Oh, Brother, But This Ain’t Kansas
They’ve done “Larry King Live.” They’ve hobnobbed with the powerful and famous. They’ve been to Sea World. And Bob Dole’s two sisters are loving every minute of it.
“Newt Gingrich gave me a kiss,” 70-year-old Norma Jean Steele said with a wink.
“We saw the killer whales,” added 74-year-old Gloria Nelson.
Lifelong residents of Russell, Kan., the Dole sisters arrived for their brother’s coronation at the Republican National Convention aboard his campaign plane.
They sit in the hall’s VIP box, wearing colorful dresses and sunflower pins, thrilled at meeting former presidents, governors and other bigwigs. But they haven’t had enough time to visit with the dozens of Dole family members and friends in town. “We’re just busy,” Steele said. “All these people are asking us for interviews. There are a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time. We hardly have had time to say hello.”
The sisters sometimes answer questions at the same time and finish each other’s sentences. They aren’t used to being scheduled by campaign handlers, preferring to just chat on the phone or answer their front doors back in Kansas.
They like to have fun. Nelson snapped Larry King’s suspenders during their appearance Monday night.
“It was fun,” she chuckled.
A toxic invitation
Bruce Willis’ name was on the invitation, but Idaho Gov. Phil Batt declined a chance to meet the actor who is the leading financial backer of the state initiative to scuttle Batt’s 1995 nuclear-waste deal.
Willis, who has contributed more than $35,000 to the Stop the Shipments campaign, was among the stars listed to attend a Tuesday night fund-raiser at Planet Hollywood, the nightclub chain in which Willis has invested. Actor Charlton Heston had invited Batt and other GOP leaders to the fund-raiser for his new Arena Political Action Committee.
“I don’t want to meet Bruce Willis,” Batt said. “It’s not on my priority list.”
Some kind of puppet government?
So many agonizing decisions for the Republican delegates: abortion, immigration, affirmative action and, most important, whether to buy the souvenir Bob Dole hand puppet or the $600,000 diamond-studded elephant pin at Neiman Marcus.
In addition to being overrun by politicians, journalists and fat cats, San Diego is awash in convention kitsch, memorabilia and free corporate-sponsored gift bags.
Just about every product imaginable is available: Dole pineapple soap; red, white and blue gun racks; topiary elephants; life-sized Newt Gingrich cardboard cutouts; $10 convention cigars; Bill Clinton cat toys; and $150 Ronald Reagan Stetson hats.
There’s even a GOP escort service: Rent three girls, get the fourth free! (“GOP” in this case stands for “Good Old-fashioned Pleasure.”)
The cache of goods is so extensive that the National Museum of American History has sent two staffers to hunt trinkets for its collection of political memorabilia.
Forgetting who’s the boss
On the eve of the biggest speech of his life, Bob Dole’s novelist-speechwriter Mark Helprin bailed out of San Diego in a huff after Dole scrapped the ending of his prime-time address.
Helprin caught a flight back to his farm in upstate New York late Tuesday after Dole - who’d been working with him since April on Thursday night’s acceptance speech for the GOP convention ordered the last four paragraphs revamped.
He gets the bounce
Bob Dole closed to within 10 points of President Clinton in a nightly tracking poll released Wednesday as the Republican presidential nominee apparently started getting the expected “bounce” from his party’s national convention.
Another national poll released Wednesday also found Clinton’s advantage eroding to only 8 points over Dole in a three-way matchup including Ross Perot.
It is the closest Dole has come to Clinton in the two polls since early this year.
Presidential candidates almost always get at least a small rise in the polls from their party’s conventions. Sometimes, though, the gains aren’t enough to make the lead change hands - or they evaporate as quickly as they appeared.