ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160143
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
BOB DOLE'S decision - not just to step down from day-to-day management of the U.S. Senate, not just to resign as Senate majority leader, but to leave the Senate seat he's held for 27 years - is odd in several ways.
The political handicappers will note that Dole's strength is not as a campaigner but as a skilled parliamentary politician. They'll observe that Wednesday's announcement by the GOP presidential nominee-to-be carries an air of desperation running counter to his image as a steady, experienced leader. Renewed attention also may be drawn to the age issue: If Dole finds it impossible to be a senator and run for president at the same time, does he at age 72 have the energy to be an effective president?
But the oddest aspect of the decision has less to do with Dole's political prospects than with the system in which he's running.
Dole and his aides concluded that resigning from the Senate, even though it undermines a couple of his strengths and magnifies a liability, would nevertheless serve on balance to improve his chances. This suggests a point larger than a particular election or a particular candidate: Something is amiss about how Americans choose their presidents.
"I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man," Dole said Wednesday. In other words, not an office-holder. This says something about Americans' current cynicism about public office, as well as Democrats' newfound ability to confound and undercut Dole's leadership efforts in Congress. If he can't get anything done, what's the point?
But it also says something about presidential candidacies. With this decision Dole is saying in effect that running for the top office has less to do with how you're going about the real work of governing than with building a first-class campaign show and keeping it on the road full-time.
Certainly, the presidential-election pattern in recent decades suggests that it doesn't hurt if you don't currently hold office. Of the four elected presidents immediately preceding Clinton, three - Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had been out of office when first elected president. The fourth, George Bush, had been out of office when elected Reagan's vice president, the job he held when elected president.
Clinton, of course, was still a governor when he won the presidency in '92. But whether he could have done so while still governor of a state much larger and less off the beaten track than Arkansas is an open question.
The American constitutional system differs from most democracies in that the head of government is elected separately from the legislative branch. In most systems, the leader of the majority party in parliament - that is, a Bob Dole (before resigning from the Senate) - is the prime minister.
We're not suggesting a new Constitution. The American system has its virtues. Separating the presidency from the Congress, though, can also invite gridlock, an absence of accountability and the notion that presidents ought somehow to come from the ranks not of politicians but of private citizens "without office or authority."
Yet what is Dole if not an effective parliamentary politician? In concluding he can't both serve in the Senate and run for president, he has widened a bit more the distance separating the legislative and the executive - and also the distance separating the rhetoric of campaigns from the realities of governing.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB