Dole’s Legislative Instincts Undermine His Candidacy

Almost every time Bob Dole stepped off his campaign plane this summer, reporters gathered with a sense of anticipation.

It wasn’t curiosity about whom he would pick as a running mate. Or what kind of tax cut he would settle on.

They wondered what he would say about cigarettes and smoking. For months, almost any time someone asked, Dole gave a different answer, looking like a man who didn’t know what he wanted to say or how to say it.

Presidential campaigns worry about things that can go wrong, big things like scandal, raising money, an international crisis. At Bob Dole’s campaign, aides worry about someone asking him a question.

On a wide range of issues, from tobacco addiction to abortion, Dole is an often undisciplined thinker and an ineffective communicator. While those traits did not hinder his work as a legislative leader who would build a consensus of other people and then let them debate it, they are weaknesses in a candidate for the presidency.

“When people look to a president, they don’t look for a broker, they look for a leader,” said Larry Gerston, a political scientist at San Jose State University in California.

Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said Dole is afflicted with “the curse of the legislative insider … the very thing that made him effective in assembling legislation in Congress militates against him as a presidential candidate, where firm lines need to be drawn.”

Indeed, Dole’s tendency to look like he’s publicly assembling his own opinion - trying one, discarding it and trying another - suggests he could have difficulty as president leading the Congress and the country in one direction.

In this television-dominated era, the most successful presidents have been articulate, effective communicators who seldom allowed themselves to be distracted from their goals by nettlesome subjects like tobacco.

During a routine campaign stop in Kentucky last June, a local reporter asked Dole his opinion of President Clinton’s efforts to regulate tobacco sales to children. Dole agreed that children shouldn’t smoke. But he didn’t stop. He volunteered that tobacco isn’t necessarily addictive, a comment that might have appealed to Kentucky tobacco growers, but which drew immediate criticism from smoking opponents quick to note that Dole had accepted campaign contributions for years from the tobacco industry.

Two days later, pressed on the issue, Dole agreed that tobacco was bad for children, but suggested that milk might be bad as well.

Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, an ardent opponent of smoking, said that Dole “either exposed his abysmal lack of knowledge of nicotine addiction, or his blind spot to the tobacco industry.”

By the end of June, Dole had enough. He wrote an open letter to Koop, talking about how smoking-related illnesses killed his brother and Rep. Bill Emerson of Missouri, a friend.

Several days later in an appearance NBC’s “Today” show, Dole suggested that Koop had been brain-washed by anti-smoking forces and the liberal news media. Two weeks later he conceded that smoking is “probably addictive” and urged people to quit. The story might have died, but Dole brought it up again during comments in August on teen use of illegal drugs.

“You shouldn’t use drugs, you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes - let’s just throw them all out at the same time,” he said.

His aides rushed to clarify afterward that Dole really was talking about marijuana cigarettes.

Dole spent the summer stepping on his own campaign. When reports revealed that teen use of illegal drugs had skyrocketed during Clinton’s term, Dole tried to capitalize with a broad indictment of Clinton’s record. But whenever he raised the subject, he was barraged with questions about nicotine.

Constant negotiating, even intellectual negotiating, is common in the Congress, where Dole worked for 35 years. Particularly for the leaders, who often must set aside their own ideology while bringing together several dozen different viewpoints for a consensus.

“It’s very difficult for someone who has been at the core of leadership for as long as Dole has to have principles which are not subject to modification in the course of framing legislation,” said Baker, the Rutgers political scientist.

“You acquire a sense that almost anything is negotiable. Any principle can be fudged, any dearly held belief can be modified. … It makes it hard for you to get out there as a presidential candidate and appear as champion of principles.”

Gerston, the San Jose political scientist, said Dole was a consummate dealmaker in the Senate because his “leanings are nonexistent. His philosophy is, ‘Where do I need to go to make it work?”’

On Capitol Hill, Dole enjoyed a good relationship with reporters, talking with them almost daily about the latest effort to negotiate compromises on legislation. But as a presidential candidate, Dole hasn’t answered open-ended questions from reporters in months.

Diana Owen, a political scientist at Georgetown University here, said Dole’s troubles handling the tobacco issue underscore the problem of his campaign staff trying to control him and the message he puts across to voters.

“He has problems communicating with the public,” she said. “They’re trying to protect him from himself. … They were trying to isolate him, so he wouldn’t put his foot in his mouth.”

The problem for Dole is that when the subject veers off the day’s script of tax cuts or fighting drugs, he has to search for an answer that might not be there.

“He doesn’t put much out there that gets people to know who he is and what he stands for,” said Owen. xxxx