Friday, May 2, 1997

Dole sheds loser role in record time

By Donald Kaul

It's becoming increasingly obvious that it was altogether a good thing for the country that Bob Dole lost the election. He's much too valuable to be wasted on the presidency.

He has become the nation's relief pitcher, the fellow you call on when you're in a jam and need to be bailed out, a minister without portfolio, a Superman without a convenient phone booth.

You say that Gingrich owes a $300,000 fine but his wife won't let him pay it with his own money? No problem. Old Bob Dole just steps in and peels off 300 Big Ones from the wad he carries around with him, just in case he spots a needy politician spare-changing at a bus stop. "Pay me when you can, kid," he says. "Sometime in the next century."

Is the Chemical Weapons treaty in trouble in the Senate? Call on Dole. He endorses the treaty, helping the president and giving Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott cover to abandon his right-wing cronies, who miss the Berlin Wall. So now they're starting to talk about Lott as a presidential candidate, thanks to Dole.

What Dole has done is absolutely amazing. In the normal course of things, there is no creature more despised than the most recent loser in a presidential election.

Perhaps "despised" isn't the right word. "Shunned" is more like it. For the first few years after a man loses a presidential election, he is simply avoided, treated as though he had some contagious disease. People duck across the street when they see him coming. When he enters a room, they find it convenient to turn slightly, so that their eyes will not meet his.

And, in truth, he does have a contagious disease: losing. A political party depends on its standard bearer to lead it to victory and when he goes down, a good many go down with him. So when he comes around later, trailing clouds of ignominy, it is best not be seen with him, lest he's still catching.

The stigma wears off eventually. The loser ultimately becomes a grand old man of the party, an elder statesman, but it takes years. (With Herbert Hoover, it took decades.)

Dole went from loser to indispensable man in six months.

When I first heard about the Dole loan to Gingrich, I marveled at the cynicism of it and assumed the obvious: that the big money people in the party were using Dole as a conduit to get the money to Newt. Why on earth should Dole give 300,000 of his own dollars to the speaker, who had always been more rival than friend? The fix was in, I thought.

Now I'm not sure. Dole comes to the rescue of the party and puts the speaker of the House in his hip pocket with one grand gesture. Then he steps forward to make both the president and Senate majority leader beholden to him.

He has gone from being a man of considerable power to a man of great influence, not a bad consolation prize and worth, perhaps, $300,000 to someone who clears that much for a single television commercial.

The really good news coming out of Washington, however, is that we have a do-nothing Congress. It doesn't meet often and when it does, all it does is fight. (The other day David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Tom DeLay, a Texas exterminator, actually came to blows - or pushes - on the House floor, which is where Delay wound up, on his back. There is talk of striking a medal for Obey.)

I think that nothing is the very best you can hope for out of this Congress. If it did do something, it wouldn't be national health insurance or reform of campaign financing or abolition of the designated hitter.

No, we'd get prayer in schools or tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of retirees or a balanced budget amendment or the abolition of aid to the arts: brain food for the brain-dead.

It's best to leave things as they are, with a conservative do-nothing Congress matched with a do-anything Rockefeller Republican in the White House, and with Bob Dole around to smooth over the rough spots.

But I'm not sure this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

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