Dole Raises Disability Issue for All to See

When Bob Dole, man with disability, runs for president in 1996, the ailment is old, but the discussion of it is new.

The old reminders: He rarely eats in public; it is too hard. He does not shake hands; his right arm, shattered in World War II, does not work. He autographs copies of his new book for just a few moments, then hands out hundreds of pre-signed tomes.

The new embrace: He talks about the Americans With Disabilities Act with greater frequency and increasing pride. He tells audiences now how he learned to walk, for the second time, in his 20s.

And people with disabilities are starting to join him regularly on the campaign trail: a quadriplegic artist in Fresno, a musician with Lou Gehrig’s disease in Oakland, a schoolgirl with multiple birth defects in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Dole stands at the complicated intersection of campaign and conscience, breaking ground in American politics. He is not the first man to run for president challenged by a physical disability. He is the first to acknowledge his ailment out on the hustings at a time when it is more comfortable than ever to talk about such issues, but not quite comfortable enough.

For the candidate and the disabled Americans who greet him, this new chapter in Dole’s political quest serves multiple, mostly good, purposes, with both sides using each other to advance their respective causes.

Softening Image

Dole’s campaign-trail meetings help increase the visibility of Americans with disabilities--a goal Dole has pursued. At the same time, his advisors know that being sung to by a disabled child as the campaign jet roars and the television cameras shoot helps to soften the former Senate majority leader’s sometimes harsh public image.

As for the disabled, some are deeply touched by Dole’s attentions. At the same time, the activists among them see the brief meetings--a handshake, a plea, a smile and a thank you--as a way of seeking increased help for their disabilities.

And every time Dole says that he, a Republican, supported the embattled disabilities law, he reminds the world that he believes the measure is necessary at a time when many conservatives are attacking it for having spawned vast federal regulations.

“It humanizes him and makes his disability less awkward in this era of searing television images,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. The disabled are “a group that doesn’t have the traditional power tools of politics. . . . He needs them, and they need him.”

“If it looks like he’s trafficking in [his disability] for self-serving ends, it won’t work,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. “But this is legitimate. This is an instance in which biography, legislative record and rhetoric are synchronized.”

Campaign’s New Phase

It is also very, very new for Dole--the unveiling over the past several weeks of a new phase in his run for the White House. Until recently, while Dole supported legislation to assist disabled Americans, he almost never spoke publicly about his disability. “You’re seeing the natural evolution of a candidacy,” Jamieson said.

Opening up about his life and struggles was “not a comfortable decision” for Dole, said his press secretary, Nelson Warfield. “He’s come to the conclusion that he has to talk a little more about what makes Bob Dole the man he is. Like it or not, his experience with the war and recovery and everyday life is shaped by his disability.”

When Jason Becker, musician in a wheelchair, was rolled out onto the Oakland Airport tarmac last week to greet the candidate and his smiling wife, there was Bob Dole looking warm and caring.

Score one for the candidate.

What the camera did not capture over the roar of jet engines was a well-planned pitch for a sometimes forgotten ailment, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. In 1990, rock star David Lee Roth asked Becker to join his band; soon after, Becker was diagnosed with the degenerative muscle disorder, one of only about 30,000 Americans with the cureless syndrome. In May, he released his latest album, the computer-generated “Perspective.”

Last week, confined to a battery-powered wheelchair and barely able to speak, Becker and his family pleaded his case to the man who wants to be president. “I want to ask him what his plans are to do with ALS and other nerve diseases,” Becker said before Dole’s arrival. “And find out what he can do for us . . . and to find out what people can do when they run out of resources and hope.”

Score one for the musician, a registered Democrat in an embroidered purple vest who plans to change his voter registration--and join the Green Party.

“For a man with Mr. Dole’s power and knowledge of the system, it’s an opportunity to put this issue in front of him,” said Patricia A. Mapps, Becker’s manager. “When a man of this stature invites you, you go. A person in Jason’s position is not partisan. He’s just trying to breathe and swallow.”

Political Risk

Simply talking about disabilities on the campaign trail runs some political risk for Dole, which was one reason for not doing it in the contested Republican primaries. The Americans With Disabilities Act costs the government money, costs businesses money and runs counter to the Republican anti-regulatory emphasis. Many conservatives strongly opposed the measure when it was in Congress.

“The larger question is, why should the federal government regulate here and not in other places,” Jamieson said. “That is the interesting question for Dole . . . and it raises a question about the Republican revolution.”

That is not a question Dole has ever directly answered. Clearly, however, he feels strongly that federal aid for the disabled is justified.

In “Unlimited Partners: Our American Journey,” the joint autobiography written with his wife, Elizabeth, Dole calls July 26, 1990, the day President Bush signed the act, “one of the most rewarding days of my life.”

Dole was not a principal author of the controversial legislation, but he worked hard for its passage. “I suppose there were some that day who saw only a White House lawn covered with wheelchairs and guide dogs,” he wrote of the signing ceremony. “As I looked around, I saw Americans possessed with amazing gifts, who could finally contribute to a nation much in need of their skills and insights.”

Poignant and important as the legislation was to this disabled American veteran, Dole spent most of the subsequent six years relatively silent on the issue of his war wound and the need for greater opportunities for the country’s 43 million disabled citizens.

It wasn’t until the end of the bruising 1996 primary season, when his candidacy was pretty much in the bag, that Dole began to heed the advice of his staff and talk publicly about that day in 1945 in the mountains of Italy, 48 hours after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death.

Dole was wounded on April 14, “the day that changed my life,” he says, on an Italian peak called Hill 913. “I spent the next 39 months of my life in and out of hospitals. Blood clots on my lungs. I was a guinea pig for streptomycin. But I was learning how to feed myself and dress myself and go to the bathroom, all those things you take for granted when you’re 20 years old.”

Looked Ill at Ease

When Dole first hit the campaign trail full time after his resignation from the Senate last month, there were American Sign Language interpreters at his first two stops--a luncheon in Toledo, Ohio, and a rally in Overland Park, Kan. On June 14, in Winston-Salem, a 9-year-old schoolgirl with diastrophic dysplasia dwarfism sang him all the verses of “Getting to Know You” on the airport runway. The candidate looked decidedly uncomfortable.

Four days later, on a swing through California, he met with artist Clayton Turner at the Western Art Gallery in Fresno. Turner, a quadriplegic, broke his neck in a diving accident in 1949 and paints by gripping a brush or pen in his teeth. His works are owned by former Presidents Carter and Reagan and former Housing Secretary Jack Kemp.

Dole to Turner: “Clayton, how you doing? I’m proud to know you. . . . You’re an inspiration.” Turner to Dole: “Look who’s talking.”

Fast-forward to Tuesday night in Century City, when Dole brings a laughing audience to silence with a five-minute lecture on being disabled, on legislation for the disabled, on a wound that cost him mobility but gave him sensitivity to the struggles of tens of millions of Americans, himself included.

“Everybody knows that you learn from every experience. And I learned a lot. How to walk. How to dress myself. How to write left-handed. . . . It taught me a lot about discipline and hard work and doing it the hard way. And that’s what America is all about.”

Does this make voters uncomfortable? Sometimes it seems to. Does it make a usually guarded man look human? Most of the time it does. But whether one considers such public encounters to be politics at its worst or politics at its best, there is no doubt that politics is at the heart of what is going on here.

“The point of all this is to tell you who I am,” Dole instructs the $1,000-a-plate crowd, looking well coiffed in the glow of candelabra at the Century Plaza Hotel. “We need to fill in the blanks. You need to know about Bob Dole.”

Lillibeth Navarro, a Southern California activist who has polio and is confined to a wheelchair, honors Dole’s toughness and perseverance and compassion. Navarro was one of hundreds of people with disabilities on the White House lawn for the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

“I’m glad he feels proud of the ADA,” she said. “But it’s not enough. We have to put teeth in the ADA. There are efforts to water it down.”

The disabled want to be self-reliant, she says, but 70% of those who can work are unemployed. Simply talking about disabilities on the campaign trail won’t fix that.

“If he becomes president, Bob Dole has to make a major effort to change that,” Navarro said. “We have a lot to offer, but we’re not given the opportunity.”

Or as the candidate himself said in San Francisco recently: “We want to make it possible for people, wherever they’re from, whatever their background, whatever their physical condition or whatever, they have a right and a possibility in America to make it to the top.

“Make it to the top, that’s the American dream.”