Playing the Knave Isn’t Dole’s Strong Suit

Independents and weak Democrats elect Republican Presidents; there just are not enough Republican voters to do the job. That fact of political life should be Bob Dole’s chief asset in the race for the GOP nomination. After all, the Senate minority leader has been called “the Democrats’ favorite Republican.” He has an image as an independent, non-ideological conservative. He co-sponsored, with George McGovern, the original food-stamp legislation, and he fought the Reagan Administration to save the Voting Rights Act. “We’re sort of a hard-hearted party,” he told the Young Republicans’ convention last week. “We get the rap that we don’t care.” Dole cares.

But before he becomes the Republican candidate in the November election, Dole has to win the nomination of a party whose activists and primary voters are--in the main--right-wing, ideological conservatives. To appeal to this narrow but crucial electorate, Dole has for some time been taking positions that could come back to haunt him in the general election. Pitted against a foundering Jack Kemp and a politically weakened George Bush, Dole has a strong chance to win the battle for the nomination but--by the manner ofhis winning--lose the war to be the next President.

In just the past few months Dole has moved to the right of the Administration in two small instances that are symbolic of his wider courtship of the right wing.

Dole has joined with Jesse Helms and a score of other Republican senators in making the appointment of our next ambassador to Mozambique hostage to a change in U.S. policy toward the Marxist government of that miserable, war-wracked country. Dole, Helms & Co. want the Administration to stop trying to woo the government away from Moscow and instead switch its support to Renamo, the contra- like guerrilla movement fighting the government. Renamo is backed by South Africa, whose apartheid system Dole has denounced. Even by the unlovely standards of guerrilla groups generally, Renamo’s tactics are odious: It burns clinics, attacks medical teams (and has kidnaped an American nurse) sent to help famine victims, and cuts off the ears of peasants who fall into its bloody hands.

That Renamo should be supported by right-wing covens like the Heritage Foundation is no surprise, but what is sensible and intelligent Bob Dole doing backing such people? Going to Reagan’s right on Mozambique might redound to Dole’s credit with the hard cases at Heritage, but how will he explain his support of these terrorists to the rest of the voters?

Worse than that dilemma is a moral one. As South African columnist Simon Barber wrote last month, “Hundreds of thousands more Mozambicans may have to die of famine and war so that Sen. Dole . . . can have a shot at the party’s nomination.”

And, against a future Democratic opponent, how will Dole defend his giving Surgeon General C. Everett Koop a calculated slap in the face because Phyllis Schlafly pressured him to do it? One thinks of Bob Dole, the disabled war veteran, as a brave man, and yet (according to a report on National Public Radio) an admonitory letter from Schlafly was enough to get him to withdraw as one of the sponsors of a recent dinner honoring Koop, who is in Schlafly’s bad book because he insists that sex education is needed to combat AIDS. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), no liberal, attended the dinner and praised Koop for his leadership in meeting the health crisis of our times.

There is more: The man who sponsored important legislation to reform the tax code and raise taxes in 1982, thereby saving the Reagan Administration from the worst consequences of the drastic 1981 tax cuts, now sides with the Administration and against many of his Republican colleagues in opposing tax increases. The man who voted for the anti-ballistic-missile treaty in 1972 now has embraced the Administration’s new-found broad interpretation that would effectively nullify the treaty and, says Sam Nunn, the conservative Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, contains the seeds of a “constitutional crisis.”

It’s hard to believe that pragmatic Bob Dole, a supreme legislative tactician during his years as the Senate majority leader, wants to precipitate a constitutional crisis, or that he really cares about the things dear to Schlafly’s heart, or that he, Mr. Deficit himself, is against raising taxes to lower the deficit. No, this “Lon Chaney of American politics,” as William Schneider calls him in the current issue of the Atlantic, is putting his image of independence, of soundness, at risk in order to get the nomination.

Dole’s skill at having things both ways--being at once “the electable” Republican with a strong appeal to Democrats and independents, and the ally of Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlafly--raises a vexing question: What does he really believe in? Notoriously, Dole has a problem with what his rival for the nomination, George Bush (who should know) calls “the vision thing.” He is not a conviction politician like Ronald Reagan or Jack Kemp. He just can’t get his tongue around the rhetoric of belief. And no wonder, when you consider what he has been through in his life.

At age 21, Lt. Dole was horribly wounded; a German artillery shell mauled his right shoulder and “permanently and totally” disabled his right arm. He spent years in painful convalescence, and to this day he must rise early because dressing himself is so time-consuming. Such tribulations build character, and Bob Dole, who uses reserves of will every time he buttons his shirt, clearly has character. But suffering can also breed cynicism. Dole recalled in an interview with Gail Sheehy in the March Vanity Fair: “You think nobody could have it worse than you, why did God do it to me, I didn’t do anything, it’s unfair. I’m never going to get married, never going to amount to anything. Live off a pension. Selling pencils on a street corner.”

A man who has beaten back such despair is constitutionally incapable of indulging in the flatulent oratory of a Ronald Reagan or a Jack Kemp. He doesn’t believe in causes; he gives the appearance of believing in only that formidable force, himself. The question is: Will that be enough for the voters?

DR, KAL, The Economist, London