I've sort of grown to like Bob Dole over the years, mostly because he's shown himself to be a genuinely funny guy, able to move beyond the sort of faux-earnest self-righteousness of the practicing politician ever since he lost the presidential race. That, combined with his age (81) and the fact that he was missing from the scene during the impeachment fracas of 1998, was enough to make me nostalgic for the guy. He seemed like the last of the old-school, pre-Gingrich Republicans.
But his hypocritical appearance on CNN's Late Edition is a good reminder that roughly the reverse is true: He was the first of the new school. When old-school Gerald Ford was running for re-election, he came under pressure from the GOP's right wing to dump incumbent Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in favor of someone a little more hardcore. Ford came up with Dole, and the right was appeased. Atrios has rounded up some of Dole's more hacktacular moments from that era, but Dole's real sins came later.
Way back on November 4, 1992, the country had just elected a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic president for the first time in quite awhile. The new president in question, Bill Clinton, had run with a moderate ideology that was somewhat at odds with the beliefs of most congressional Democrats. As a result, he came to Washington hoping that, like most newly elected presidents, he could attract at least some Republican support for his agenda.
Dole was having none of it. “Fifty-seven percent of the Americans who voted in the presidential election voted against Bill Clinton,” he said, “and I intend to represent that majority on the floor of the U.S. Senate."
Even more ominously, in retrospect, he observed that "the Democrats will have both the White House and both houses of Congress. There can't be any more excuses for gridlock and bad legislation; those excuses are over. They now have the heavy burden of leadership and delivering on many of their promises. And if they fail, then they are the problem."
That latter observation became the basis for Dole's legislative program of mindless obstructism. Famously, Clinton couldn't get a single Republican vote for his 1993 deficit-reduction bill (the one that was supposed to destroy the economy), though many GOP members had voted for a similar bill during the first Bush administration. Worse, in the long term, this led Dole to accept the logic of a memo penned by Bill Kristol (a man with no demonstrated knowledge of, or interest in, health-care issues) urging Republicans to oppose Clinton's health-reform proposals "site unseen," not because the proposal was bad (it was, remember, unseen) but because it might be good, thereby restoring middle-class faith in the efficacy of government action. Dole successfully whipped his caucus into doing just that, using the filibuster power to ensure that no plan would pass rather than losing leverage to forge a more moderate bill. That this entailed having several senators back away from ideas they'd long been on record as favoring, and even forced Dole to repudiate a compromise measure he'd co-sponsored, was of little concern. The important thing was to deny Clinton any legislative compromises.
Thus Dole found himself present at the creation, almost simultaneously, of all the most repugnant aspects of the modern Republican Party: the pursuit of partisan gain at the expense of the public interest and any recognizably coherent ideology, the dogmatic insistence that no tax ever be raised under any circumstances, and the pretense that the Democratic Party is less an opposition party than some sort of illegitimate force to be crushed by any means necessary. In combination, the resulting legacy is one of fundamental unseriousness about public life -- the sort of mentality that spends tens of millions of dollars investigating various Clinton-era "scandals" but can't provoke a simple hearing into why the Bush administration lied to congressional Republicans about the cost of its Medicare bill.
The mentality that led House Intelligence Chairman (and CIA Director-designate) Porter Goss to say, "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation" into the Valerie Plame leak. The sort of mentality that agrees with Dick Cheney that Ronald Reagan proved "deficits don't matter" because he won re-election. And, yes, the sort of mentality that's led conservatives to adopt a position admirably described by Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard: "A veteran who volunteered for combat duty, spent four months under fire in Vietnam, and then exaggerated a bit so he could go home early is the inferior, morally and otherwise, of a man who had his father pull strings so he wouldn't have to go to Vietnam in the first place."
As the man who did so much to build the Republican Party into what it is today, Bob Dole is now being called upon to dig a new low for it. How fitting.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
