A Bravo for Bob Dole

Right before a sickly presidential campaign goes terminal, it usually gets fat. The better to elude responsibility for failure, the candidate’s handlers rearrange themselves — and then summon another layer of consultants to headquarters. “Grown-up help,” it’s called, though help it almost always isn’t. The new men immediately make busy with the press corps, in whispered negotiations over personal credit and blame. In their spare time, they “focus group” and “conference call” and “trial balloon” a million teensy ideas. But it’s all just a gooey hill of beans, erected on the same rotten foundation of paralysis and resignation. The campaign “shake-up,” all too often, is merely the introductory cymbal crash of a rote, spritless, time-clock march to death.

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. 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. But Bob Dole does not die easily. There will be no typical shake-up, apparently. His campaign will not bulk up with wiseman “rescuers” as a prelude to inevitable failure.

Instead, the effort will get dramatically smaller. The “Senator Bob Dole” part of it, which has always occupied three-quarters of the campaign’s mental office space, will be permanently retired. All that will be left in its place is Bob Dole himself: the man, his convictions, and the future he intends for the nation. He, just “Mr. Dole” at last, after 35 years in Congress, believes it will be enough. “I have absolute confidence in the victory that to some may seem unattainable,” he promises. And since manufactured emotion — so much that other fellow’s franchise — is obviously the wakest weapon in DOle’s arsenal, you have to believe he means it.

Wow, Majority Leader Robert J. Dole’s retirement from the Senate, four years into his fifth term, would be a momentous event under any circumstances. What was best about last Wednesday’s announcement was that it came in a form exclusively of Dole’s creation. It was kept a secret; the morning papers gave no hint it was in the offing. And by its pure surprise, Dole’s terse, ptionant 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.

So complete was his success, so riveting was the moment, that no one could initially find anything interesting to say about it. Before they quickly fell fully silent. Democrats embarrassed themselves by violating the unspoken but ironclad rule that an Ameriacan politician is allowed to retire from office pretty much as he pleases. They were churlish and cold. Sen. Christopher DOdd, as Democratic National Committee chairman, called Dole’s speech “an admission of failure.” 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 campaigining.” Nasty to the point of weirdness. And preposterous. Mrs. 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.

The cyncic’s explanation is that Bob Dole now seeks to separate his reputation form the GOP’s Gingrichoid congressional “Extremism.” If that were really his strategy, it would prove unavailing: Dole is inescapably implicated in his own career and his party’s present platform. But it is not his strategy, and it shouldn’t be. Tieless and flush with excitement in Chicago the day after his resignation announcement, Dole vigorously endorsed the general thrust of the 104th Congress. He was right to do so, in every respect.

Despite its setbacks in recent months, Republican conservatism retains a basic, broad appeal. There are meaningful differences between the two parties. And in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, on eight of thirteen major political concerns, voters still prefer the Republican prescription. Bob Dole, he seems clearly to understand, does not need fancy new arguments or silver-bullet mini-issues to clarify that winning distinction. He must only find the right words — a voice.

It won’t be easy. 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. And Dole is not naturally a man of words. he is fundamentally private, diffident, suspicious of the show-bizzier aspects of public life, smooth speechmaking most promiently among them. And serious, even collaborative, word-work, remember, has been largely beyond him for more than 50 years. Bob Dole was born right-handed. And then his right hand was stolen from him in a war. Even using a pencil is a problem for him.

It does Dole honor that he would attempt this one final public task with such apparent determination. And with so few illusions. The presidency’s glories do not interest him, he said last week. He is attracted “rather to its difficulties.” “I trust in the hard way,” Dole admits. And “I will do it the hard way again.” And “God has blessed the hard way.”

Genuinely eloquent. And eloquently geniuine: the real, unmistakable, citizen Dole. It is a good start to a difficult battle. We wish him well.

David Tell, for the Editors