Dole Is No Great Communicator

It is now clearer than ever that if the American people are inclined to change presidents, they will have to pick Bob Dole for what he does and what he believes - not for what he says or how he says it.

His victory would force a complete rewrite of that fine book, “The Rhetorical Presidency,” which recounts how chief executives increasingly have used television and other mass media to exercise power. Were Dole to govern, he would do so in the way he ran the Senate - using speeches only to announce decisions he had negotiated on his office balcony or in cloakroom conversations.

You can say that definitively now - after what was billed as the “speech of his lifetime,” the acceptance address on Thursday night’s final session of the 1996 Republican National Convention.

Those who admire Dole’s character and courage, who are familiar with the quick insights and sardonic wit of his private conversation, can only shake their heads in sadness at his inability to convey in formal talks the qualities that have made him such an effective leader.

No major public figure since Lyndon Johnson has been more persuasive in private conversation and less so when the TV lights go on. Dole was victimized by circumstances. The fast-paced, emotionally powerful first three convention nights made his flat-voiced, hourlong speech seem even longer and flatter.

To my mind, the speech was so lacking in theme and so full of contradictions that it almost undermined Dole’s reputation for integrity.

It said that honor, not wealth, is the goal of life and criticized President Clinton for putting “the economy, stupid,” at the center of his last campaign. But it is an economic plan with the promise of tax cuts that was at the center of Dole’s speech and that will be, he hopes, his ticket to the White House.

He spoke scornfully of leadership “unwilling to risk the truth, to speak without calculation,” and said, “all things flow from doing what is right.” But it was political calculation which caused him to be silent on his party’s and his own long-held commitment to eliminate abortion rights in all but the rarest circumstances. This speech did not reflect the honesty of the man any better than it did his strength of leadership.

But since he cannot do that for himself, voters will have to rely on the testimonials he has earned from more verbally gifted associates like his wife Elizabeth, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and his rival-turned-running mate, Jack Kemp. Kemp has been deeply moved, friends say, by learning at close range in this past week how much effort and stoic endurance it takes for Dole simply to get through the day, and has come to see him in the heroic terms he used in his own speech Thursday night.

But most persuasive, perhaps, was the testimony of the only one of this quartet who stands to gain nothing personally from a Dole victory - Sen. John McCain of Arizona. McCain endured his own purgatory - years of imprisonment and regular torture in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. He has the fierce and hard-earned independence of judgment that is the special gift of wounded warriors, who know that nothing in politics can match the pressure or threaten the pain they already have endured.

What McCain said of Dole in his nominating speech is what Republicans have to hope the voters will hear - and heed:

“In America, we celebrate the virtues of the quiet hero; the modest man who does his duty without complaint or expectation of praise; the man who listens closely for the call of his country, and when she calls, he answers without reservation, not for fame or reward, but for love. He loves his country.”

“All I want you to believe about Bob Dole is that he gets his vision from you. Your hopes are his mission. Your cares are his cause. Your dreams are his purpose and your country is the love of his life. America, we cannot spare this man.”

Those two paragraphs, full of simple words, perfectly chosen and with not a syllable to spare, make a far better case for electing Bob Dole than the prolix and awkward speech he delivered himself. An important part of a president’s job is public persuasion, marshaling the language that will mobilize the greatest force in democracy, the consent of the governed. Dole will have to govern without that tool. But first the voters will have to decide if he can.