Certainly over the decades no one has sat before more helpings of rubber chicken every one of them to
Certainly, over the decades, no one has sat before more helpings of rubber chicken, every one of them to further his ultimate ambition.But ask Bob Dole why he wants to be president and he cannot answer. An evening at home (once a fortnight, on average; these campaign days, never) is a pizza and a rented video. The Doles have an apartment in Florida which they sometimes visit. Most nights, though, are Senate business, fundraisers or party functions in the four corners of the United States.Nobody understands the mechanics of politics better - the money that greases its wheels, the art of putting together a majority, and the law of a favour given, a favour returned. The couple still live in the one-and-a-half bedroom flat in the Watergate building that Dole bought when his first marriage ended in divorce in 1972. "A broken fingernail," he has said, "is a minor crisis." Perforce, his life is politics pure and simple, an almost ascetic existence in which weekend relaxation is an appearance on the Sunday morning talkshows (on which he is the most frequent guest in network history), or a spell on the exercise bike in the living-room.Elizabeth, his wife of 20 years and a former cabinet secretary under presidents Reagan and Bush, is as busy and as addicted to work as himself. He cannot cut a steak or tie shoelaces (hence the shiny black loafers he always wears).
He is a creature of political Washington, yet is physically unable to participate in many of its favoured relaxations - tennis, golf, even the power lunch. There was Ronald Reagan in 1980, and above all George Bush, the patrician Yalie who bested him eight years ago - hence his abhorrence of Steve Forbes, another East Coast rich boy, touting nonsensical nostrums like a flat tax, for whom life has come too easy.For Dole, of course, nothing has come easy, starting with the recovery of the use of his own body after the wounds of 1945. His selling points are experience and judgement, a "safe pair of hands", as the British like to say. If Dole can seem defensive and resentful, it is because he has been passed over so often, forced to watch as Republicans he considered less deserving claimed the supreme prize. In the Dole view of the universe, the presidency is not to be won by glib promises and florid words (indeed, Newt Gingrich's omniscient psychobabble drives him insane) but by deeds. "Dole 96", runs a fictional campaign bumpersticker, "A Dark Man for Dark Times".The other reason that Dole can't make a decent speech is because he doesn't believe it's necessary. Dole can be very funny, but his jokes are mostly stabbing, bleak and mocking, either of himself or others "Yeah, I got elected president once.
President of Iowa," he says, apropos of his initial but worthless win in his 1988 bid for the White House.This time, his aides have touted a "new Dole", soft, fuzzy and reassuring. But the only real difference is that thus far the famous temper, the "mean streak", has been kept under control Dole will never be a national cheerleader His smile is still that of an undertaker. Indeed, in the bully pulpit of the White House, he promises to be tongue-tied, or worse. His stump speech is genuinely excruciating; staccato salvoes of fatuities, random cliches drawn like numbered lottery balls from a bag "This is 'Merica. I wanna talk about being Pres'dent," he will say in his rasping machine-gun of a voice, swallowing vowels by the throatful "'Merica's a great country Greatest country on earth.