Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 2, 1993 TAG: 9305020079
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KAREN TUMULTY LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
"Fifty-seven percent of the Americans who voted in the presidential election voted against Bill Clinton," the Republican leader of the Senate declared with his familiar growl, "and I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the U.S. Senate. If Bill Clinton has a mandate, then so do I."
On the surface, it was just another caustic comment, the sort of acid rain you'd expect the sharp-tongued Kansan to drizzle on someone else's parade. Down deeper, it was more than that. It was a deeply personal declaration:
Bob Dole was back.
Back with a vengeance - as the winner of the 1992 presidential sweepstakes has since learned, and could learn again and again.
Only two years ago, Dole's spirits had been so low he seriously considered giving up politics. President Bush's popularity was at its peak, and the ultimate prize - the Oval Office - seemed forever beyond Dole's reach. He faced the prospect of spending the next six years "carrying the mail," as he put it, for the very man who had demolished his hopes in New Hampshire.
Dole was left to endure the insolence of an entrenched Democratic Senate majority and the sniping of Republican up-and-comers.
Having established a beachhead in the Senate, the newcomers fancied themselves the future of the GOP; they made no secret of the fact that they considered Dole a narrow thinker, a compromiser, a relic from the pre-Reagan past.
Finally, there was what he delicately calls "that little health problem" - prostate cancer, an aging man's disease. The doctors said they caught it early enough, but it was nonetheless a reminder that not even Dole, the survivor of a Nazi bullet that could have killed him, was immortal.
He stayed on, in part because Bush asked him to. On the morning of Nov. 4, 1992, when other Republicans mourned their worst setback since Watergate, Dole recognized that Clinton's election meant a new start for him as well.
No one at the White House had gotten Dole's message that morning after the election, or if they had, they weren't taking it seriously.
Later, when Clinton toured the Capitol, he had lunch with Dole and other GOP senators; when the Republican leader asked that his staff be allowed to participate in what Clinton promised would be a bipartisan health-reform effort, he was rebuffed.
But Dole and his supporters believed that if he played his cards right, capitalizing on his cunning and the new administration's inexperience, he could stamp his tough moderation into the unformed clay of Clinton's domestic policies.
At the same time, he might be able to supplant the supply-siders - those who never forgave Dole for his role in turning back the tax cuts of the Reagan Revolution in the interest of narrowing the deficit - as the dominant force in shaping the GOP's future.
And if all that led to one last chance for Dole to seek the White House himself, so be it. At the least, he could get in some good licks in the game that had become his life.
His wife, Elizabeth Dole, the two-time Cabinet secretary who heads the American Red Cross, said the last few weeks have been "a parting of the curtains. There's a window in time here, where people are seeing the real Bob Dole. . . . You see exactly who he is, and what he's really like."
Before Clinton could complete his first 100 days, Dole had handed him his first major legislative defeat, strangling a $16.3 billion spending bill that Clinton had argued was crucial to reviving the economy.
"Bob Dole has one overwhelming advantage," says Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "He's the one person in this town smarter than Bill Clinton."
That may or may not be true, but at least for the moment Dole is the undisputed leader of a suddenly unified party, besting his rivals in their struggle for its soul. Many of the old snipers from the Reagan and Bush administrations are now out of office.
"Any redefining of the Republican Party will be done right here, in the most vivid and appropriate way," said Assistant Senate Minority Leader Alan Simpson, R-Wyo.
Dole has even been making appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire, the traditional proving grounds of future presidential candidates. He is cagey about his plans for 1996, though, and jokes that his travel itinerary is designed to needle his old adversary, Jack Kemp.
The question is whether he can sustain the success and avoid the inevitable pitfalls. Polls show that the public already sees Congress as the primary culprit for "gridlock," the current term for Washington's seeming inability to act on anything that matters. Dole could become the symbol of gridlock if he fails to pick his fights with Clinton carefully.
But that, say some, is precisely where Dole stands above anyone else. In the view of Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker, he is Washington's most skilled guerrilla warrior.
"He will wait for an opening, wait for an issue on which the president is vulnerable, and come out of the woods with guns blazing," Baker said.
Yet many will swear that Dole is one of the most compassionate people in government. It is rooted in an empathy that wells from the trials of his own life, friends say.
"My Democratic activist friends are shocked to discover that Dole is one of the two authors of the food stamp program," said former Democratic Party Chairman John White.
Dole spent the Depression living in the basement of his own home, into which his family moved so it could rent out the rest. As the Russell County attorney in the 1950s, he had to sign welfare checks for his own grandparents.
His apparent escape from his bout with prostate cancer has made him a zealot about providing opportunities for early detection.
However, it was an earlier dance with death that defined Dole. The wound he suffered in World War II cost him the use of his right arm and his dream of becoming a doctor. He spent three years in Army hospitals and had to relearn to walk. Now active in many handicapped causes, Dole runs a foundation that funds innovative programs for employing the disabled.
by CNB