republican party.

Despite the pressing of a team of eminent conservative economists, Dole has made it clear that he’s reluctant to pledge himself to cut taxes. The more often he’s asked, the less intelligible become his views on abortion. He has rebuffed the staffers who have urged him to take a strong stand in favor of the California Civil Rights Initiative and against quotas. He has nothing beyond the vaguest generalities to offer on crime, immigration, or health care. In New Hampshire he parroted Pat Buchanan’s fulminations against treacherous foreign traders and overpaid corporate executives. True, on one memorable occasion he denounced the entertainment industry for producing violent and perverse movies and songs. But as soon as Dole had knocked Phil Gramm out of the race, his concern for social conservatism appeared to evaporate. And even at the time, Dole’s championing of the cause of wholesome family entertainment seemed tinged with self-amused irony — as if he wanted us all to know how preposterous he found the whole exercise, as if he found conservatives and their preoccupations so silly that he could not even pander to them with a straight face.

This record does not merely reflect an election season dash to the middle. About the only unifying theme one can detect in Dole’s recent senatorial career is a determination to exasperate conservatives. He fought hard to win a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution in 1995 — but not nearly as hard for the spending cuts that would have actually pulled the budget into balance. He flirted with an endorsement of the main themes of the Clinton health-care plan, and actually did endorse the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill whose probable effects would push the country toward some future version of Clintoncare.

You don’t need to take a critic’s word for it. On June 11, Dole put a remarkable summation of his career on the record. In his leave-taking speech from the U.S. Senate, he singled out six accomplishments from his nearly 30 years in that chamber as worthy of special pride: his work to defend agriculture subsidies; his opposition to cutting off aid to South Vietnam in the last desperate hours of the struggle against communism; the expansion of food stamps and other low-income nutrition programs; the management of the Martin Luther King holiday bill; the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act; and the 1983 Social Security compromise that salvaged the pension system by accelerating increases in the payroll tax.

Bravo to him for sticking by America’s allies to the last. On Vietnam, as on defense issues and matters of tional honor generally, Dole’s record is exemplary. But look at what Dole thinks of his domestic accomplishments. On June 11, he said not one word about the budget struggle of 1995. Nothing about the battle over health care, the most important proposed change in social policy in a decade. There was no praise for the Reagan tax cuts or any other of the Reagan achievements, for many of which Dole deserves some credit. Dole’s strong pro-life voting record went unmentioned. So too (although this would be asking a lot) did his far-sighted opposition to the Medicare and Medicaid programs back in 1964 and 1965.

Dole, speaking in the forum where he feels most at home, chose to depict himself as a man of the system, utterly unlike the Republican radicals in the House. And why not? Bob Dole is a man of the system, a legislator, a maker of deals. To a man like that, conservatives — who reject the deal- making culture of the capital — are bound to seem alien at best, subversive at worst. It’s wishful thinking at its most ungrounded to imagine that much room will be made for such people in a Dole administration, especially since we know how little room was made for them in Dole’s Senate office. The New York Times magazine this spring mocked conservatives for demonizing Dole’s chief legislative aide, Sheila Burke. In a distorted way, the Times had a point. Why blame the king’s evil counselors? If Dole was tempted to compromise on the Clinton health plan; if he has sometimes preferred to rely on tax increases rather than spending cuts to balance the budget, the responsibility does not belong to his underlings. It is his.

Optimists argue that Dole’s political deficiencies don’t matter: that the Republican congressional majority will govern the country, and that Dole’s job will merely be to sign the bills that Clinton would have vetoed. And Dole’s inexplicable passivity throughout this campaign season — his inability to generate ideas and issues of his own, his seeming lack of interest in his own election — certainly lends a tincture of plausibility to this theory. William Henry Harrison won election as a “Whig,” by which he meant a president who would do more or less as Congress told him to do. Perhaps Bob Dole sees himself as a Harrison for our time.

Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem very likely. Just as President Eisenhower was fatuously unimpressed by the Pentagon’s military advice, so a President Dole is likely not to take particularly seriously the congressional advice of Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and Trent Lott. What could those whippersnappers know that he does not know better? Besides, if Dole finishes as badly as the polls suggest he might, there won’t be a Republican Congress, not even one to put the brakes on a reelected President Clinton. And should Bob Dole and the congressional Republicans somehow both win, who would care to predict — after watching Dole’s performance on the abortion issue — that it would be the Gingriches, Armeys, and Lotts who would get his ear and not the Nancy Johnsons and the Al D’Amatos?

That’s not a small danger. The difference between the advice of conservative Republicans and the advice of moderate Republicans is the difference between an Antonin Scalia or a Clarence Thomas on the one hand and a David Souter or an Anthony Kennedy on the other; it’s the difference between no-new-taxes and the 1990 budget deal. And unlike George Bush, who gained the nomination in 1988 with the active assistance of party conservatives, and therefore felt constrained to choose Dan Quayle as his vice president, and appoint Jack Kemp to his cabinet and John Sununu as his chief of staff — never mind that these appointments mostly turned out badly, they were rewards conservatives had sought and they were granted — Bob Dole will come to office feeling that he owes conservatives little or nothing. This is why his choice of a running mate is crucially important. Under the present rules — which make the ability to cement support before the first primary the crucial factor in winning the party’s presidential nomination — Dole’s vice-presidential pick will have to be considered the Republican frontrunner for 2000, no matter what happens in 1996. Should Dole go on to win the presidency, his vicepresidential choice will become the overwhelming favorite. Which means that Dole’s ascendancy threatens to decisively reverse the conservative achievement of 1976 and 1980, and bring to an end the era of conservative predominance within the GOP

So how did conservatives get into this mess? And what can they do about it?

Dole won the nomination very largely because the conservatives who could have denied it to him failed to rally around a single alternative candidate. In part, that failure resulted from personal quirks — Gramm put off religious conservatives, Buchanan horrified economic conservatives, and Forbes did not have time to put together an effective national organization — but something deeper was at work, too.

The crucial weeks of the race — the weeks between Dole’s startling show of weakness in Iowa and his decisive win in South Carolina — followed shortly after the fiercest moments of the budget confrontation between the House Republicans and President Clinton. Had the House Republicans won that fight — either by forcing the president to accept a budget on their terms or by convincing the public that it was the president, and not Speaker Gingrich, who deserved the label “extremist” — the whole shape of the 1996 race would have been different. Republicans would have had to prepare themselves to fight an election over issues of principle, which puzzle Dole, rather than over character, where a craggy, plain-spoken veteran of World War II provides a much starker moral contrast to Bill Clinton than would Phil Gramm or Newt Gingrich.

Had the House Republicans won the budget fight, Republican conservatives would have faced Republican primary voters as the natural leaders of the country, not as wild-eyed enthusiasts keen to lead the GOP to a 1964-style disaster. Had the House Republicans won, Bob Dole and his fellow old-line senators would have looked excessively cautious, dangerously weak, and terminally old-fashioned, and Newt Gingrich might well be putting the finishing touches on his San Diego acceptance speech right now. But the House Republicans didn’t win, and their defeat has had a shattering effect on the Republican party as a whole — similar to the effect the collapse of the Clinton health-care plan had on the Democrats.

The party chieftains who, often unhappily, enlisted in Dole’s campaign at the end of 1995 and in early 1996 cannot have entertained many illusions about their man’s appeal as a candidate. Who could? Just in case anyone had forgotten his catastrophic performances in 1976, 1980, and 1988, Dole put on an extra-bad show in Iowa and New Hampshire in 1996. But after the debacle of the shutdown of the federal government, both party conservatives and party moderates seem to have arrived at an unspoken consensus that this was no year to nominate anyone who could be accused of “extremism”: so no Gramm, no Forbes. Thus the boomlet for Colin Powell last year. Thus too the flurry of interest in Lamar Alexander in the early primaries. Alexander rested his whole campaign on a claim that he was the most “electable” available Republican. What he meant by that, among other things, was that his moderate record as governor of Tennessee protected him against the “extremism” charge, while his nonmembership in Congress gave him an alibi to deny all connections to Newt Gingrich.

The unpopularity of the House Republicans crippied the prospects for a conservative nominee in 1996. Dole, as the most eligible non-conservative, scooped up his prize because of Gingrich’s collapse.

Political analysts will argue for years over the reasons for Gingrich’s failure to outmaneuver the president last winter. Some say that defects in Gingrich’s personality, his lack of measure and self-control, made it easy to represent him as a man drunk on power and indifferent to ordinary citizens, while the cunning of the president enabled him to represent himself as occupying the moderate, reasonable middle ground.

Others think that, just as the president discovered the limits of liberalism in 1993, so the Republicans bumped up against the limits of conservatism in 1995. Gingrich attempted to cut Medicare, and the American people do not want Medicare cut. Defeat was therefore inevitable, and with it the loss of control by conservatives over the Republican party, and — if you believe E. J. Dionne and Jacob Weisberg — soon over the political culture of the country.

But there’s a third explanation of what went wrong, and one that offers both hope and a warning. Perhaps Gingrich suffered a 1995 debacle very like Clinton’s in 1993 because, like Clinton in 1992, he campaigned in 1994 without fully revealing his agenda. Republicans believed in 1994 that the country needed major reductions in government spending, and especially in Medicare spending — just as Democrats believed in 1992 that the country needed radical health-care reform that would limit the quality of medicine offered to those now insured in order to fund insurance for those who now go without. Republicans and Democrats alike, though, decided that it would be wiser to wage their campaigns without risking a full explanation of their political programs. Which meant that, while they won the election, they failed to win a mandate. And when they acted as if they had, the public punished them.

The British parliamentary system, the system deliberately rejected by the framers of the Constitution, is a dictatorship punctuated by elections. Slip into power, and it’s possible to do as you please for as long as five years. The American system, by contrast, is a car with no suspension. Every little bump in the ground shakes up everybody riding in it. You can’t govern without a mandate, and you can’t get a mandate without candidly describing what it is you intend to do. The cunning of the Contract with America was its own undoing.

That’s my theory, anyway. If it’s right, then the Dole-led Republicans could be on their way to an even more spectacular disaster than that of 1995. Dole HQ seems to be planning one of the most brain-dead campaigns in recent memory: Whitewater-Filegate-Paula Jones. And perhaps that formula may even work, in the sense of defeating Bill Clinton. But then what? The only mandate President Dole would have after a campaign like that would be one to refrain from crooked Ozark land deals and to keep his fly zipped. If a Republican Congress — assuming it’s reelected — then tried to resurrect its ambitious 1995 program, it would quickly find itself in bigger political trouble than ever.

That’s the warning. Here’s the hope: The 1990s are a time of immense political possibility. An amazing number of people understand that the liberal social experiments of the 1960s and 1970s failed. They may not comprehend all the implications of that failure, and they may not know what they want to replace those experiments with, but they’re open to persuasion. They know they’re overtaxed, they sense that the economy is not prospering as it ought, they are beginning to fear that the old-age pension and Medicare benefits for which they are forking over more than 15 percent of their real pay won’t turn out to be very good purchases, and they are haunted by apprehensions about the moral quality of their society. They’re ready to try new things. They were ready to try a Democratic president who seemed to have some exciting new ideas, and they were ready to get rid of the last vestiges of the New Deal Congress when that president disappointed them. But they insist on being convinced. Bob Dole is not the best man to do that, but he must try.

Depressed? Don’t be. The conservative cause is bigger than any election or any candidate. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the high-water mark of Keynesian self-confidence and liberal intellectual dominance, America twice elected Dwight Eisenhower president, Conservatives Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan occupied 10 Downing Street, Canada was led by Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker, and Germany was ruled by Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats. It was possible, in other words, for conservatives to win elections in a liberal era, provided they played by liberal rules. It will be equally possible for liberals — Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Jean Chretien — to win in a conservative era, provided that they play by conservative rules. The power to set the terms of debate is the ultimate political power. It would be very nice to win the White House; it would be even nicer to win it with a candidate willing and able to use the White House for conservative reform. But even without the White House, conservatives can continue to dominate the nation’s political life — if they will only trust their own beliefs and carry on arguing their case.

The nomination of Bob Dole was a mistake. It was a mistake brought about in large part because of the failure of the House Republicans to overcome Bill Clinton, and that failure, in turn, can be traced to the unwillingness of the authors of the Contract with America to speak frankly to the people, to educate voters about the need to shrink and reform government, and to ask their permission in advance.

Happily, there is almost no such thing in politics as an irreparable mistake. Defeats and disappointments are simply opportunities to start over from the beginning. There can be no satisfactory outcome for conservatives in the November election. That’s no reason, however, to despair. Win or lose, it’s time to go back to the most important political work of all: mounting our soapboxes and preaching our gospel.

By David Frum