What Won’t Dole Do For A Vote?

It has become painful to watch Bob Dole groveling for the presidency.

Here’s a man in his 70s, a politician of some distinction, who is, in effect, disavowing his whole career in hopes finally of being granted the Republican presidential nomination.

Dole ought to be counted one of the ornaments of his party. He fought back from nearly fatal wounds in World War II to take up a life of public service even though it exposes his physical disability in ways he finds personally distasteful.

Dole has twice been the GOP’s Senate majority leader, and as minority leader he was a stout defender of his party’s values.

Now, in what should be Dole’s glory years, he finds himself on permanent probation with the right wing - especially its Christian evangelicals - that has come to dominate the GOP.

Bob Dole has been a fierce partisan and an instinctive conservative but never a dug-in ideologue.

He could be the poster boy for the observation that the genius of American politics is compromise - a process that lets us get on with business without creating either tyrannical winners or political prisoners.

It is precisely Dole’s knack for accommodation, however, that today’s radicalized GOP holds against him.

The pragmatism that has been essential to Dole’s Senate role has always rankled doctrinal Republicans. Newt Gingrich memorably but unfairly slandered him as “the chief tax collector for the liberal welfare state.”

So we find Dole, a superior legislative mechanic and pretty good free-style foreign policy draftsman, playing the preacher - working the sawdust trail from one Republican revival tent to the next, hosannahing one day for “traditional values” (he absurdly says the government is making war on them) and witnessing the next day against the evil influence of some vague Hollywood elite.

Dole has bowed to the party’s anti-foreigner nativists by calling for making English our “official” language, a jingoist declaration we didn’t feel any need to make in 200-plus years of steady immigration.

Stooping to a little gay-bashing, he pointedly returned a small contribution from an organization of gay Republicans, and he plays to cultural chauvinists by endorsing the hysteria that sees an attack on Western culture lurking in proposed standards for history classes. The standards merely encourage a broadened understanding of all cultures.

Perhaps most debasing, Dole even quit a United Methodist Church he had attended in Washington when the religious right pronounced it liberal. In politics, faith is fungible.

Dole might have come to some of his new positions without the nomination luring him, but it is unlikely he would have come to all or that he would be harping on them to the neglect of the more solid matters of governance that are the real business of politics.

Bob Dole should be sharing with us the best public policy thoughts that his decades of experience have led him to. Instead, we see him jumping through ever smaller hoops held up by culture-war Republicans.

The temptation is stronger to cry for the act than to applaud the agility.