Bob Dole to run for president - 14 June 1996

There was a moving hour or so in the Senate of the United States last Tuesday that reminded me by a quirk of memory of a woman athlete, the first black woman to become the tennis champion of United States and Britain. She won Wimbledon and then the United States Championship two years in a row. And I remember some coach or friend of hers saying: "She's a great athlete. There's nothing she couldn't do. No game she couldn't conquer if she put her mind to it." Well, she retired early and put her mind to the game of golf. And managed to qualify as a professional. She went on the tour and was never heard of thereafter.

Well, last Tuesday afternoon, Senator Bob Dole took a similar professional risk. 28 years a senator, 11 of them the Republican Senate leader. And probably the most effective legislator of his time. He decided to turn his expert hand to another game which requires quite different talents. To become an equally effective president. He did something that other senators who have run for the presidency did not do. He resigned his seat for ever. They stayed, hoped to become president, ran a campaign, didn't make it and went back to representing their state in the Senate.

Senator Dole not only left the Senate once for all, he made a point of it. And boasted strategic move. "Now," he said, "I am no longer Senator Dole. I am Citizen Dole. Now I am no longer in Washington and of Washington. I'm going out into America to listen to Americans and their needs." This was surely an empty sort of boast. It was as a Washingtonian, a greatly experienced practitioner of government at the national level, that he rightly achieved his fame. "Citizen Dole!" snorted a senator from the other side, a Democrat. And then sighed: "Say it ain't so, Bob! Say it ain't so! Remember Charlie Chaplin wanting to play Hamlet?" The man put his finger on it, on what could turn out to be the only charade of Mr. Dole's life.

Of course at the farewell ceremony in the Senate, after the senator had gone on in his droll, sentimental, rambling way, to such great effect that he had an eight minute standing ovation, the news reporters got after colleagues on both sides. The main line of all the senators who spoke of him was that he never threatened the party members who disagreed with him. And as one said: "He had a very strong sense of when he could push for a consensus and when he should not. He was able, when a consensus arrived to leave people with the belief that they had reached the conclusion on their own." In short, Senator Dole knew and practised better than any senator I can recall, certainly since the Second War, what James Madison said more than 200 years ago, in the weeks of debate during which this form of government was being invented. There are three principles of successful law making. Compromise, compromise, compromise.

Of course, that line is seized on by politicians so timid and wobbly that they have no principles about anything. But Senator Dole did. He did believe deeply in the way he wanted things done. The cures he thought best for the ills of society. But he knew most of all, as a legislative leader, that in democratic government you can never get the whole loaf. Or as he put it on Tuesday: "You can never have total victory." He recalled some of the laws that he'd been most responsible for passing, beginning with the historic Social Security Financing Act. And he recalled that in legislation that seemed most crucial to him to get passed, he'd had the help of 19 Democratic Senators and only 11 of his own party. That didn't mean that the Democrats surrendered their principles or he his, but they were ones who shared his philosophy of government. They were ones ready to accommodate. Their true beliefs to his true beliefs. And write a law that might not delight but would satisfy most of the senate.

This virtue is not of the sort that sets fire to the prose of the history books. It's not a dramatic gift and it doesn't lend itself to rousing motion pictures. But good government as such rarely does. Which is why political plays and movies have to dramatise the very qualities that have little to do with bringing about workable laws. Blazing oratory, heroic ideology, the scornful dismissal of opponents, the taking of audacious risks. These are wonderful qualities with which to fight a war. But comes the peace, comes the pause and you have to throw off the cloak and drop the sword. Hence after Roosevelt, Harry Truman. After Churchill, Clement Attlee.

The sad reflection the man was making who said, "Say it ain't so, Bob!" He was thinking of the young Turks in the Republican Party. The new Republicans, about 40-odd of them, elected in 1994. These are the ones that kept up a daily drum beat of applause for the Speaker of the House, Mr. Newt Gingrich. Remember him? Who underlined with a flourish his contract with America. The people who most conspicuously wanted no compromise of any sort with the administration's policies on healthcare, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, that's medical care for the very poor, on abortion, even though it's the law of the land, the young Turks want to overturn it. And so on.

You haven't heard anything about the contract with America for months and months because while it promised to rid the country of the more flip-flopping contradictions of the president's policies, it went farther to the right than the country wanted it to go. The young Turks were so determined, at all costs, to cut taxes and cut spending on healthcare, on welfare, on protecting the environment, on government inspection for toxic waste, on student scholarships, on inner city poverty projects. Because, they said, often quite rightly, the country couldn't afford all these social services.

In response, President Clinton said, with splendid rhetoric: "If you cut the welfare project as you propose, you will give tax cuts to the rich and shamefully ignore the poor, the sick, the minorities, the students, the earth itself".

Now this is a gross oversimplification of the original Republican contract. For instance, the Republicans actually want to increase the federal budget for Medicare, that's medical care for everybody over 65. But their budget doesn't increase it quite so much as Mr. Clinton's does. Now why you haven't heard so much of these fearsome, triumphant young Turks of 1994/5, why their extremism didn't turn into law was not just because of the opposition of the Democrats. But because of the restraining hand of Senator Dole. Whoa Dobbin, was his injunction to these hasty new legislators. He recognised before anyone else in the party that the country might have gone conservative for a moment there in '94, but like all American populations about to vote for the next president, an instinctive caution takes over against extremists of either wing. The country moves to the centre. So Senator Dole did. And so citizen Dole is now trying to move that way as a presidential campaigner. But there's an obstacle at the centre. It's nobody but President Clinton. He occupies the spot already. So you can see why the former Senator Dole is highly unpopular now with the right wing of his party and with the young Turk Republicans. They think he's betrayed them.

Only this week, Mr. Dole, realising rather late in the day that close to 80 per cent of the people are in favour of a woman's right to an abortion, Mr. Dole wants the Republican platform, which will soon be being composed, to omit any mention of abortion. "Let's agree," he said, "that our party is big enough to embrace people of different opinions. On this as on other matters." Well, so far it's been a feeble appeal. More of an irritant to the Christian right, to the Catholic Church, to the most conservative Republicans. So I'm afraid the prospect of seeing a united, confident Republican Party at its California convention in the summer is a very dim one.

People, especially visitors from abroad, keep asking, who's going to win the election? And I keep saying, "It's early days." If the election were held today, there's no question President Clinton would come down on the Republican fold like the Assyrian – remember? – "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold" with Edna St. Vincent Millay.

So, suppose it's much the same in November. Suppose President Clinton is re-elected. What will happen to Mr. Dole? He says he has buried the past. He's now jobless. Homeless. And has left behind, he says, all the trappings of power, all comfort, all security. What a frightful sacrifice! What a bleak future! Not quite.

Untouched by his shedding of the trappings of power are the fruits of prudence. Of saving money for a rainy day. His total assets are somewhere between three quarters of a million and two million dollars. Also he will receive for life a pension from the Senate, $107,000 a year, starting this August. And because it's adjusted for inflation if he lives to be 85, the pension will be $178,000 a year. He gets a War Veterans' disability payment of $17,000 a year. If, nevertheless, he finds himself broke, his pretty and able wife Elizabeth, who's been 28 years in government will be eligible for a government pension which could touch $2 million 25 years from now.

Mr. Dole has magnanimously said he's thought of giving all his pension benefits to charity. That's quite a rip in the cushion of his old age. Still, I think we can staunch our tears, pocket our handkerchiefs, if ever we hear a replay of that heartbreaking sentence: "I have left behind all trappings of power, all comfort, all security".

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