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The Yuckster: Bob Dole, after politics
National Review, April 30, 2001 by John J. Miller
When the people behind Bartlett's Familiar Quotations consider whether to put any of Bob Dole's utterances in their next edition-he has none in the current one-they'll have plenty of choices. There's the bitter line from the 1988 GOP primaries, spoken to then-Vice President George Bush: "Stop lying about my record." There's one of the great blunders of recent political history, from the 1976 debate with Walter Mondale: "I figured it up the other day: If we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans-enough to fill the city of Detroit." A later, self- deprecating quip on this unfortunate statement may itself deserve status as a minor classic: "They told me to go for the jugular, so I did: mine."
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Now there's a very late entry: "Easy, boy."
On March 25, during ABC's broadcast of the Oscars, Pepsi unveiled an ad in which belly-baring 19-year-old pop star Britney Spears vamps about shaking her hips, flaunting her cleavage, and singing her tune. Flash to Bob Dole, sitting in an armchair and watching the same commercial. He appears transfixed at the sight of Spears and her come-hither looks. His dog barks. Dole doesn't budge, except to nod and speak two words: "Easy, boy."
It's the sort of double entendre more suited to a cheap sitcom than to a former presidential candidate, and it's hard to imagine, say, Michael Dukakis pulling it off. Dole can, simply because he's universally known not just as a former politician, but as a septuagenarian pitchman for an erection drug.
What a long way we've come since Dole ran for the White House. Back in 1995, he traveled to Hollywood and delivered a bold speech attacking the entertainment industry for its "mindless violence and loveless sex." It was a fight Dole didn't especially need to pick, and it voiced the belief of millions of Americans that contemporary movies and music pander far too much to people's worst urges. Dole's rhetoric soared, in what remains one of the finest speeches of his career: "The mainstreaming of deviancy must come to an end, but it will only stop when the leaders of the entertainment industry recognize and shoulder their responsibility." "The mainstreaming of deviancy"-that's a nice phrase, and a useful one. So it's too bad that Bob Dole, by portraying a dirty old man in a Pepsi commercial, now embodies a trend he once condemned with such eloquence.
Conservatives never were entirely comfortable with Dole as the Republican nominee-
Newt Gingrich once described him as "the tax collector for the welfare state"-but the stoic Kansan nevertheless earned respect on the right for his rugged Midwestern dignity. He was a plainspoken war hero, a gruff member of the Greatest Generation who seemed attractively out of place in the age of Slick Willie. During one of the debates in 1996, Dole even criticized Clinton's manners: "I'm addressing [Clinton] all evening as 'Mr. President,'" he said. "He didn't extend that courtesy to President Bush." Here was a man who probably would have refused to answer the most memorably indecent question of the 1992 presidential campaign: boxers or briefs? Conservatives also admired his loyalty: Dole was capable of resilient partisanship when necessary, and remained faithful to the first President Bush even after they fought through that rough primary in 1988.
Despite this appeal, Dole was not a good presidential candidate. It would have taken a truly exceptional campaign to beat Bill Clinton in 1996, but Dole's effort was worse than lackluster. The one thing most people remember is not that he proposed a tax cut or that he promised to restore character to the Oval Office, but that time he tumbled off the stage in Chico, Calif.
It's hard to believe, then, that Dole has been even worse as an ex- presidential candidate-but it's true. Dole started out playing the good loser, and his shtick worked. He went on David Letterman's show within days of his defeat. "Bob, what have you been doing lately?" asked Letterman. "Apparently not enough," Dole deadpanned. He also showed up on Saturday Night Live for a skit with Norm MacDonald, the man who had been impersonating him. They commiserated about their dim futures. Dole said that at least he had a job answering phones at the Red Cross. "My wife pulled some strings," he explained, referring to the fact that Elizabeth Dole was president of the organization. Then he satirized his own penchant for talking about himself in the third person by demonstrating his telephone skills: "Hello, Red Cross. How might Bob Dole direct your call?"
These appearances were funny. They also communicated the fundamentally conservative message that politics isn't everything. As Dole wrote in his recent book, Great Political Wit (an amusing collection of one- liners and anecdotes), "I wanted to show that there is indeed life after politics. And that losing an election does not mean losing your sense of humor."
But some of his behavior following the election was a bit unsettling. Dole immediately reneged on what seemed a simple promise, made during his surprise speech announcing he would retire from the Senate: "I will seek the presidency with nothing to fall back on but the judgment of the people, and nowhere to go but the White House or home." By "home," most listeners assumed he meant Kansas, which he had represented in Congress for decades. But it turned out that home really meant the Watergate complex, where he owned a one-bedroom apartment; Kansas was no more Bob Dole's home than Tennessee was Al Gore's.
