Dole Gets Fragged by His Troops

All was right with Bob Dole’s world when he left Washington Friday morning for a weekend campaign swing in California. Earlier in the week, after sweeping the Midwestern primaries, he went to the White House as his party’s all-but-official presidential nominee and essentially kicked off his general election campaign there by announcing Republican legislative priorities for the year.

Newt Gingrich and the rest of the House GOP leadership, after dominating public debate of the Republican revolution throughout 1995, had pledged their subservience to Dole as he worked to advance that agenda. Even Pat Buchanan announced that he planned to take a few weeks off the campaign trail after the California primary. A reluctant Republican Party finally seemed ready to get behind its nominee.

Or maybe not. Dole’s campaign plane had barely left Washington airspace when his putative congressional allies took to the floor of the House to repeal last year’s controversial ban on assault weapons. At a time when they should have been marching in lock step with their newly crowned nominee, the House Republicans instead pulled the rug right out from under him. By the time Dole touched down in Los Angeles, they had successfully voted for the repeal, turning a whirlwind tour of California designed to bolster Dole’s general election prospects in this critical state into a three-day exercise in damage control on a divisive, no-win issue.

With friends like these, you couldn’t blame Dole for wondering who needs Democrats.

In recent weeks, Dole has been effectively presenting Bill Clinton as an obstacle to change, emphasizing popular issues with broad-based support like tax cuts, welfare reform and a balanced budget. If House Republicans had wanted to demonstrate support for their party’s presidential nominee, they could have passed legislation on any one of these issues last week, dared Clinton to exercise his veto and provided substantial and symbolic reinforcement for Dole’s opening salvo.

But by choosing instead to highlight an issue as volatile as the assault weapons ban in the first days of Dole’s general election campaign, they played right into Clinton’s hands. They reminded the electorate of its uneasiness with some of the sharper edges of the GOP message. They reinforced what has been Clinton’s strongest argument, that a Republican Congress left unchecked by a Democrat in the White House would push for more radical programs than most Americans are comfortable with. And they tripped up their own nominee with an unpopular issue just as he was breaking out of the starting gate.

A year ago, these same House Republicans carefully crafted and doggedly stuck to a game plan that emphasized conservative themes with broad popular support. Divisive agenda items like abortion, school prayer and gun control were left on the back burner.

No one has suggested, then or now, that these aren’t serious issues with significant constituencies that deserve to be heard in legitimate debate. But Gingrich and his lieutenants had the foresight to realize that the controversy generated by any one of these issues could cost them critical public support and momentum for their agenda. That discipline seems much less important to them, though, now that it is Dole’s life on the line rather than their own.

Dole’s handlers may be able to spin this uncomfortable scenario into a political plus for their candidate. They will argue that his refusal to bring the assault weapons repeal to the Senate floor proves that he is capable of reining in hard-line House Republicans. But those hard-liners didn’t do Dole any favors by throwing this political hand grenade into his lap.

Republicans on the Hill talk regularly of the need for an “integrated” campaign between the presidential campaign and their candidates for the House, Senate and governors’ races. This is a polite but condescending way of saying that they’re afraid of a one-on-one contest between Dole and Clinton and are looking for a way to broaden the combat into a larger political war between the two parties.

But as much as this integrated campaign strategy assumes that the rest of the party will join their leader at the forefront in the general election battle, it also means that they must stand behind him when he needs it. If congressional Republicans are serious about defeating Bill Clinton, they can’t afford to keep fragging their own party’s nominee. One of these days, they’re going to have to start jumping on those grenades for Bob Dole instead of the other way around.