A Vote For Dole Is A Vote For The Past
The Republicans, as far as anyone can tell, are preparing to take the country on the greatest leap backward in American history. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
The reports from the summer meeting of the Republican National Committee in Philadelphia confirm the widespread expectation among GOP leaders that a year from now, they will be taking the field against President Clinton under the banner of Sen. Bob Dole.
I am firmly of the belief that the term “front-runner” should never be applied to anyone until the voters in New Hampshire have performed their God-given right to sort out and shrink the presidential nomination field. But it is clear that the Senate majority leader from Kansas dominates the race in every way today.
Dole has the public prominence, the familiarity and the standing that no one else now running can claim - to say nothing of the best organization, the strongest financial backing and the most impressive endorsements.
An experienced presidential strategist, nominally supporting another candidate who happens to come from his home state, remarked last week that Dole conceivably “could win this without a real fight.” I disagreed. My hunch is that the historical pattern will hold and that someone will emerge from the big field of rivals to take a real run at Dole. That is the normal pattern for the opposition party. The struggle may be brief, as it was when George Bush threatened the favored Ronald Reagan in 1980, or it may be protracted, as it was when Gary Hart made the favored Walter Mondale battle through many primaries in 1984.
But Republicans more often than Democrats actually nominate the early anointed favorite. Former Vice President Dan Quayle might have contested Dole’s claim to that position, but he chose to stay home in Indiana. Jack Kemp was the top choice for 1996 in a poll of the delegates at the 1992 convention, but he too chose early retirement. So Dole inherited that status, rather than having to fight for it.
His rivals point out that Dole, at 73 in January 1997, would be the oldest man ever to take the presidential oath for the first time, breaking Ronald Reagan’s record by more than three years. But Dole’s fitness is not a concern to anyone who knows the rigor of his daily schedule.
What is more striking is that if elected, Dole would be 23 years older than the outgoing president, Bill Clinton. In generational terms, this would be the biggest leap backward in American history. Reagan was 13 years older than Jimmy Carter in 1981. You have to go back to the Franklin Pierce-James Buchanan succession in 1857 to find another gap of that dimension. Two ill-fated predecessors, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, both of whom soon died in office, were 10 and 11 years older than the preceding presidents. Lyndon Johnson was nine years older than John F. Kennedy.
Through more than two centuries of our history, in other words, presidents have either been of the same generation as their predecessor or of a successor generation - the latter being the case with Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton, among others.
A public decision to go back a generation in presidential leadership would be as significant as it is unprecedented. It would mean that Clinton, instead of being seen as the first of a string of “boomer-generation” leaders of the nation, would be just a brief interruption in the succession of the Depression-era, World War II veterans who occupied the White House from 1953 to 1993.
What is it that has given that particular cohort of Americans such an enduring hold on the nation’s fancy? Or to ask it the other way, what is it that has made it so hard for the boomers - Hart, or Quayle, or Clinton, or Al Gore, or Newt Gingrich - to develop a strong and secure grip on public approval?
I put that question to the man who had predicted Dole’s nomination, a boomer himself and someone who would surely have backed Kemp or Quayle if one of them had run. He answered with another question: “What has my generation done that anyone should trust us? Dole’s generation not only endured the Depression and won World War II, they built the greatest and most widely shared era of economic prosperity in our history. Even today, they hold most of the wealth.
“My generation, by contrast, has run up most of the debt, filed for most of the divorces, used most of the drugs.” That is a harsh judgment - but one the nation would be echoing if it decided, literally, to turn back history and make Bob Dole the next president.
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