Bob Dole’s campaign easily divined its new slogan: “A better man for a better America.” In the minds of its creators and the candidate himself, it has the added benefit of being true.
They line Dole up against President Clinton on the issue of character and see the former senator as the clear winner. They line up the promises Clinton made in 1992 to make the nation better and see few of them kept.
Yet no one tries to make the case that Dole has run a better campaign. Supporters agree that the opinion polls are right. They show Dole trails badly and needs some immediate, stunning success in his race for the White House.
The reasons are both simple and complicated. Fundamental among them is this: In his fourth run for national office in the last 20 years, Dole has yet to articulate why voters should choose him over the incumbent president.
“I am aghast,” one longtime friend and supporter said of the state of the campaign.
The character issue will not be enough in the contest with Clinton. Former President George Bush and most of Clinton’s Democratic rivals tried that in 1992 to no avail.
Unless the Whitewater cases now percolating directly implicate the president, voters seem resigned to an uneasy peace with Clinton’s personal failings. Surveys show that a majority of voters don’t trust the president’s word, yet a majority also approved of his job performance.
Clinton has sustained the belief that the economy has improved under his stewardship and that he understands far better than Dole the lingering economic uncertainty felt by millions of voters.
In post-Cold War politics, character has diminished as an issue, and along with it the expectations for all political figures. No longer are people concerned about standing up to one menacing enemy like the former Soviet Union, counting on a president who is primarily the guardian of the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Dole’s life story–overcoming devastating war wounds and his rise to power from Dust Bowl Kansas–encapsulates what children learn in grammar school about the heroism of presidents. It has failed to captivate the public’s attention.
Dole’s campaign insists the American people don’t know Dole’s story. At the same time, they concede that the prevailing, and more potent, image is that of a 73-year-old politician who has spent 35 years in a Washington scorned by many voters.
Even among several of his top advisers, there is a private concession: Dole still has no clear message, no clear strategic vision, and as such, voters have no compelling reason to support him.
It is as if he’s locked in the time when party politics dominated, when serving longer than any other Republican as the Senate majority leader might have been inherent validation of leadership, trust, and mettle. His ability to bring Democrats and Republicans to agreement on a host of legislative matters has left no lasting, positive imprint on the public memory.
More than any modern president, Clinton has proven that the job today is more one of independent contractor than party loyalist. On welfare reform, Clinton was willing to override 60 years of Democratic orthodoxy about the role of government in protecting the poor.
Beyond the “better man” half of his slogan, Dole vows nothing short of a “better America.”
Here, too, he has failed to tell the nation how. His campaign is faced with the daunting and expensive task of promoting both the Dole life story and an agenda that lives up to the grand promise of a “better America.”
To be sure, time remains to reverse a downward trend in his campaign in the last two months, but increasingly the prospects seem to be premised on Clinton’s squandering good political fortune.
Dole is said to believe that most Americans have not engaged in the presidential race yet and that the national conventions will bring the race into focus. The campaign takes most heart in a steady finding in polls that most Americans believe the country is on the wrong track.
“We are in under-appreciated good shape,” said John Buckley, communications director for the Dole campaign. In the next 30 days, he said, Dole will unveil his economic plan (Monday in Chicago), announce his vice presidential pick, deliver a “superb convention speech” and start spending money at a rate comparable to Clinton once he receives federal matching funds.
“Those four things combined are going to do wonders in terms of getting Sen. Dole’s message across so (voters) can make a choice,” Buckley said.
More Top Picks Best Cake Combs
Asked what the message is, Buckley replied: “In a nutshell, it’s more opportunity, smaller government, stronger and safer families. Everything we do between now and November has to fit into those categories to be meaningful.”
When Clinton campaigned in 1992, he offered several clear, concrete proposals for what his presidency would bring. Health care for all, a middle class tax cut and ending welfare “as we know it.” The Dole campaign remains baffled why Clinton has not suffered for delivering, and only belatedly, on one: welfare.
Dole also has been hurt by the consistent disaffection with the Republican Congress, particularly with House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Democrats successfully painted Republican proposals on Medicare and Medicaid as extreme, and they benefited greatly when Americans blamed Republicans for shutting down the government last year.
The modern presidency has become a more symbolic office with a premium placed on communications skills, and Clinton has been adroit.
Dole has been a flawed communicator at best.
In his other national campaigns, Dole has been criticized for trying to micromanage, and there are signs that he is doing it again. He also is surrounded by people who do not have a long history of loyalty to him. They include conservatives more in the mold of Jack Kemp, or even Gingrich, who have tried to remake him on some issues like tax cuts and some social issues.
Some of the sharpest criticism of the Dole campaign has come from within the Republican Party. Many of the Republicans who identify more closely with Gingrich and those who led the party’s historic takeover of Congress in 1994 have never fully embraced Dole. Two conservative columnists, Cal Thomas and Arianna Huffington, went so far as to publicly say he should step aside before the convention.
The infighting that often visits, and sometimes poisons, a campaign is vivid in Dole’s. There are private criticisms of Dole and of each other, frequently to reporters, but never a willingness to speak on the record.
“The problem is not what is wrong with the campaign now,” one adviser said. “The problem is when you look on the shelf there is not the medicine to fix it.”
More recently, Dole has brought on former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, former Minnesota congressman Vin Weber and former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
Regardless of internal problems with a campaign, which invariably come to light when things are not going well, it is Dole, not any apparatus, who must convince Americans that his slogan is true.