Takeover (18 page)

After a rough start, Dole vanquished his conservative rivals, Senator Phil Gramm, magazine publisher Steve Forbes, and political commentator Pat Buchanan, to become the face of the Republican Party in 1996.

Dole’s 1996 campaign was a classic example of a content-free establishment Republican presidential campaign—the same kind of résumé-heavy campaign that Mitt Romney ran and lost in 2012.

Republicans never, ever win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by campaigning on a conservative agenda—drawing a sharp contrast between the Democrat worldview and the conservative worldview.

One of the best examples of nationalizing a presidential election is, of course, Reagan’s 1980 campaign, but the 1994 “Contract with America” congressional campaign also drew a sharp contrast with Democrats on balancing the budget, term limits, and other issues. Likewise, in 2010, Tea Party candidates, without any real direction from the national GOP, drew a sharp contrast with Big Government Republicans and with the Democrats on taxes, spending, the growth of government, and especially on Obamacare, to power the GOP to pick up six Senate seats and win historic sixty-three seats in the US House of Representatives, recapturing the majority, and making it the largest seat change since 1948 and the largest for any midterm election since the 1938 midterm elections.

Sometimes Democrats assist in this effort by being Democrats—as Walter Mondale famously did in 1984 when he admitted, “Reagan won’t raise taxes; I will.”

If the campaign becomes, as Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill said, “all politics is local,” Democrats will win—they are the party of the delivery of ever-increasing services, and Republicans
will never outbid them for the votes of special-interest groups or payments to the aggrieved, nor should they try.

In 1996, Bob Dole ran on his biography as a war hero, attacked Bill Clinton’s character, and tried to make himself out to be a conservative, but you couldn’t find the social issues or any part of the conservative agenda in a Dole campaign ad. The low point in Dole’s campaign came when, in a ham-handed effort to appeal to conservatives, Dole said, “If that’s what you want, I’ll be another Ronald Reagan.”
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The “stand for nothing” strategy didn’t work for President Ford’s 1976 campaign, it didn’t work for President George H. W. Bush’s reelection, and it certainly didn’t work for Bob Dole—or John McCain’s losing 2008 campaign, or Mitt Romney’s losing 2012 campaign.

My old friend, conservative author, and Reagan administration official Jeffrey Bell’s insightfully wrote:

Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964. The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. … When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election … the Republican Party won seven out of eleven presidential elections.
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The American electorate was already polarized on fiscal and social issues; it was waiting for a candidate to step forward and seize the opportunity to make the case for the conservative policies that Gingrich and the conservative leadership of the House had fought for—but Senator Bob Dole was not that candidate.

Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections. As I have noted there were only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party won by a majority of the popular vote. It isn’t coincidental that when the Republicans run on conservative issues, they win.

Like any good establishment Republican, President George H. W. Bush avoided the social issues in 1992, and Bill Clinton, who ran for president and defeated Bush in 1992, was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.”

Dole missed that lesson entirely, and by running a content-free campaign, Clinton’s reelection was never really in doubt. He led the public opinion polls throughout the campaign. On Election Day, Clinton won a decisive victory over Dole, becoming the first Democrat president to win reelection since Franklin Roosevelt.

Clinton garnered 379 Electoral College votes to Dole’s 159; although Clinton outpolled Dole by over 8.2 million votes, he did not win an absolute majority of the popular vote.

The media and establishment Republican postmortem of the 1996 campaign was brutal—but it was mostly aimed at conservatives, not Dole’s content-free campaign.

In much the same way that the establishment tried to blame conservatives for Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012 by claiming that he was “forced” to embrace unpopular conservative positions, the establishment blamed Dole’s loss on the government shutdown and the conservative agenda pursued by House Republicans and largely ignored by the Senate that Dole led.

There was, however, one voice that got it right.

On the eve of Election Day 1996, conservative columnist and opinion leader George F. Will gave this “pre-mortem” to the Dole campaign:

Bob Dole’s unintelligible campaign—the “Finnegan’s Wake” of presidential politics—was premodern in its indifference to the rhetorical dimension of the modern presidency, and postmodern in its randomness. His contention that the liberal media made matters worse called to mind the sign on the ruins of an ancient British church: “Anyone damaging these ruins will be prosecuted.
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“Reagan,” said Will, “faced media much more hostile than the often affectionate media Dole faced, but Reagan won because his candidacy, unlike Dole’s, was about something larger than the candidate’s lust for the last rung up the ladder. Which is to say, the secret to getting out a message is to have one.”

Will saw in Dole “an incoherence and superficiality born of his intellectual laziness and the incompetence of his staff of rented strangers [that] trivialized every issue he touched, from the coarsening of the culture as exemplified by partial-birth abortions to the Balkanization of the country by racial preferences.” He predicted, “On Tuesday the country will make the mistake of extending a squalid presidency, but the country cannot be said to have missed the chance for a luminous presidency.”

George F. Will’s devastating indictment of the 1996 Dole–Kemp campaign included a number of criticisms that bore an eerie resemblance to what conservatives would say about the failures of the 2012 Romney–Ryan campaign, and with good reason. In both campaigns, the Republican establishment forced their candidate, and their policy of running a content-free campaign, down the throats of the conservative grassroots of the GOP, and lost the election to a Democratic candidate that in any rational universe would have been soundly defeated by a competent candidate and campaign.

Dole lost not because conservatives on the House side of Capitol Hill pursued a conservative agenda—he lost because he was at heart a supporter of Big Government who failed to embrace the reconstituted coalition of social and economic conservatives that, joined by national defense conservatives, supported the Contract with America.

But at least Bob Dole remained true to his Big Government principles. Long after he was out of office and had ceased to be relevant in Republican politics, he joined with another “great compromiser,” Howard Baker, the former Republican senator from Tennessee, and his predecessor as Senate Republican leader, to support the passage of Obamacare.

“This is one of the most important measures Members of Congress
will vote on in their lifetimes,” the former Republican Senate majority leader and presidential candidate told an audience in Kansas City. “If we don’t do it this year I don’t know when we’re gonna do it.”
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With a “commitment” to conservative principles like that, it is no mystery why Bob Dole was soundly defeated in 1996—the question facing Republicans in the aftermath of Dole’s defeat was, what was going to happen next?

I
n the aftermath of the GOP’s 1996 defeat, it was clear that Bill Clinton hadn’t won the election so much as Republicans had given it away.

Newsweek
magazine noted that even “the most loyal Democrats [ascribed] Bill Clinton’s victory to anybody or anything but Bill Clinton.” In
Newsweek
’s analysis, Clinton “was neither beloved as a leader nor trusted as a man; his first term had generated scandals enough to shadow his second before it had begun; his fellow Democrats avoided using his likeness in their advertising; his average grade as president in a nonpartisan Pew Research Center poll was a merely passable C.”
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And Clinton still outpolled Bob Dole by over eight million votes.3

As Republicans and conservatives surveyed the political environment in the wake of the 1996 election disaster, there was a tremendous leadership vacuum in the GOP at the national level. Leading fiscal conservative Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, and economic conservative magazine publisher Steve Forbes, had run against Dole in the presidential primaries and been soundly rejected by GOP primary voters. Principled conservative political commentator and former White House advisor Pat Buchanan had run against both
George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole and had defeated Dole in the New Hampshire primary in 1996.

However, it was clear the Republican establishment was never going to forgive or forget that Buchanan had run against incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush in 1992. What’s more, Buchanan’s unfiltered political commentary, which was loved by grassroots conservatives, came back to haunt him by providing his establishment Republican detractors and the liberal establishment media with unlimited fodder with which to attack him. Buchanan’s campaign soon wilted under the harsh flame of their attacks, and Buchanan returned to the role of conservative commentator. Republican voters may have liked what Pat Buchanan said, but it was clear they weren’t going to make him president.

Going into the 1996 election, former congressman Jack Kemp had been viewed by many conservatives as the leading voice of conservatism. Even though Kemp had declined to run for the presidency in 1996, he remained a popular and influential figure in conservative circles, and the fact that Kemp was put on the ticket as Dole’s running mate was taken as some evidence that even the tone-deaf Dole campaign team recognized that the campaign was DOA unless it found the means to energize grassroots conservatives.

Unfortunately, Kemp did not distinguish himself during the 1996 campaign. To the great disappointment of his many friends and supporters in the conservative movement, far from being the voice of principled conservatism that would fire up grassroots Republican voters, Kemp often came across as a zombielike figure who went through the motions of advocating a cause he knew was lost.

When Kemp did wake up, it was usually to criticize the inside workings of the Dole campaign or to declare his intention not to be “divisive” or otherwise take up the cudgel and play the role of aggressive conservative warrior against the liberal policies of Clinton and Gore.

The low point in the Dole–Kemp campaign for conservatives probably came during the Kemp–Gore debate in which Kemp, a
gifted speaker and favorite on the Lincoln Day circuit, was expected to demolish Gore. But Kemp was flat, weak, and disappointing in the debate with Gore; he did not demolish Gore as expected, and even Kemp’s close advisors admitted he did not take the debate seriously. As one Kemp staffer put it, “There was no quarterback’s pre-game drill before a big game like the Rose Bowl or the Super Bowl” before the Kemp-Gore debate.

As soon as the campaign was over, Kemp went back to running Empower America and promoting his brand of optimistic economic conservatism. Jack Kemp still had many friends in the conservative movement and grassroots Republican politics, but he was no longer seen as a potential president by most observers of the national political scene.

In the headlines of the national media, the most recognized Republican was Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, largely by dint of his fierce and tireless partisanship, was the leading conservative opponent of President Clinton and his agenda. And in the two years since the “Contract with America” Congress had been elected, Gingrich’s fight with Clinton and the business-as-usual Washington establishment over spending and balancing the budget had largely erased the me-too Republicanism of President George H. W. Bush, and effectively re-branded the Republican Party as the Party of fiscal conservatism.

However, Gingrich’s larger-than-life personality and his tendency toward bombast and hyperbole—especially when describing his own contributions to the American historical record—were beginning to wear thin on many of his colleagues in the House, and especially on other members of the House Republican leadership.

Less than six months into the first Republican-controlled House to be re-elected in half a century, Gingrich would be the target of a rebellion by some of his closest colleagues in the House leadership.

Gingrich survived the rebellion; it turned out the rebels were fractured and riven by the same conflicting personal ambitions that brought them together to plot Newt’s demise.

Still, the rebellion generated a great deal of negative publicity about Gingrich’s leadership style, and it weakened him as a national leader. Coupled with his personal foibles, and the constant negative media to which he was subjected, Gingrich was a declining force in national politics; he just hadn’t yet expended quite all of the energy stored in his meteoric rise to the Speakership.

Bill Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard
, described this period as “the winter of the Republican discontent” in an article urging the party to rally behind both Gingrich and an aggressive conservative agenda. In an interview, Kristol called the nervousness within party ranks over Gingrich “a sign of the disarray of the party” and not the cause of it.
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“To be defeated by Clinton again was a blow,” Kristol said. “To have gotten 38 percent (1992) and 42 percent (1996) in successive presidential elections is a blow. And to have proclaimed a revolution, foolishly, and not to have had a revolution happen has caused them [Capitol Hill Republicans] to overreact to a kind of timidity and even dispiritedness.”
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