THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 17, 1996 TAG: 9608170026
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 62 lines
When Alf Landon, Bob Dole's fellow Kansan, ran for president, he was buried by the Roosevelt landslide. Leading up to San Diego, many were writing Dole off as another Landon. Instead, he emerges from his convention a legitimate contender.
The choice of Jack Kemp as running mate energized the party and shrank the distance between Dole and Clinton in polls. The convention put a moderate, unified face on a party still divided by conservative factionalism. The viewing public was offered Republicanism Lite, long on what the country needs, short on how to achieve it.
Colin Powell made a masterful debut as a Republican spokesman. Pat Buchanan, the Christian Coalition and the Gingrich revolutionaries were kept off prime time. Elizabeth Dole showed she'll be a formidible campaigner with her performance as a distaff Donahue who helped humanize her sometime-distant husband.
But none of that would have mattered if Dole hadn't delivered the speech of his life. And that's what he did, not by running away from qualities often viewed as defects but by making virtues of them.
The candidate has been characterized as too old to be president, as a poor speaker, a man wounded not just in body but in spirit, a man with a dark side.
Dole countered that he's old enough to remember a better America and can return the nation to neglected virtues.
Dole admitted he's plain-spoken, but suggested that's preferable to slick talk and ``leadership unwilling to risk the truth, to speak without calculation.''
Wounded, yes. But that just means he's been tested. Sounding almost like a Confucian or stoic, Dole said the measure of a man was ``right conduct.''
As to Dole's famous darkness, he made it clear that he will run as a tough-talking, austere and demanding patriach who will make the lives of criminals hell, pursue terrorists to the end of the Earth, expect schools to measure up, keep illegal immigrants out and make no compromise when it comes to the defense of the nation.
The one glaring exception to all this bracing austerity was on the biggest issue of all: economic policy. Dole spent the entire convention building up an image of trustworthiness only to bet it all on his economic plan.
Dole has set aside a prairie fiscal conservatism that has been described as root canal Republicanism in favor of supply-side optimism that looks suspiciously like the promise of a free lunch.
Dole claims he can preserve Medicare and Social Security and increase defense spending and balance the budget by 2002 AND cut the capital-gains tax by 50 percent and the income tax on a family of four earning $35,000 by 56 percent. The math doesn't seem to add up, but to objections Dole answers, in effect, trust me.
The nation might just do so. A free lunch is hard to pass up. One thing is certain, instead of the me-too race with Clinton many had predicted, Dole has set up a stark contrast with President Clinton, largely on character and economics.
Dole has tried to frame the contest as a choice between his tough talk and Clinton's happy talk, between unity and diversity, between the man of experience and the feckless baby boomer, between the patriarch and the prodigal, between sacrifice and self-indulgence, between the old soldier and the artful dodger.
In two weeks, we'll hear the president's rebuttal. by CNB