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If you find yourself in Kansas City, make time for the forty-minute drive to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and the Bob Dole Institute of Politics, where you will learn why we should all miss Bob Dole. You may be thinking, “But he endorsed Trump!” Well, that’s more than a small blemish, but forgive him. He was being a loyal Republican who later would say he was “Trumped out,” and counsel that Trump, without doubt, lost the 2020 election.
We should miss Bob Dole if only because no one, no one, with in today’s Republican Party could be seen next to him out of fear that Donald Trump might say he preferred soldiers that didn’t get shot. Bob Dole. War hero, Purple Heart and Bronze Star recipient, small government conservative, Republican standard bearer, decent human being. What a RINO! He’s waiting now for disaffected Republicans and right-leaning independents to say, “Enough boot licking. Enough lying. Enough whining. Enough incompetence. Enough chaos.”
We first see Dole as Jerry Ford’s running mate. Ford, the nice guy accidental President, needed an attack dog on his ticket. And so he picked Dole, a young Senator from conservative Kansas with an acerbic wit and bravura. We all disliked him, we liberals who voted for Carter. But let’s now pause and consider that Bob Dole really was a great American, Republican, Kansan and in the end bipartisan patriot.
It wasn’t that Bob Dole couldn’t be partisan, he was. As Senate Majority Leader he was particularly irksome. He also helped lead the fight to defeat Clinton's health care plan. It’s just that he practiced that traditional form of partisanship wherein after the floor session speeches, the committee hearings, and the press conferences, he and Joe Biden, or Ted Kennedy, or Pat Moynihan, could be friends and colleagues joined by respect, decency and shared patriotism, if not a uniform vision for America.
Need some examples? Begin with the Dole Institute’s bylaws, which specify that the Director and Associate Director must come from different parties. There was also the 1983 bipartisan bill to restore Social Security solvency, a mission lost on today's crop of Republicans.
So we should miss Bob Dole, not the last decent Republican but perhaps the most emblematic of a time when ignorance, anger and whining wasn’t killing his party and maybe American democracy.
This article originally published in The Union on SubStack, March 2024.
