When President Joe Biden attends former Sen. Bob Dole’s funeral on Friday, he’ll be paying respects to a man he served with in Congress for more than two decades.
Both men have been described frequently as more at home in the Senate chambers than just about anywhere else. As Dole found out on the campaign trail and Biden has learned while serving as president, what works in the legislative arena does not always translate to other forms of leadership.
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“Running for Senate and running for president are light-years apart,” said Don Devine, who helped lead Dole’s 1988 White House run, when he lost the Republican nomination to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. “It’s a very different kind of thing, and thinking of yourself as a legislator and thinking of yourself as a president are very different things.”
Biden and Dole’s most obvious similarity may be their strong association with the upper chamber. Both have been observed as, and sometimes criticized for, being most comfortable in the peculiar dialect of “Senate speak” and in the intimate settings and frequent compromises of Congress.
There are plenty of surface similarities on the two men’s resumes as well. Decades in Congress, three runs at the presidency, a turn as the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket, and winning their party’s nomination the third time out. They even ran for president during the same cycle in 1988. Only Biden was later able to grasp the brass ring, as Devine sees it, thanks to 2020’s unique political landscape.
“Biden was the most stable, normal-looking person who was running for the nomination at that time,” he said. “That’s what Democrats were looking for that year. Republicans weren’t necessarily looking for that in 1988.”
Earlier this year, in the wake of the violent Jan. 6 Capitol invasion, Biden spoke of the need for greater unity during his first days in office. After Dole’s death, an opinion piece he wrote around the same time appeared in the Washington Post, again asking for unity.
“America has never achieved greatness when Republicans and Democrats simply manage to work together or tolerate each other,” Dole wrote. “We have overcome our biggest challenges only when we focused on our shared values and experiences. These common ties form much stronger bonds than political parties.”
But comparisons between the two should end right there, argues Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian Craig Shirley.
“No,” Shirley said when asked if Dole and Biden are similar. “Joe Biden has never met a first-person pronoun he didn’t like. Bob Dole was humble, Joe Biden was arrogant. Bob Dole was a war hero, Joe Biden was not. Biden, for most of his senate career, was not known for anything except for being a showhorse. Dole was a workhorse.”
Dole served as the Senate Republican leader for over a decade, presiding over two GOP majorities, and is credited with helping pass legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, a measure to save Social Security, and the creation of the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Biden, speaking in Kansas City on Wednesday, praised Dole’s cross-party politics.
“We didn’t agree on everything, but I always admired and respected him and his willingness to work with anyone of any party when it mattered most,” Biden said. “Our nation owes Bob Dole a debt of gratitude for his remarkable service and a life well lived.”
But Dole was also a true conservative, not a centrist, who would have led the nation better than Bush had he won the ’88 GOP primary fight, Shirley argued. Dole was anti-abortion and strong on national defense, low taxes, and slashing regulations.
Shirley remembers a brief Dole campaign slogan against incumbent Bill Clinton in ’96, “A Better Man for a Better America,” believing it especially apt in light of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that engulfed Clinton’s second term. But between Clinton’s popularity and Ross Perot peeling off would-be Republican voters, the outcome likely wasn’t in doubt no matter what.
By the time Dole finally nabbed the GOP nomination following unsuccessful runs in 1980 and 1988, he’d become an elder statesman of the party known for his often self-deprecating sense of humor.
That was a far cry from Dole’s 1970s reputation as an attack dog, especially during the Watergate scandal and his 1976 vice presidential bid. Walter Mondale once described him as a “hatchet man.”
Dole’s image softened as he aged and as Republicans went from a Senate minority to the majority for much of the 1980s and ’90s, giving him some of his biggest accomplishments.
“Dole was basically a legislator rather than an executive,” Devine said. “He found it very difficult to do a lot of the silly things you have to do when you’re running for president. He was used to being blunt and working with people in the Legislature as rough equals and not having to worry how you phrase things.”
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Dole was also the last World War II veteran to become a major party’s presidential nominee and one of the last veterans from the war to maintain an active presence in Washington. He helped establish the World War II monument on the national mall and famously saluted fellow veteran George H. W. Bush upon his death three years ago.
Even Biden, now the oldest president in American history, is not old enough to remember the war, a gap he referenced during the Kansas City stop by calling Dole “one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation.”
Dole died just two days before the 80th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which sent the United States into the war and launched Dole from sleepy Russell, Kansas, to the European battles that would shape his life. Whether by coincidence or something higher, Shirley sees significance in the two occasions.
“I don’t believe in signs, but I do believe in synchronicity,” said Shirley. “The beginning of Pearl Harbor changed Dole’s life. He had no intention of going into politics or law or anything else. His body was so badly damaged in the war that he had to concentrate on his mind instead. And it totally changed our world.”
