But something may have happened to Dole last week. He had, he told me later, a moment of doubt: “Driving around in the car, hearing AP say it doesn’t look too good. Might even finish third. You try to prepare yourself.” He thought about whether it was worth it, staying in the race, slugging it out. And though he doesn’t quite admit it, Dole might not have stayed in had it been anything like 1988, when he was beaten by George Bush. This, however, was different. Pat Buchanan represents a profound threat to everything Dole believes in–not just ideologically, but temperamentally. Buchanan represents instability, anger. “He looked pretty angry when I passed him in the hall last night,” Dole said. “Can’t figure out why. He won.” Worse, Buchanan represents a kind of casual, drive-by intolerance that truly grates on the senator. “We wouldn’t get a single Jewish vote [if Buchanan got the nomination],” he said. And so Dole–who had posited the campaign against Clinton as “one last mission” for his generation–has come to the conclusion that there is another, more immediate and personal mission for him: saving his party from reactionary radicalism. “We were going down in the elevator to the ballroom to concede,” New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill recalled, “and I was surprised by how cool he was, cracking jokes. He said, “Next time, I’m gonna get this right’.”
Next time is now. But it isn’t easy for Dole to compete in this arena. His visceral mistrust of histrionics makes it near impossible for him to craft a speech that builds dramatically and moves a crowd. He will bark an occasional applause line, but there are never any of the cadences, riffs and rhythms that bond an audience to a speaker. He did get better, and more energetic, after New Hampshire. His thoughts were strangled, half-articulated–but at least there were thoughts (none of his speeches in Iowa and New Hampshire had contained anything remotely resembling an idea). He bashed Buchanan with some gusto. It was the most rudimentary sort of politics: Bob Dole was, finally, learning how to say what he was against.
If he wants to win, he’ll have to do much more than that. He’ll have to figure out a compelling way to say what he is for. Given the current atmosphere, that wouldn’t be easy, even for a candidate with far greater rhetorical skills. Because what Dole is selling, ultimately, is a product insufficiently appreciated by an enervated media and self-indulgent electorate: he is selling tradition, restraint, moderation in the midst of a vast public silliness (especially about the economy). Ted Kennedy talks about a “Quiet Depression” in a country enjoying the most stable economic growth of any advanced industrial nation. Buchanan talks about the evils of immigration and the glories of “protecting” anachronistic paper and textile mills at a moment when American ethnic diversity is proving a blockbuster advantage in the global market and American high- and info-tech creativity is trashing all competitors.
But there is a national crassness that has become an issue in this presidential campaign–and needs to be addressed responsibly. As we flew across South Dakota last Wednesday, I asked Dole who’d been the largest private employer in Russell, Kans., when he was a boy. A trucking firm called R.C. Williams, he replied. Had about 150 employees. And what would have happened, I asked, if R.C. Williams had fired 30 of those employees and given himself a big fat bonus? Folks wouldn’t have liked it, Dole said. You just didn’t treat people like that. But, I pressed, isn’t that what’s happening now? “You mean, AT&T?” Dole asked, referring to the 40,000 layoffs Pat Buchanan has been feasting on. “What can you do about that? You can’t deal with it legislatively. And you can’t out-Buchanan Buchanan.”
Right, but you can do what Bob Dole did to Hollywood earlier in the year: you can stigmatize the crassness. You can say that in America we don’t celebrate other people’s misfortune. You can remind voters that while companies must operate at peak efficiency to compete in the global economy, and layoffs are sometimes a necessary part of that, it is grotesque and unseemly for corporate leaders to give themselves zillion-dollar bonuses while firing some workers and suppressing the wages of others. You can call that sort of behavior shameless. You might also mention some of the marginal things government can do–job-training vouchers, health-care reform–to ease the pain when people are laid off. It’s not a message as stirring as Buchanan’s populist nonsense, but it has the advantage of being honest and true. And consistent. Who knows? It might even have some appeal. If only Bob Dole could deliver it.
