title: “Last Call” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Nelda Stahr”
But presidential politics isn’t Pierre. It’s a digitized national feedback loop of handlers and pundits. And back in Washington, everyone wanted to know: what happened on television last week? Dole’s reply to President Clinton’s State of the Union speech was well aimed at conservative Republicans, but it bombed as theater. Of course, it was a mere 10 minutes in a long campaign. A month from now it could be forgotten. Still, Dole looked like a funeral director, not a front runner.
The Dole campaign didn’t completely dismiss the speech: they assembled a long list of excuses. He was never sure he wanted to give the response, so he didn’t practice it much. He spoke too late and was fired. Clinton spoke to an audience; Dole was alone in a room with an ABC crew, reading from a TelePrompTer, a device he hates. He was fighting a cold, took a Sudared, and was dry-mouthed when he finally went on camera. Dole himself had another explanation as he rode to the Pierre airport for the flight to Sioux City, Iowa. It was the network lights that made him look haggard, that gave the Washington harpies their chance to go after him again. “You know lighting,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Lighting can kill you.”
In choosing the Leader of the Free World, the candlepower of the kliegs shouldn’t matter. “That’s not how you pick a president,” Dole complained. “You’ve got form and you’ve got substance. I had a good message.” Perhaps so. But his dreary presentation illuminated doubts about Dole, especially when contrasted with Clinton’s energetic and smooth address. Suddenly, it seemed, all the political insiders and viewers tuning in to the ‘96 campaign for the first time were asking the same tough questions. Can Dole fend off the wealthy, hard-charging Steve Forbes–or even the plodding but relentless efforts of Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Pat Buchanan? If Dole wins the nomination, does he have the stamina and flair to best Clinton? Can Dole operate in a new media age? Or is he a man sadly out of time: a legislative mechanic who can’t see, let alone paint, a Big Picture?
Beyond the mere horse race are other, deeper dramas. One is personal: the story of a wounded but determined man in a campaign he calls his “last mission.” Like his mentor, Richard Nixon, Dole is an archetype of public striving in postwar America. No major figure has run for president longer, or more unsuccessfully, than Dole. At 72, is he simply-frankly-too old to finally make it work when he has his best chance? The other drama is historical: the last hurrah, perhaps, of what was once considered an honorable style of politics. Bob Dole’s way is personal, nonideological, patient, based on respect for seniority and deals. He has an almost physical aversion to grand rhetoric and sweeping promises. The new way relies on handlers, spots,“message” and mass insurgencies that promise simple answers to complex issues. Soon enough, we’ll see which wins.
Watching dole shift between leader and candidate is to see two men. One is a paragon of Senate bipartisanship. Last week Democrats took the floor to praise him for steering the SALT II arms-control treaty extension to passage. When Clinton needed support for sending troops to Bosnia, Dole reluctantly agreed–then whipped his recalcitrant COP colleagues into line. And it was Dole who pushed Republicans to raise the government’s borrowing authority, But as a campaigner, Dole must play the role of uncompromising partisan.
Defiantly, but not quite convincingly, he blamed the “liberal media” for his thumbs-down reviews on the response to the State of the Union. “I’m sending copies of the speech to all our supporters in the trenches,” he said. But in a NEWSWEEK Poll, 58 percent of Republicans who saw the speech thought it was a “weak response” to Clinton. GOP rivals jumped all over the speech -and him. “Dole is stuck in the locker room without a game plan,” huffed Gramm. He’s simply too old, Alexander said. More in sorrow than anger, unaligned Republicans were critical, too. “It was a debacle, wasn’t it?” said Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. “It showed his problems in full relief.” Rush Limbaugh reported that his phone lines were jammed with anti-Dole calls. He finally had to order his call screener, “Bo Snerdley,” to turn them away so he could move on to another topic. “All they wanted to talk about was Dole,” Limbaugh told NEWSWEEK, “and most of it was negative.”
Still, Dole remains the front runner, and most of the smart money think he’ll survive. “Every campaign goes through rough spots,” says James Carville, an adviser to Clinton. “They’ll probably he able to deal with this one.” Yet despite an army of endorsements and loads of money, Dole has lost ground. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, he remains the GOP favorite, but the percentage of Republicans who say they wish there was another GOP candidate in the race has risen, from 84 percent last November to 42 percent now. And in test matchups against Clinton, Dole now performs poorly. Last fall he led 49-45 in a two-way race. Now he trails, 48-52.
That’s sobering news for the Republicans. Just a year ago, it seemed that history was on the GOP’s side. They’d won the Congress for the first time in 40 years and seemed poised to easily defeat a weak and waffling Clinton. But now they’ve lost the budget fight, and winning the White House suddenly looks dicey. They may need an outsider-and certainly need another Great Communicator. Their current front runner is neither.
As the voting starts, national numbers mean less than local ones. But in individual states, there isn’t much good news for Dole. In next week’s Louisiana caucuses, which he’s skipping, Gramm and Buchanan are expected to win delegates. Dole is looking for liftoff on the Feb. 12 caucuses in Iowa, a farm state he won handily in 1988. There, and elsewhere, Dole is selling seniority and experience. But he’s being pressed by Forbes, a man who represents everything he despises: inherited wealth, the East, the ’90s cult of the political outsider. Dole’s operatives insist that a tough ad campaign has slowed Forbes in Iowa. “We’ve driven his negatives up, and ours are coming down,” said a top Dole aide. In a caucus state, Dole notes, only the “hard rocks”– longtime loyal supporters– tend to vote. Dole thinks he has them. Yet Dole publicly put his strength in Iowa last week at 31 percent hardly over-whelming-and his crowds were as flat as the Kansas prairie. In New Hampshire, the consensus is that Forbes is gaining on Dole. In Delaware, which votes four days after New Hampshire, polls show Forbes tying Dole. In Arizona, which votes Feb. 27, Forbes leads.
Dole knows he is close to, but still so far away from, a goal he’s been pursuing since he arrived in Washington when Kennedy was president. He’s known a life of near misses and bad luck. In World War II, he almost escaped unscathed until he was nearly blown to bits two weeks before the end of the fighting in Italy. In 1976, one angry mistake in a TV debate–his infamous “Democrat wars” remark-left him a humiliated loser. In 1980, he never made it out of the Reagan-dominated pack. In 1988, he had George Bush on the ropes, but lost in New Hampshire when he stood on principle. He refused to sign a"no-tax pledge" and was outmaneuvered organizationally by Bush’s quick-moving campaign.
This time was supposed to be different. It’s Dole’s turn in a party that still reveres its elders. He assembled a new team that understood the conservative grass roots of the GOP. All of last year, luck was with him. A series of major potential rivals -Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle- decided not to run. Pete Wilson flamed out early. Colin Powell’s tantalizing noncampaign froze the field for months. For a time, Forbes’s ascent had the same effect: taking momentum away from other candidates the Dole camp feared more. Now Dole needs things to break just right. He needs Forbes and Gramm to cancel each other out in Iowa and New Hampshire. Alexander could slip quietly into contention in a situation one of his aides happily describes as “chaotic.” Forbes’s bottomless pockets are a concern. “I think we have enough strength around the country,” says Dole. “But he’s got a lot of staying pow-er-and we don’t have unlimited funds.”
Dole’s real concern should be in closing the sale for himself. In Iowa last week, his events were carefully advanced, with all the trappings of a front-running campaign: blue curtains in the background, gospel music on the sound systems, decent crowds of longtime supporters culled from lists of those who backed him eight years ago. But while the audiences–especially the older folks-gazed at him with affection and respect, he said little to excite them. At every stop he pulled from his shirt pocket a copy of the 10th Amendment, the thematic core of his campaign. It says that all power not granted to the federal government is reserved to the states, or to the people. It’s not an act; Dole is a true disciple of Alf Landon, the Kansan who ran against FDR in 1986 on a theme of opposing the federal aggrandizements of the New Deal. He was conservative before conservative was cool; he even voted against the creation of Medicare in 1965. But on the campaign trail, he spends much of his time touting his Beltway experience-especially the fact that he is the longest-serving GOP leader in Senate history. “I keep getting elected in a very tough precinct,” he brags.
A product of the Dust Bowl days, Dole is a skeptic–which should serve him well at a time when voters supposedly are dubious of lofty rhetoric. Reared to dread the idea of debt, his message of the need for budgetary sacrifice is worthy. He’s a bitter foe of supply-side economics, whose newest avatar is Forbes. But presidential campaigns are about inspiration, excitement. Dole handlers know this. So they fill the front rows of his events with young people. In his televised response to Clinton, and in every stump speech, Dole evokes the fate of kids and the need to erase the federal debt for their benefit. “This isn’t about arithmetic,” he shouts. “It isn’t about politics. It’s about the future-the future of our children.” He’s right. But it somehow sounds abstract, and the crowds rarely rise to cheer.
The standard line on Dole, even. among his adversaries, is that his age per se doesn’t matter. And the NEWSWEEK Poll seems to bear that out. By a 60-37 margin, voters reject the notion that Dole is “too old to serve effectively as president.” Many of Dole’s advisers eitc such numbers when they claim age is irrelevant. “Some of us are in denial over it,” said one top aide. “What I tell them is this: people won’t answer that poll question honestly.” The State of the Union response, this adviser says, brought the issue to the surface for the first time. “Unfortunately,” he said, “what you saw was a 72-year-old man at 10 o’clock at night.”
The Dole campaign frankly acknowledges that its game plan is to keep their man away from the national press until after the first round of primaries. Though he crisscrossed the Plains in a large jet, no reporters or camera crews were allowed on the plane. A press advisory on his trip to New Hampshire told reporters to fax their requests for credentials by 5 p.m. It was faxed to Washington bureaus only hours before the deadline.
But if you catch up with Dole in a place like Pierre, you find a man wary but comfortable: his permanent state. “I kind of enjoy this kind of work,” he says, as though describing his job at the drugstore in Russell 60 years ago. He still sees things coming together, not apart. He remains the picture of lean determination. It’s a prodigious act of will by a man who has known physical pain for most of his life. He pursues a schedule that would ground lesser men. After two days in the Plains–riding buses and planes, shaking hands, slowly signing autographs with a felt-tip pen-he jetted back to Washington to shepherd legislation through the Senate, then flew to New Hampshire for a campaign day.
In the Senate, they call it “final passage”–the last confirming vote. This is Dole’s. This time he’s backed by 21 of the nation’s 31 Republican governors–including some, he notes happily, who opposed him in the past. Forbes, he believes, will falter because he’s too critical, too nasty. Yes, Dole was that way, too–back when he was known as Richard Nixon’s “sheriff” in the Senate. “At least I was elected,” Dole bitterly observes, “and had to go back and face the voters to see if they thought I was stepping over the line. Maybe Forbes will mature, maybe he’ll learn. But there are certain limits-I’ve learned that-and I think he’s crossing the line.”
In his own mind, Dole has personal connections with his idols. Just like Ike, his father ran a cream and egg station in farm country. He feels an odd affinity with Lincoln, he says, based on the date of April 14. It’s the day Lincoln was assassinated–and the date Dole was gravely wounded in Italy. “There’s a little connection there,” Dole says. More to the point, he’s learned from recent reading of Lincoln’s deep ambition. “I always thought Lincoln was sort of, you know, on a pedestal, and the world sought him out. He never gave up. He just kept going back and back and back. And he, you know, was a politician.” That’s why Dole feels a deep bond with his late mentor, Nixon. He admired the way the Old Man worked to rebuild his reputation after Watergate. “There’s something in his story, repeated two or three times over: being at the bottom of the heap and getting back up.” On his Senate desk, Dole keeps a small jade elephant that once belonged to Nixon.
Now Dole thinks he is ready for victory. “It’s all sort of an ongoing experience,” he says. “I don’t have to be briefed, don’t need anybody handing me three-by-five cards.” But a streak of fatalism remains. He’s always prepared for the worst, because he’s had reason to be. “All I can do is get out our message,” he says, “and see what happens.”
