As the presidential campaign enters its final phases, I’m struck by something I didn’t expect to get struck by: Everybody likes Bob Dole!
This is not strictly true, of course. If you look at the polls, you’ll notice that actually a lot of people don’t like Bob Dole at all, and even more are simply indifferent to him. But the roster of the Bob Dole Fan Club (official motto: “Aaaaarrrgh . . . whatever”) contains some unexpected names.
President Clinton, for one, expresses his undying admiration for Bob Dole whenever anyone asks, and often when anyone doesn’t. He can be almost poetic on the subject, discoursing on the drama of the Republican nominee’s life, first as a child of the Depression sixty years ago, then as a soldier in a war that ended more than fifty years ago, and then in the Congress beginning way, way back at the close of the Eisenhower era. The president never fails to mention Dole’s “long public service” — emphasis on the “long.” Decades of service. Centuries! The listener is left thinking that only Methuselah, or maybe Strom Thurmond, could have served longer. This is the tone of corporate testimonial dinners, when an honored employee is at last put out to pasture for whatever little time remains to him. If Dole loses the election, the president will be inconsolable.
Leon Panetta is another big Dole fan — or he was until Dole decided to cut everybody’s taxes. This, Panetta said on one talk show after another, was a betrayal of the real Bob Dole, the Bob Dole whom Leon himself had admired so slobberingly during the great congressional budget-balancing wars of the 1980s. Dole had always been a responsible fellow, but now had undergone “a major reversal,” Panetta said, after “thirty-five years” of trying to balance the budget. (Thirty-five years! The guy must be ancient!) Leon’s disgust was almost palpable. You got the idea that if Dole doesn’t renounce the tax cuts immediately, Panetta might just vote for Clinton.
Believe it or not, there are even Dole fans outside the Clinton White House. One of the more remarkable pieces of journalistic Dole-iana came from Andrew Sullivan in a recent New Republic. Sullivan used to be the editor of the magazine, which used to be the flagship of the intellectual wing of the Democratic party, which used to have an intellectual wing, and so he is not, perforce, the sort of guy you would expect to find warbling the praises of the Kansan conservative. When it comes to popular culture, most of us think of Dole as . . . well, sort of old and out of it; his favorite band, after all, is Glenn Miller’s. But Sullivan improbably tags Dole as the perfect candidate for Generation X — “someone whose ironic detachment, bleak humor and occasional bursts of dark sentiment make him far more intelligible to the under-35 crowd than most politicians.”
Sullivan’s argument is hard to follow, but he seems to be referring to Dole’s inability to stop cracking wise about the absurdities endemic to election campaigns, particularly the candidate’s habit of finishing incomplete sentences with his famously dismissive “whatever.” (“That’s one way to address it,” Dole has said, “whether you’re white, black, whatever.”) Sullivan finds this an appealing sign of ironic detachment; others may consider it annoying evidence of intellectual sloth. Whatever. Sullivan’s flattery of Dole, like Clinton’s and Panetta’s, is easily translatable into practical campaign advice. Clinton and Panetta advise a return to good old constipated Republicanism. Sullivan’s counsel is more succinct: Stay clueless, Pops.
But the biggest Dole fan that I can think of is — perhaps appropriately — dead. Richard Nixon continues to offer his protege advice in a new book, Nixon Off the Record, a series of uncensored reflections transcribed by an aide during the former president’s logorrheic final years. Here we see the freewheeling Nixon, his mind ranging widely over matters political, diplomatic, and personal. It makes for unpleasant, not to say revolting, reading.
Like Clinton and Sullivan and Panetta, Nixon “admired” Dole for reasons that are hard to regard as disinterested. Nixon liked Dole because he reminded him of another politician of humble origins, one despised by the liberal media but who nevertheless was tested time and again in the cauldron of adversity. The author paraphrases the former president: “A vote for Dole would be a vote for a smart, savvy, responsible moderate . . .” and then the ominous afterthought — “not unlike Nixon himself.” And of course there’s the wise counsel: Dole, said Nixon, “can be a warm, funny guy. That should come across more. We had that problem.”
They certainly did. And so another Dole fan offers a word of advice, this one from beyond the grave. Be warm. Be funny. Like Nixon.
With friends like these . . .
ANDREW FERGUSON
