Peggy Noonan

In a more or less conservative country, the more or less conservative candidate—Bob Dole—should have been a shoo-in for the presidency, especially against a feckless charmer whose Administration threw off scandal like spores. But until the end, Dole was barely competitive, and in the end he lost. There are three schools of thought on why. The first:

Everything went wrong. Dole was so bloodied and bankrupted by Steve Forbes in the primaries that he never fully recovered. The choice of Kemp for Vice President seemed bold, but Kemp as candidate was not: he was weak and embarrassing. The Republicans took an early pounding on Medicare and were late in understanding the impact of a year’s worth of anti-G.O.P. spots from what should once again be called Big Labor. The President’s luck on almost everything held—until the very end.

Clinton’s people were better. Clinton surrounded himself with tough and talented tigers who spoke with authority because they had been in the meeting. Dole surrounded himself with second-raters who had the easy arrogance of national-campaign veterans and no national-campaign experience. In the last month they got up every day with what a Washington insider called two and only two objectives: not to get fired and to blame everything on Dole. They succeeded. That was staff. The lobbyists around Dole seemed more interested in getting a piece of the media buy than helping him win.

Dole got no breaks. But then he made no breaks for himself. He didn’t do the obvious, didn’t take full advantage of the conventions of modern campaigning, like the free media of radio talk shows. And he didn’t do the daring—picking a Cabinet in advance, making it Our Team vs. Their Team.

That is one school. Here is another:

It all came down to two things. The year began with two reigning cliches. One was that the incumbent would win because the economy was good; the other was that Dole was too old. Normally in an election the early cliches are replaced by newer cliches, but not this time. The good economy denied the challenger the traction he needed to move forward. As for Dole’s age, the best political commentary I heard all year came one morning on C-SPAN during the Republican Convention in San Diego. An elderly woman called in to say why she couldn’t back Dole. I am his age, she said, and people our age—they shouldn’t let us drive! Have you seen us on the highway? They shouldn’t give us licenses!

Reagan was almost 70 when he was elected the first time, and he was not too old. But Dole at 73 was, because he had the crochets of old age—crabbiness, defensiveness. Reagan looked forward toward the horizon, saw the city on a hill and said, Let’s go there. Dole looked back and saw flat Kansas, the boarders living upstairs and the family in the basement. He was emotionally landlocked. Where Reagan had a vision, Dole had only a picture: of Bob Dole sitting at a desk in the Oval Office and doing a good job. But a picture is not a vision, and Dole’s picture wasn’t enough.

There is a third school on Dole’s loss. It has to do with limitations—and not all the limits were his:

True, he never said anything interesting. On the stump he seemed like a man caught in a 1983 applause-line factory. He never thought aloud in his speeches, never offered the sustained and layered argument that precedes the applause line. He just declared things—And there’ll be no more crime in a Dole Administration!—and waited for people to clap as he cleared his throat. Every time I saw him on C-SPAN, his sentences lay there like half-dead fish flopping on the dock.

An almost poignant note: His staff advised him as to the modern media convention that a politician has to repeat his message relentlessly. They perhaps didn’t notice he didn’t have a message. So he took to repeating phrases endlessly: It’s about your money…your money…your money. I thought the media were exaggerating the tic until I saw him on the stump and found they didn’t report half of what they came to call the trifectas.

Dole ran on the wrong issues. More than most candidates, he needed the right ones to justify running at his age. In a good economy he shouldn’t have banked everything on a 15% tax cut, should instead have pushed a tax cut within the larger context of going after the biggest corrupter in American life, the IRS. He should have echoed Forbes: tear it down and sow the field with salt.

He made no use of a big issue: a latent anxiety about Clinton’s competence if something bad happens. Everyone in the country knows Clinton has had four years of good luck, and they all know luck doesn’t come in eight-year doses. Much could have been made of Clinton’s lack of international sophistication.

Clinton successfully obscured every issue. All politicians know how to dance, but boy, can this boy foxtrot. Clinton ran as champion of the family, knowing he could obscure the issue if he turned it into something else. And so family values became parental leave. It was brilliant. Dole never called him on it.

Clinton got away with having one of the most scandal-plagued Administrations in U.S. history. Perot gave a good speech detailing the scandal in this Administration and outlining its implications. Dole never made the case, only used applause lines—”some barroom bouncer named Craig Livingstone!” Dole never nailed Clinton in a way that said to the people: This isn’t just a partisan matter; this is a level of corruption that actually endangers our country.

The media played favorites by refusing to obsess on Clinton’s scandals. The other day at a Dole rally in New Orleans, a reporter was assailed by two Dole supporters who said the media are in the tank for Clinton and don’t report the scandals. The reporter answered, honestly, that the media had reported all the allegations against Clinton. But what the Dole supporters meant and didn’t say was this: the media failed to crusade against the scandals of the Clinton Administration as they’d obsessed on Watergate, on Iran-contra, on Ray Donovan and Ed Meese and all the smallest scandals of the Republican presidencies. They reported the Clinton scandals—and then let them go, released them like balloons into the air, where they disappeared.

Could any Republican have defeated the Great Conniver? I think so. A fighter aware of and engaged by the things that bedevil our country, a thinker able to speak with such clarity and simplicity that his words move people to action. That is not what the Republicans had this year in Bob Dole. But considering all he had against him, including himself, the percentage of the vote he won was a kind of triumph, even a kind of tribute to his gritty and stubborn endurance.

On the stump those last days, Bob Dole’s campaign was more local than national—the taped Sousa marches, the town bigwig at the mike vamping in front of an audience in elephant hats. Then Dole would come out from behind the stage, parting the polyester-blue curtain, and enact the body language of victory—thumb up, quick-flash smile, the arm that doesn’t hold the pen punching the air in a go-get-’em arc. The crowd would always stand and applaud. “We love you, Bob!” someone would yell, and the unmuffled sound would echo too well, because the hall was always half empty.

He didn’t look bitter or lost that last week, didn’t look—concussed, as big losers of past history have. He just looked like a man who was enacting a campaign rather than waging it. And I stood in the back of the hall and thought, He’s losing with grace because losing is something he knows how to do. I thought of the old poem Invictus:

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

I think that’s how he saw himself at the end. Invictus, one of F.D.R.’s favorite poems, was popular in the storm-tossed 1940s and would have been known to a lieutenant named Dole. It is a poem about fierce human will, a poem you might call proud or braying, depending on your taste. And you could say the Dole campaign at the end was a similar kind of poem.

He drew the party faithful. A Dole campaign stop was not Reaganesque (20,000 adoring college students) or Bushian (mom and pop and the kids in the city square). Dole’s crowds were 400 and 600, often at small, third-tier colleges, and they were Republican believers. One night, on the Wednesday before the voting, at the Pontchartrain Center outside New Orleans, about 700 people showed up, a big crowd. It was dinnertime, after work, and they could have been home relaxing, watching TV, helping with homework, but instead they got in the van and drove on the highway to stand and cheer for a man who they knew would give a bad speech and who in a week would be an asterisk in a boring book.

The faithful lived up to their name. At Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, there was the young mother in jeans, hair frosted blonde, a baby in her arms and a toddler in a stroller. She came late to the speech, flustered, and she was excited to be there to see a man who was running for President. When Dole was moving along the side of the gym talking and shaking hands, she saw the top of his head, his tanned brow and his combed, sprayed hair, and she said to someone, “That’s him—oh, I’ll never get there with the kids …” I turned and motioned to the stroller. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll watch him.” She looked at me as her brain rolled out the possibilities—the young mother said she last saw her son at a Dole rally when a member of the press offered to stay with him—and she jerked the stroller softly and barreled toward Dole, who was turning now and disappearing in a small sea of suits. “Oh,” she said as he left, “oooooooh!”

Those twilight days Dole took to talking about Dwight Eisenhower. He would tell crowds, I want you to be proud of your vote, just as I was proud years ago when I voted for General Eisenhower. Hearing him refer to his fellow Kansan, I realized Eisenhower was to Dole what F.D.R. was to Reagan—the prototype, the vivid President of his youth, the one who set the standard and the style. Do you remember Ike’s philosophy from the ‘52 campaign? Neither does anyone else. He didn’t have a philosophy; he barely had a discernible point of view. What he had was himself: I’m Ike. I ran the war, and I can run the White House, because I am me. The buttons said it all: I LIKE IKE.

Dole ran the same kind of campaign: I’m Bob Dole, and you know me: I ran the Senate; I’ve been here for 30 years; I’m solid and competent, the Big Bobster. But that won’t do anymore. The candidate must be himself, and more than himself: he must be the carrier of a point of view, the expression of certain assumptions. He must have a philosophy. You may say, but Clinton didn’t have a philosophy! And the answer is, sure he did—he had plenty of them.

Dole ran like Ike but without Ike’s air of inevitability, and without his sunny good fortune. But then Dole never saw himself as a fortunate son, and if you know his history, you know why. The story of his devastating war wound and recovery is so moving because trauma was at the heart of Dole, not only of the physical kind but in so much of his life that would follow. For he would enter the Republican Party just as the great wave of modern liberalism was washing across the American continent. He would rise to head the Republican National Committee just in time to see victory washed away with Watergate. He rose to lead his party in the Senate—only to find his time going not to securing victory but to limiting loss. He would run for President twice and lose and keep running.

It was a political life of great triumph—he did, after all, go for the very top job—but his victories obscured its persistent theme. And now here, in the last days of his last campaign, at the end of another long losing haul, he stood alone, with the faithful, the master of his fate, as the old poem says, the captain of his soul.

Bob Dole’s acceptance speech was big—stern, daring, even at moments Churchillian—but it was marked most by a kind of interrupted eloquence. The speech betrayed the weight of a few too many hands. Even in its strongest, most poetic passages there seemed to be something missing. When Dole stirringly pointed to the exits in the convention hall and declared the Republicans the party of Lincoln, he invited any bigoted delegates to leave, “as I stand here and hold this ground.” But the way the section was constructed, it seemed as if he were telling the party it was bigoted and no longer welcome at his convention.

The speech didn’t quite hang together. Yet it was a brave speech and deserves credit for its ambitions. It was brave first in that it ignored many of the time-honored conventions of political oratory, and did so in a way that asked a lot of the audience—especially the people in the hall. Half the delegates had been to dinner, had had a few drinks and were ready to rock. But Dole gave them little to play with. He didn’t offer much humor, didn’t inspire a chant, didn’t ask them to hoot ‘n’ holler.

What he asked them to do was stand there and think. And that is a lot to ask of a delegate surrounded by guys in elephant hats. But the most interesting part of the speech’s bravery was its high moral seriousness; it attempted to address what really ails America. And it did so while rejecting the florid optimism of political speeches and asserting instead that America is in trouble because of the way modern Americans have been living their lives. He scored the small corruptions of our lives, of ambition and unthinking selfishness that damage first individuals, then a whole society.

“Permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed,” Dole said, “honor and liberty must be restored.” How? Through personal “right conduct, every day at every level.” What stops us from rising above ourselves? The answer was beautifully put—if not utterly convincing: “It is because for too long we have had a leadership that has been unwilling to risk the truth…An Administration in its very existence communicates this day by day until it flows down like rain. And the rain becomes a river, and the river becomes a flood.”

But what worked on page didn’t always work onstage. Dole never seemed to “own” the speech, didn’t have it absorbed so deep it was bubbles in his blood. My guess is he never really liked it, but stuck with it because his previous collaboration with his speechwriter, the novelist Mark Helprin, was such a hit. Aaargh, eggheads all liked the resignation speech, do it again. There was a lovely spareness to certain small sections, and if it had been sustained, it would have resulted in elegance. Helprin had given Dole a first draft of the speech on April 22, then met with him roughly a dozen times to work on it. But in San Diego things unraveled when Dole asked for new writers. Soon sections of eloquence were followed by blocks of boilerplate. After more than a dozen drafts, Helprin turned in his beeper and went home to upstate New York. There he issued a statement. It said in part, “Early on I was happy to volunteer to Senator Dole a first draft of an acceptance speech, and he then made it his own…In the end the legitimate and understandable requirements of political speechwriting did not mesh with the principles of my profession, which I can in no circumstances abandon. So I stood down, without rancor.”

That is pretty strong rhetoric. Perhaps some of the best at the convention.

FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
TO: BOB DOLE
DATE: JUNE 10, 1996

This week you leave the Senate, with a goodbye speech on the floor that is sure to be moving. Whatever happens in November, you’ve closed a great chapter of your life.

Now what? The standard thing to do is what all modern presidential candidates do: get on a plane and hop like a mighty flea from one end of the continent to the other. Your advance team will get the schedule late and throw events together haphazardly. They’ll put you in the wrong room with the wrong crowd, with the TelePrompTer shading part of your face and with a bunch of nine-year-olds standing behind you at the lectern with faces that say, “Mama, whatever I did to get put here, I won’t do it again!” That is, it’ll all be like your Macomb County event last week.

What should you do? Let’s start with your problems and work from there. You’re out of money and will be until roughly the time of the G.O.P. convention, when you get an infusion of federal funds. Your campaign is also, at the moment, without a kind of physical context. When people think of Bill Clinton they think of a big white house with pillars on Pennsylvania Avenue. When people think of Dole they used to think of the Senate floor, the wrong place but a place nonetheless. Now you are—where? On a tarmac without a tie.

You’re rootless, moneyless, groping toward a message. Is there a way to make a virtue of these disadvantages? Yes. It’s an idea that’s just begun bubbling up from the Republican ranks. (Ted Stevens and Slade Gorton are talking about it in the Senate.) It is simple, cheap, so old it’s new, so hokey that it has a startling cleanness about it.

It’s this: go home to Russell, Kansas. Go back to the house you and your brother and sisters grew up in, the house in which you waged your lonely battle to recover from the wounds of war. Wage the last great front-porch campaign of the 20th century. Now and until the convention, make that house and that porch the locus of your last great battle. Let the word go forth that you’ll meet with any American or group of Americans that has the wherewithal to get there and the patience to stand in line. Get them all in—farmers, fishermen, enviros, ranchers, housewives, fire fighters—and listen to them. Ask them what they most need from the next President, listen to them, learn from them.

This will be the first real front-porch campaign since 1920, when Warren Harding oozed to effortless victory. But before him the great front-porch campaign, the one that caused the phrase to be coined, was in 1896, by William McKinley, who sat on his porch in Canton, Ohio, and met with whoever came by. As William Safire once noted, McKinley “had good reason to stay at home . . . he was not the stem-winding orator his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, was.” He played to his strength, a strong personal presence. “I rang and walked in,” wrote an English journalist. “Mr. McKinley was sitting on a rocking chair not 10 feet from the door . . . he is gifted with a kindly courtesy that is plainly genuine and completely winning.”

Like you. You shrink in crowds and expand in private. Play to your strength. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and have them come to you, as they should. Here are the reasons to do it:

It will give you place and context. Your campaign will reside in a place called Kansas, a square state in the middle of America. This is a good place to be.

It will give you a symbol—the old American porch, the kind people rocked on before the days of drive-by shootings. The symbol underscores a message: I stand for the heartland.

It will make you a better candidate. You’ll learn things you didn’t know. No matter how sensitive or astute, no man spends 36 years in Washington and doesn’t lose a sense of the texture of his country.

It will force the media to tell your story for you. Every major news outlet in America will send a crew and reporters. They’ll be forced to get to know Kansas towns and Kansas people. They’ll be forced to do feature stories on your life—this is where he played football, this is where they passed the cigar box to pay his hospital bills.

Every comedian in America will spoof it. Dennis Miller will rant, Al Franken will say Kansans are big fat idiots, Letterman will have a Top 10 Reasons I’m Really Sitting on This Porch. Fine. The more famous they make it, the more famous it becomes, the more present in the minds of people.

You’ve just begun thinking about this, as has your wife, but you haven’t really focused on it. But do.

By the way, McKinley and Harding won handily.

MEMO FROM THE DESK OF PEGGY NOONAN
TO: BOB DOLE
DATE: MAY 27, 1996

Your Senate leave taking provided that most satisfying of political moments, when the words are as big as the event. Forget the June departure date, leave now and for good. You made a dramatic exit. To go back in the next three weeks and haggle is to blur the picture and confuse the public. Don’t step on your own applause line: it’s over, the tie is off, go West ol’ man.

Now you go to the people. What they need from you is a clear new picture. Like Bush in 1988, you’re famous but unknown; people know your face and name but aren’t sure what you believe in. This is not a disadvantage but an opportunity. Now you get to reintroduce yourself, and on your terms.

Start with what people know. They know you’re experienced, they know you’re an adult, they can see the flintiness. But they don’t know if you have the presidential temperament, that you’re a big, good-natured, stable, tough-minded optimist. You also need to show that you’re genuinely thoughtful, that you have been watching and thinking about America for a half-century and have come to conclusions that are now convictions about how to preserve and protect her.

All year your aides and friends have been telling you to show your passion. But after three years of sentiments and feelings from the White House, the whole country hungers for logic. (And in any case, every time your staff tried to make you show passion, you wound up pounding the lectern—”Have you no shame, Hollywood?” “Liberal judges!”—and looking not serious but fierce, dark, censorious.) You can demonstrate the quality of your thinking and temperament by spending the next six months speaking clearly to the American people—by trusting them with your thoughts. Which is not something you’re used to.

Talk about the things that have happened in America since 1961, when you entered Congress, and what your thoughts are about what worked, what didn’t and what you’ve learned in a party split on issues and a country going to extremes. In the past 27 years you’ve straddled, which may have been the only way for a Republican Senate leader to survive. You’ve had your paleoconservative moments—”Democrat wars!”—and an old-style, Midwestern aversion to deficits. You’ve also pushed through tax increases, and if you think you were wrong about some of your votes and views from 10 and 20 years ago, then explain where you were and where you are. If you think you were right then, say that too, and amplify. People respect it when politicians try hard to speak truth.

To do all this, you will have to overcome a lifetime habit of thinking words are the enemy. Up until now they have seemed that way. Words muck up deals, create divisions, draw battle lines, are misunderstood. When you are a legislator, silence is your friend. The unspoken word never has to be taken back. (And dust-bowl Kansas wasn’t exactly a place for airy chat; you grew up in the last age of yup and nope. “Lost the farm.” “Bad.” “Still tryin’.” “Good.”) Now it’s all different. When you run for President, words are your friend, your only friend. You must “martial them to fight for you,’’ in Margaret Thatcher’s phrase. This will be a psychic shift, and it won’t happen overnight. But it’s your job now; if you win the presidency, it will be your job then.

Don’t let your advisers tell you that the right loves cheap, nasty issues, and you have to be cheap and nasty to please them. This is a common misconception of moderate conservatives. Reagan spoke to the right as if they were equals; he never had to throw them raw meat because he never thought they were animals. And don’t let the liberals in the party fuzz up the message. The conservatives are still small town and small pocket; the liberals are the moneybags of Team 100 who used to be entrepreneurs and lately are lobbyists. They’re proabortion and disdain the icky Christians. (This kind of snobbery is as old as America itself.) Take their money and thank them, but do not let them dictate policy.

You have a gender-gap problem. The way to ease it is to bring up the real women’s issue of this campaign: the fact that more and more women are entrepreneurs—dry-cleaner’s owners, real estate-agency owners—and taxes and regulation are killing them. Show women who are breaking their backs pursuing economic freedom that you’re on their side.

Your wit is natural to you, almost compulsive, deeply mordant. They’re telling you to squelch the one-liners. Don’t. It’s you, and it’s a relief. The pious conniver in the White House lacks the cool tragic sense that produces irony. So go with it, knowing wit is not a substitute for thought but an adornment of it.

So go out there, speak, be famous and known.

What does the Jackie Onassis auction tell us? some things that we already knew, and some that we didn’t. We knew that there were always two Jackies, really. One was moving and heroic and cultivated, the possessor of a detached dignity that kept us fascinated. The other was a girl who was just a little too interested in money, which was not moving or heroic at all, and certainly not cultivated.

The first Jackie has, and deserves, a place in the history of American heroism. For on a dark, cold weekend of a November long ago, when everyone felt stunned and saddened, she redeemed a tragedy, gave it a kind of meaning, by the sheer force of her presence and the size of her will. And she did it at age 34, after her husband’s head had been exploded on her lap.

But the other Jackie, Tacky Jackie, was not so inspiring. I remember reading one of the early “Jackie, Oh!”-type biographies and being struck by the story of First Lady Jackie receiving, as a gift from a head of state, a ceremonial gold sword. She held it in her hands as it gleamed in the lights of the East Room—and noticed that embedded in the surface were a host of beautiful jewels. First Lady Jackie became Tacky Jackie, and tried to find out how to get the jewels out, to make herself some earrings.

As soon as I read it, I believed it. By the 1970s we knew that for all her splendor she was a woman who would buy 10 pairs of the same Pappagallo flats, all in different colors. You have to really like things to shop like that. You have to want goods in stores to give you pleasures you’re not getting in real life to be like that. You have to be a little sad. Or a total greedhead. I think she was a little sad.

Tacky Jackie is not a noble picture, and it is not how we choose to remember her. And we are right.

So she wasn’t perfect. And now we know her taste wasn’t either. In fact, some of the items sold last week reflect an amazing and heartening level of vulgarity. The big Onassis diamond that went for $2,587,500 is a truly gross piece of work, and I am not saying that only because I can’t have it.

Jackie had a brilliant marketing sense if she was involved with the idea of an estate sale, and I suspect she had a few thoughts on it before she died. It was brilliant to set the prices so low on everything. That way, everybody felt he or she could afford something. No one could accuse the Kennedy kids of greed, as it seemed rather generous of them to offer Dad’s humidor for only a couple of thousand dollars. Then when it went for $574,500, it was like an enormous compliment to the Kennedy family: “We like you! We really like you!” And the kids could shyly say, “Thanks, we’re so surprised. We never dreamed people would pay $1.5 million dollars for a set of coasters Gore Vidal once threw at Bobby Kennedy at Merrywood . . .”

Yes, brilliant. And it gave us the last Jackie we will ever have: Canny Jackie, the girl who really knew her public.