You keep hea,ing that Bob Dole has trouble ‘articulating’ — articulating his message, his vision for America, the reasons he wants to be president. It seems to be the one enduring consensus to have emerged from the general electoral chaos of the past several weeks.
Lamar Alexander has made his rival’s inarticulatess one of the reasons he himself should be president. He asks his campaign audiences to imagine Bob Dole appearing at the epochal pre-election debate with the hyperarticulate Bill Clinton. The president will “come out from behind the podium, and he’ll feel the questioner’s pain,” Alexander says. “And we’ll need a candidate who can respond with something more than talk about CBO and OMB and other Beltway kinds of talk.”
Even Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Dole supporter, has felt the need to explain his candidate’s twisted tongue. As majority leader, “Bob Dole’s every day is consumed with being involved with 10 or 12 issues all at once,” McCain told Nightline recently. The result: “When he’s giving a speech or talking to a journalist, he’ll bring up different issues that really seem, in some ways, disconnected.”
Thus the consensus among friend and foe alike: As a campaigner, Bob Dole ranks several notches below the firesnorting Pat Buchanan, down below even the snooze-monger Dick Lugar, and only a notch or two above tire king Morry Taylor, who campaigns with an open keg of lager in his RV. But consensi are often wrong, as those of us who lost money on President Bush’s sure-thing reelection should know. If you really want to see how bad Bob Dole is on the stump, struggling to articulate, the best thing to do is go see for yourself.
Unfortunately, you’d be out of luck. For the surprise awaiting anyone who followed him around the last few days of February, just before the crucial South Carolina primary, was not merely that he campaigns badly, but that he barely campaigns at all.
Of course, the news has yet to get back to his campaign organization. “I think you’ll be quite pleased with our press accommodations,” a Dole staffer said when I called to reserve a seat on the campaign plane. “We have a nicely outfitted 727. Meals included, of course. Your baggage will be taken care of. Frankly, many of your colleagues in the press have commented that we’re running a White House level operation here–certainly far more professional than what you’ll get with the Buchanan campaign.”
And he was right. The 727 has been dubbed, in an unfortunate pun, Leader’s Ship. A full complement of flight attendants greet reporters as they climb aboard. Two large baskets beckon, one of fresh fruit, another of candy, along with coolers of iced soda and spring water. The cuisine tends to the nouvelle: chilled greens and sliced red pepper in a basil vinaigrette, blueberries and wedges of melon, cheese tortellini in an amusing pesto. Schedules are met with the precision of a Swiss security detail. The lowing herd of press moves from plane to bus to rally to bus to plane, seamlessly, in a mobile, self-suffcient cocoon. It is indeed like the White House: Reporters get pampered because there’s scarcely any news for them to report. The blueberries are offered up as consolation.
Like a president, Bob Dole the candidate shuffles from place to place at the center of a serum of middle-aged white guys, their hair well-combed like his hair, their backs straight, their suits dark, their smiles unchanging, all like his. Unlike a president, though, Dole takes for his companions not Secret Service beefcake but elected officials, who provide him with a special kind of security. He seems reluctant at times to venture forth without them.
After landing in Charleston the Tuesday before the South Carolina primary, Dole sits on Leader’s Ship for several minutes, until a Cessna lands and pulls up alongside on the tarmac. There it disgorges the day’s contingent of white guys: Gov. David Beasley, former governor Carroll Campbell, an attorney general, a state party official. They troop up the gangway in solemn formation and then, a moment later, back down again, Dole in the lead, Strom Thurmond picking up the rear. They file past the reporters–Dole with a thumbs up, the rest with a wave — and duck into a waiting Ford Explorer, as choreographed as the Pips behind Gladys Knight, if the Pips were to join the Chamber of Commerce.
You might say it is the same at every stop — and it is — but in fact, there aren’t that many stops. Today there is only the one; tomorrow, there will be one more, though the approaching primary is considered make-or-break for Dole’s candidacy.
After spending the morning in Washington, Dole has come to South Carolina for a rally aboard the decommissioned World War II aircraft carrier Yorktown. The event holds breath-catching possibilities: the last political representative of the generation that saved the world, proclaiming one final mission aboard the windswept deck of an ancient ship where his contemporaries bled and died. As it happens, the rally is held below deck, in a room the size of a large cafeteria. No churning ocean spray to provide a dramatic backdrop, no wind to muss the hair.
And no mission to speak of. As the candidate is introduced, the Pips take their places on the dais in a line of folding chairs, sitting perfectly erect, hands on knees. A massive American flag looms behind them. Thurmond chews on something mysterious for several minutes. Dole speaks without a prepared text, as he prefers to do on the stump, and mentions the war only at the beginning of his remarks — recalling the men who had made the supreme sacrifice for the greatest country on the face of the earth. “That’s what this is all about, ” he says. The crowd erupts. He quickly brings them to their seats. “This election,” he says, “is about the economy and jobs and about crime and about health care.” “This election,” he says,” is about building the Republican party. … I got into public offce,” he goes on, “because I might be able to help somebody along the way. Maybe try to strengthen the economy, maybe cut taxes so we could create jobs and opportunity, maybe welfare reform. A strong defense. That’s what it’s all about.”
Like a new life-form hauling itself up from the primordial depths, the speech evolves without apparent method, sprouting a free-trade arm here, a family tax-credit leg there. There are moments, after a burst of applause, when Dole stands silent and his mouth purses, and his eyes jitter rapidly like marbles in the bottom of a cup, and he holds the silence for two beats too long until you suspect, for a brief unsettling interval, that he has absolutely no idea what he just said, or is going to say next. “People ask: Bob, what’s your vision for America?” he says after one such pause. “That’s a very good question and you ought to know the answer. I know America’s headed in the wrong direction. I know there’s too much crime and too much drugs. We’ve got too many kids graduating high school who can’t find California on the map. We’ve got major problems in America. And THAT’S my vision for America.”
The crowd erupts again. It is a good crowd. They applaud when he waves his copy of the Tenth Amendment–one of the set pieces of his campaign appearances nd sit still as he reads it aloud, verbatim. “So I’m very happy to be here,” he says in conclusion. “I see the young people out here. That’s what this election is all about. It’s about the future.”
After the speech, Dole staffers are delighted, veteran reporters amazed. ” That,” says one who has followed Dole since the beginning, “was the best he’s been in the whole campaign.”
Dole hits about 500 voters directly at the Yorktown event, and he gets fairly good coverage on the local news. After returning to Washington for the night, he comes back to South Carolina Wednesday afternoon for another single event, reaching several hundred voters more. Two days of campaigning, and he is approaching a kind of landmark: 1,000 voters in 48 hours.
Wednesday’s event is a “meet and greet” at a BMW plant in Greer. A tarmac press conference is to take place immediately after Leader’s Ship lands at nearby Spartansburg. At the small airline terminal, red carpet has been unfurled, camera positions set up, tape laid down showing the Pips where to stand.
The press conference is canceled.
The Pips are out in strength. Descending the stairs from the front of the plane are three governors and two United States senators, including Phil Gramre. Dark-suited and straight-backed, white shirts gleaming, they and the candidate pause briefly before the microphones.
“We’re going out to BMW to talk about jobs and trade,” Dole says. “That’s what this campaign is all about.” He steps back. Gramm and Beasley step forward and begin rattling off statistics about South Carolina’s foreign investment and the number of jobs it created in the past year, the past decade. Dole nods grimly. Gramm is particularly voluble, unburdening himself of the knowledge and soundbites he had planned to use in his own campaign.
After several minutes, an aide motions Gramm toward the waiting car. ” Senator Dole,” a reporter calls out, “do you agree with any of that?” Dole ducks into the front seat and is gone.
He reappears at the BMW plant, a stark white behemoth set in a vast pasture. Its smokestacks are clean and quiet and smokeless; its employees wear blue smocks, looking very European. Dole tours the plant floor as forklifts glide by, dodging the contingent of Pips. No one in the press can hear what the candidate is saying, but he is here, after all, to meet and greet the voters, not the press. With the Pips he forms a reception line to shake hands — like a wedding with five unhappy fathers-in-law — and the braver of the plant workers walk briskly through. I can hear Gramm reciting trade statistics: ” The American worker is the most productive in the world,” he says, Dole nodding. And no thanks to presidential campaigns: Hundreds of the most world’s most productive workers stand idly by, enjoying the show.
Then it is time for the photo-op. A spanking new, sky-blue BMW Z3 convertible roadster (yours for as little as $ 29,000) is parked in the center of the shop floor, fairly screaming to be sat in. Dole stands aside, admiring. Absent-mindedly, Gramm runs his hands over the leather interior seatback, squeezing it, squeezing it, squeezing … Then, incredibly, the two senators open the doors and get in. As the cameras close in they lean back, hitch their elbows on the car door, looking satisfied but not quite comfortable: Bartles and Jaymes cruisin’ for babes.
When he gets out, Dole moves quickly through the crowd of reporters. The scrum of Pips re-forms behind him. “The American worker is the most productive in the world,” Gramm is saying. “Senator Dole,” asks one reporter, who is lucky enough to get close, “what are you trying to say with your visit here to BMW?”
Dole draws up straight; the scrum slows. Close up in such moments his irreducible dignity comes through. Then he speaks. “What this shows is, we’re the future. We’re progress. They’re the past.” He turns to go with a final shrug. “That’s what this is all about.” And the campaign, for the day, is over. *
By Andrew Ferguson
