Even as future conventions become cable events, the acceptance speech will remain a major network moment. This one played well in part because Dole put himself in the proper historical setting. The autobiographical references and wartime elegies were powerful. He addressed the age issue squarely and looked fit enough to serve – an important threshold.
But if Dole himself didn’t dodder, his message did. The speech was an eloquent mess: focused on the cold-war past instead of the 21st century and full of inconsistencies that may haunt him in debates. Most jarring was Dole’s phony claim to be the ““most optimistic man in America.’’ It’s his bracing irony, after all, that makes him appealing in the first place. The idea that he deserves to lead because of his ““willingness to stand fast in hard places’’ could win the hypocrisy gold. Dole once told a joke in which the good news was that a busload of supply-siders went over the cliff, and the bad news was that Jack Kemp was not aboard. Now, after a reputation built on fiscal responsibility, he is suddenly one of them. It’s the biggest 180 since George Wallace embraced civil rights.
The speech was a busted play. Beginning in April, novelist Mark Helprin crafted a tough draft on character, with Dole drawing a sharp generational and moral contrast to Bill Clinton. The plan was to run as the heroic, stable grown-up against a draft-dodging, two-faced weasel. Humphrey Bogart versus Eddie Haskell.
Good idea, but it wasn’t working. With the introduction of the tax-cut plan in early August, the ““character thrust’’ was supposed to be subordinated. But apparently Helprin never got the message. So eventually the campaign’s new theme – economic optimism fueled by tax cuts – was simply layered onto the speech. It showed. Instead of reworking the text to reflect the centrality of the tax cut, Dole chose to accommodate, fudge – and talk for nearly an hour. Sound familiar?
Actually, Dole and Bill Clinton, while both world-class, post-ideological flip-floppers, make for a compelling thematic contrast. Dole, stripped of his romanticism by his injury, believes that life’s struggle is against something – personal adversity, communism, Democrats. The idea is to mobilize resentments and sharpen distinctions. Parry-thrust. Thesis-antithesis. Clinton, conditioned by an alcoholic stepfather and the more romantic 1960s, tries to soften the wedges and aim for synthesis, then settles for synthetics. As he demagogues on Medicare and authorizes tough ads, Clinton probably won’t get too personal about Bob Dole. Even in 1992 he never really went after George Bush.
Cut and thrust can still work, as the polls attest. But in a larger sense, Dole’s conflict theme reflects the cold war, and Clinton’s consensus theme represents if not the future then some approximation of the global coping and groping that lies ahead.
That’s not a slam on Dole but a description of his speech, which Helprin focused on Lincoln’s mystic chords of memory. The conflict framework – refighting the Vietnam War and attacking Clinton for modest defense cuts – occupied large chunks of the middle of the speech that might have been better used to conjure the future. Even more glaring than the absence of explicit appeals to women and conservationists was the failure to use the word ““technology.’’ Ronald Reagan understood that after a nostalgia trip, good speeches pivot. The eye turns back, then up and ahead, to a New Frontier or a city on a hill. Dole never pivoted. The man described by Jack Kemp as ““the first lion of the 21st century’’ was still largely focused on the 1950s and ’60s, eating old prey.
That’s not to say the particulars were all wrong. ““If education were a war, you would be losing it,’’ he told the teachers’ unions. When it comes to accountability and choice, parents are ready for red meat. While Clinton has robbed Dole of many of the GOP’s issues (not a word about welfare in the speech, for instance), education is still No. 1 on voters’ minds. The president has already put some distance between himself and the hidebound unions. Now we’ll see if he’s smart enough to put some more.
Get prepared for a nasty fall debate about who is the bigger waffler. That’s a symbolic character issue, and fair game. But it can get tricky. Dole, who smeared Hillary Clinton’s book ““It Takes a Village’’ as a socialist, antifamily tract when it’s nothing of the sort, must be careful not to push ““character’’ too far. For all of his past infidelities, Clinton is not the candidate who ate only three meals at home one year when his daughter was young before coldly telling his stunned first wife: ““I want out.’’ Dole will hear more about that from Democrats if he doesn’t lay off the hard stuff.
But that was last week’s speech talking. The new speech is a pander play on taxes. The line ““It’s your money’’ may not have impressed the poetry critics in San Diego, but it helped close the gap with Clinton. The challenge now, Dole’s advisers agree, is to say ““15 percent’’ 75 times a day, then say it some more. Right now the voters think the check is in the mail. If Dole can convince them that as president he will actually deliver it without hurting Grandma, they might take the money and run.
