-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.nationalreview.com/09feb98/ponnuru020998.html <A HREF="http://www.nationalreview.com/09feb98/ponnuru020998.html">NR Feature Article February 9, 1998</A> ----- D O L E C A M P A I G N Who is Elizabeth Dole? Her greatest political asset may be that nobody knows. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RAMESH PONNURU ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mr. Ponnuru is NR's national reporter. WASHINGTON, D.C. BEFORE her wedding, on December 6, 1975, Elizabeth Hanford rehearsed her vows again and again; the groom, Bob Dole, just winged it. The speeches each gave during the 1996 presidential campaign followed the same pattern: his were off-the-cuff, hers polished to translucence. As a result, he would trample through a bog of half-sentences and insider shorthand, while she would wow audiences with her articulateness and poise. Hard work and thorough preparation have brought Elizabeth Dole to a political height unprecedented for an American woman of her generation. As she considers whether to run for the summit in 2000 or to stay on as president of the Red Cross, she is likely to weigh her options just as methodically as she has done everything else. According to polls, she would be one of the Republican Party's strongest candidates. She appeals to Christian conservatives and the party establishment, a rare combination. She can raise funds; everyone knows her name -- her candidacy would have everything. Everything, that is, but a rationale. It wouldn't have one for the same reason she is so popular with such a broad range of people: no one really knows what her politics are. Although she has been in public life for more than three decades, in Administrations of both parties, somehow Elizabeth Dole has managed to keep her political views largely under wraps. Even close associates sometimes forget that she got her start working for LBJ; she was a volunteer worker on the Kennedy - Johnson campaign in 1960 and then, after Harvard Law, joined Johnson's Office of Consumer Affairs. To the surprise of some colleagues, she stayed there when Nixon took power in 1969. In 1973, President Nixon appointed her to the Federal Trade Commission. In both positions, she pursued the policies of an activist liberal. She was a fairly reliable vote for regulation and trust-busting at the FTC. She called for a Consumer Protection Agency, the main Naderite goal of the day. As late as 1977 she was defending that view in public debates with her husband. Government programs were necessary ``to replace the outmoded and socially irresponsible notion of caveat emptor,'' she would explain later, in the Doles' 1988 campaign book, Unlimited Partners. (The title was unfortunate, reinforcing the cynical Beltway view of the marriage as a business arrangement: ``Were they married by a mergers and acquisitions specialist?'' cracks one Democratic speechwriter.) This record didn't keep her from becoming a loyal member of the Reagan Administration. At its start she headed the White House public liaison office and led a task force on women. She tried, unsuccessfully, to promote ``comparable worth,'' the feminist notion that government should set and enforce a ``fair'' wage for secretaries in relation to plumbers. In 1983, the perceived need for a woman in the Cabinet and lobbying by her husband got her appointed Secretary of Transportation. IN each job she worked as hard as ever, looking after the public image of the Administration but relying heavily on assistants for policy details. She would master those details only in politically important cases. That focus annoyed some career staffers at the Department of Transportation, but it probably helped President Reagan, whose agenda lay elsewhere. DoT never caused him any problems under Mrs. Dole. And she demonstrated considerable tactical savvy, knowing when to deploy her Southern charm and when to show flashes of the steel amid the magnolias. According to many former associates, the major drawback of her managerial style -- aside from occasional bursts of temper -- was that her extensive preparation often came at the price of prolonged indecision. Her work at DoT included some real victories for the Reagan Administration: privatizing Conrail; devolving control over Dulles and National airports; privatizing landing slots at major airports; blocking persistent efforts by congressmen, including Newt Gingrich, to reregulate the airlines. In a reversal of the policy that had prevailed throughout the Seventies, Mrs. Dole approved a score of airline mergers. But she remained devoted to federally imposed safety regulations. She opposed Reagan's raising of the 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit, pushed for a mandatory third rear brake light (which had no lasting effect on auto safety), and bribed states to raise their drinking age to 21. Legal developments arguably left her no choice but to mandate airbags for cars -- but she did so enthusiastically. It was as if her personal obsession with control and caution spilled over into her policymaking. ``In all my efforts to promote safer transportation, I tried to respect individual choice,'' she wrote in Unlimited Partners. But airbags had to be designed just so; speed limits could not be raised; people wouldn't buckle up on their own. (Mrs. Dole also supported fuel-efficiency standards that had the perverse effect of taking more lives than airbags save.) Another continuity was her seamless and apparently un-self-conscious blend of public service and private ambition. Elizabeth Dole's conception of public service is deeply statist. She is capable of writing things like, ``Perhaps no one in our society is more unjustly maligned than the bureaucrat.'' And she regards the main purpose of government as ``to make a difference to the plight of people in need,'' as she recently told Henry Louis Gates Jr. -- as opposed, say, to preserving public order. She has, by all accounts, done a praiseworthy job of modernizing the Red Cross, but her campaign to ban land mines suggests a weakness for a politics of gestural sentimentality that, in this case, even Bill Clinton has rejected. Her conservatism, meanwhile, seems to consist of generic pro-business and pro-tradition inclinations. An official who had frequent dealings with her at the time explains that when the Reagan Administration had a clear policy, she effectively promoted it. But in the absence of marching orders, he says, ``she never tried to be imaginative in trying to do what she should have known Reagan would want her to do if he had the time to focus on it.'' In the same way, when she served briefly as George Bush's Labor Secretary, she helped to defeat child-care legislation he opposed. But when she had more latitude, as on the issue of the ``glass ceiling'' allegedly keeping women out of executive positions, she set in motion a commission that validated feminist orthodoxy. A soft but pervasive feminism, indeed, runs throughout her career. In the Sixties and Seventies she used federal power to stop what she regarded as scams against financially inexperienced women. In the Eighties she often cheered the ``tidal wave'' of women entering the work force. She was proud to establish an on-site day-care center at the Department of Transportation. In Unlimited Partners, she takes comfort from the thought that social change is ``challenging the sexual stereotyping that begins at birth, when a pink blanket is used to identify a girl and simultaneously limit the range of opportunities open to her when she grows up.'' As one might expect, Mrs. Dole has also long shown a commitment to ``diversity,'' including the use of preferential treatment based on race and sex. Anti-preference activist Ward Connerly recalls her approaching him after a fundraiser in the fall of 1996 to ask whether her practices in government would meet his standards. ``What struck me,'' he says, ``was [that] the kind of affirmative action she was talking about was precisely the kind that we were trying to get rid of. . . . It was almost like I was in a debate from twenty years ago.'' THE current debate concerns whether Mrs. Dole should enter the Republican presidential primaries. Mari Maseng Will, a Republican operative in the Doles' orbit for almost two decades, says that Mrs. Dole has been pondering the question with close advisors in recent months. Most of them are encouraging her. Her huge name recognition and fundraising prowess give her more time than most potential candidates would have to agonize over the question -- and she's likely to take all of it. A possible game plan: she could, on her own time, campaign for a few initiatives and House and Senate candidates this fall; act conspicuously coy while having aides create a buzz around Thanksgiving; and enter the race with a splash in early 1999. An Elizabeth Dole candidacy would generate instant excitement simply because, as former aide Cindy Williams notes, ``You've got 18 nominees potentially and one of them wears a skirt.'' In addition, she has more campaign experience than almost anyone else in the GOP. Her skills on the stump need no elaboration for anyone who watched her masterly performance at the San Diego convention in 1996. (A note to those who didn't: She said her husband was tender, trustworthy, kind to the poor, and friendly to the Senate help, so vote for him.) Republican �ber-pundit Bill Kristol even argues that Mrs. Dole will turn out to be a stronger establishment candidate than Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the perceived front-runner, because of her ties to Christian conservatives and because ``the party is so obsessed with the gender gap.'' Mrs. Williams, who is working on that obsession for the House leadership, goes further: ``I think there would be nothing better for American women than to have her run.'' Rod DeArment, a former aide to both Doles, notes that she is ``almost deified by the Republican women's groups,'' which ``are really an army of volunteers and . . . do a lot of the work of the party day in and day out.'' But gender solidarity doesn't win elections: just ask Geraldine Ferraro, or Christine Todd Whitman, or Ronna Romney. Elizabeth Dole's campaign could well peak on announcement day. A campaign would not play to her greatest strength: her ability to master a script. When her microphone went dead in San Diego, she was able to recover gracefully because she had been warned it might happen and had planned for the contingency. Even a perfectionist can't prepare for the rough-and-tumble of a national campaign. The last election Mrs. Dole won was in 1958 -- for May Queen at Duke. If she wants the Presidency, she should run this time. In the first place, the race is wide open. In the second place, she does not have the option of using a vice-presidential nomination as a springboard for a later bid: in 2008 she will be 72. So will she run? DeArment says it's ``a fifty-fifty proposition.'' My bet is no. But she is definitely in the top tier of Veep possibilities -- right now, only Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge is in the same league. Her political indeterminacy means she can balance anyone. She can be everything to everyone, just as the early Ross Perot and Colin Powell could. Consider, for instance, her position on abortion. More than one anti-abortion activist said in 1996 that while they didn't trust Bob Dole, they thought his wife would be a good influence on him because she had had a spiritual reawakening in 1983. Her pro-life rhetoric, however, is more recent than that. In a 1987 profile for The Washington Monthly, Philip Weiss had fun with her comments to the New York Times in 1980 (``I think it's just about the most difficult question there is, and one I'm still wrestling with'') and to him seven years later (``It is the toughest question I have ever had to wrestle with, and frankly I am still wrestling with it''). All that wrestling to so little effect! But how very like Elizabeth Dole: scripted, indecisive, careful not to offend. As first reported by Sidney Blumenthal in The New Yorker, former New Hampshire state senator Susan McLane says that Mrs. Dole approached her in 1988 and reassured her that while her husband had to campaign as a pro-lifer, he wouldn't really do anything about it. ``She certainly didn't appear to be very anti-abortion,'' says Sen. McLane, who has since become a Democrat and joined the national board of a leading abortion-rights group. Mrs. Dole has not explained the evolution of her views on abortion -- or, for that matter, on other subjects where her record looks inconsistent. In Unlimited Partners, Mrs. Dole invokes the motto of her home state of North Carolina: ``To be, rather than to seem.'' If she decides to run for high office, she may stumble over the question that, after all this time, she has not answered: whether she is everything she seems to be. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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