THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 6, 1996 TAG: 9611060371
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SERIES: Decision 96
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 80 lines
When Republican activists ponder today why good Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton, a candidate of myriad defects, they need only look in the mirror to find a major contribution to Dole's defeat.
Early in the primaries and again when Dole resigned from the U.S. Senate, my express contention was that the Republicans had better let him be himself. They didn't.
They kept tugging at Dole, as in an old-fashioned taffy pull, trying to reshape that moderate, pragmatic conservative into their own rigid, often harsh, image.
Long before many members of Congress took a position on the abortion issue, Dole had been anti-abortion. GOP extremists might better have left it at that. But they continued to push at Dole, advocating a platform with a constitutional amendment to ban abortions. Doing so, they aroused fears among pro-choice women on that troubling issue.
By contrast, although Democratic liberals were horrified, and rightly, when Bill Clinton signed the welfare bill that rent the safety net for children, they went along quietly. What the liberals had seen of Newt Gingrich and his revolutionaries scared them into becoming momentary moderates. It had taken them 30 years of defeats over ideology to learn to shut up to win.
Even Jesse Jackson, concerned about his son's candidacy for Congress, gave a conciliatory speech to all Democrats in Chicago and focused his fire on the Republicans.
Although the Republican rightists loathed Bill Clinton, they didn't detest him enough to modify their heated, self-indulgent rhetoric on crucial issues. They were contemptuous of what they called Clinton's ``teeny tiny'' reforms, such as a guarantee of a 48-hour hospital stay for a mother with her newborn child.
But to many young parents, that baby outweighed any other issue. To those families, the extremist Republicans seemed out of touch with daily realities.
One of my colleagues told of his wife's giving birth to a child at 2:30 a.m. and being ordered by the hospital to leave the next day at 2 a.m.
A fear of Gingrich drove many middle-of-the-road voters away from the GOP and toward Clinton's new-found centrist position. In a fit of hubris, Gingrich went too far, too fast with his Contract for America.
To many observers, the two-week shutdown of the federal government during the dispute over the budget was frightening.
By the finish of that brawl, both congressional Republicans and President Clinton were culpable in forcing the deadlock, but a general perception was that the Republicans were more to blame.
To many voters it appeared that to the founding fathers' delicate system of checks and balances, the most exquisite invention of government, the Republicans had added a wrong-headed play at blackmail: Give us what we ask or we we won't appropriate funds for the government to operate.
If the truly gifted negotiator, Bob Dole, tried to advise GOP leaders in private against that reckless strategy, he did not divulge his doubts to the voters.
Too many voters simply declined to accept as valid the offer of a 15 percent tax cut from Dole, the longtime fighter of fiscal deficits.
The GOP erred in keeping Ross Perot out of the debates. Perot, becalmed at 5 percent in the polls, was desperate to break into double digits. He would, piranha-like, go where the votes were - and more of the soft ones were with bloated Clinton than lean Dole.
In the last two weeks, the issue of foreign donations broke in the Democratic camp. To Perot, it was blood in the water. He brushed aside Dole's invitation to get out of the campaign and went with headlong ferocity at Clinton.
It took him into double digits and helped cut down Clinton's lead over Dole. Now aroused, the GOP camp seized on the issue as a way to attack Clinton's lead, and it may have saved some Republican congressional candidates.
In a final undoing, the GOP command diverted money from Dole's war chest into tight congressional races and urged voters to back Republicans for the House and Senate to weaken a victorious Clinton.
Dole went along with that snub and launched a gallant, closing 96-hour marathon of 20 states that negated any doubts he was too old for the White House. It showed the grit and resolve of the man who might well have been a great president.
KEYWORDS: PRESIDENTIAL RACE RESULTS REPUBLICAN PARTY
ELECTION by CNB