The Old Dole Is the New Clinton

Bob Dole is not campaigning, he’s growling: more prisons and assault weapons, bash Hollywood and ring Taiwan with missile defenses. This once courtly if acerbic denizen of the Senate is now merely intemperate.

Crime is down, the economy is up and the world’s people are more interested in making a buck than in fighting us, but to listen to Dole, you’d think America’s position has never been worse. He recently labeled the Clinton years a “sad interlude of American waffling and weaknesses.”

But where is the evidence of America’s weakness? Refuting earlier predictions, Clinton has turned out to be an effective foreign policy president. People like me, who criticized him on Haiti and Bosnia, have been proved wrong. And both Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat praise Clinton’s role in the all-important Middle East peace process.

Yet ignoring those very real achievements, Dole has decided to make foreign policy the battleground of the character issue. Last week, in a major speech, Dole accused Clinton of “weak leadership, vacillation and inconsistency,” while failing to offer a single serious policy alternative.

Claiming that the United State is “drifting and defensive, with an uncertain course and an untrusted voice in the Pacific Basin,” Dole charged that the administration has not been tough enough on China. But Dole, like the president, supports most favored nation status for China, so what would he do differently?

Ring Taiwan, Japan and South Korea with missile defenses that they have not asked for, that’s what. Now there’s a fresh, innovative response to the threats of the emerging multinational economy. The Chinese challenge us with the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world and we prepare for World War III. Doesn’t Dole understand that the Pacific Basin is becoming one integrated economy and that national assets, the presumed target in any war, are now multinationally owned? Taiwanese businessmen have $20 billion invested in the mainland, which says more about “one China” than all of Beijing’s bluster.

On trade issues, Dole is caught between a rock and a hard place. He can’t replicate the jingoism of Pat Buchanan and also please the business community, which thrives in the multinational economy. Dole makes noises about opening Asian markets to American goods, but Clinton and Mickey Kantor, his pit bull trade negotiator, have already stolen that thunder.

Although it took Dole’s staff months to draft his foreign policy speech, it contained no new assessment of this country’s security needs. His only specific criticism of the Clinton administration was over its resistance to reviving the “Star Wars” program, originally designed to shoot down incoming Soviet nuclear-armed ICBMs. Despite massive expenditures, the program was discredited when its key technology, the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser, fizzled.

The Soviets are gone, but Dole and Newt Gingrich are pushing a bill through Congress to force the Pentagon to deploy a $20-billion system in three years to deter international terrorism. The only problem is that international terrorists don’t have ICBMs. And even if they could lay their hands on one, it would still be far more practical to smuggle 20 pounds of plutonium into Manhattan and decimate New York City. The spread of nuclear weapons technology and materials is a real problem that needs to be met by international policing on the ground and not with fantasy defenses in the sky.

One can sympathize with Dole’s desperation. The ideological zealots who have captured his party forced the Senate leader to betray what he did best, which was broker sound legislation with bipartisan support. Then came the revolution of Newt Gingerich and Dole has not been his old rational self since.

It was hot while it lasted, that Gingrich revolution. More a tantrum than a revolution, but still, it had decent folks confused. However, when even Al D’Amato warns that “the whole Republican Party has been set back on its heels” by Gingrich, you know the revolution is over. But not before it took Dole down with it.

The old Dole was very much like the new Clinton, but it’s too late to regain that ground. Clinton has positioned himself as the perfect moderate, ever comfortable at the center of domestic and foreign policy. Poor Dole is left mucking about in the dregs of a failed Republican right, reminescent of the days when Republicans accused Democrats of being “nattering nabobs of negativity.”