Dole Must Now Decide How to Define His Relationship With Gingrich, GOP

Emotionally wrenching as it might have been, Bob Dole’s decision to resign from Congress was not the most difficult choice he faces in his presidential campaign. More difficult, and ultimately more important, is deciding what to do about the man who stood at his side as he made the announcement: House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Dole’s departure solves his most immediate tactical problem: his self-imprisonment in the tar of interminable and inconclusive legislative struggles with Senate Democrats. If you’re banging your head against a wall, it’s a good decision to stop; in that sense, Dole’s resignation was a good decision.

But Dole’s move leaves unresolved the principal strategic question facing his campaign: defining his relationship with the colleagues and agenda he is leaving behind. The basic structure of American politics since last fall is not complicated. In a simple reciprocal motion, President Clinton has ascended in public esteem precisely as Gingrich and the congressional Republicans have declined. Dole has failed to inspire much enthusiasm on his own, but his biggest problem is that he has been dragged down in that undertow.

Republican officials were given an uncomfortable look at the strength of that current in a series of recent focus groups with swing voters that the party convened around the country. As one top party operative delicately put it, the sessions showed that Democrats “have to a certain degree sold the idea that somehow the [congressional] Republicans are extreme.” Thanks to John King of the Associated Press, who obtained more detailed findings, we know the results were even worse than that, with voters repeatedly using words like “radical” and “gone too far” to describe the GOP Congress. Some of the comments about Gingrich couldn’t be reprinted in a family newspaper.

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Republicans understandably feel indebted to Gingrich. He was the intellectual engine of the party in the wilderness of the late years of George Bush and the early ones of Clinton; more than any single figure, he can claim credit for the historic GOP victory in 1994. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he and his allies overreached in 1995, producing a polarizing agenda--particularly on the budget and the environment--that alienated the political center of the country. The cost of that miscalculation is written in the surveys that now consistently show Clinton with a lead of 15 to 20 percentage points over Dole (not to mention Democrats leading in tests of sentiment about next fall’s congressional elections).

Part of Dole’s strategy for winning the nomination was to prevent any daylight from opening between himself and Gingrich. Now it is Democrats who want to cement that bond. Democratic party ads disparage the “Gingrich-Dole Congress”--with the placement of Dole in the subservient position adding the last bitter jab of mockery. Against that backdrop, the most important decision facing Dole may be whether he thinks he can win the White House with Gingrich at his elbow, or must find a way to signal his independence from the voluble speaker and the congressional agenda that Gingrich, more than anyone else, inspired.

This isn’t a unique problem for Dole. Demonstrating independence from controversial figures and ideas in their own parties has been an essential rite of passage for many presidential candidates over the last quarter of a century. In each instance, the candidate faced the same test: proving that he would set his own course--and tame the excesses of his allies.

Clinton cleared that hurdle in 1992 when he confronted the Rev. Jesse Jackson over inflammatory remarks from the rap singer Sister Souljah. In a more subtle way, Bush took a modest but firm step away from Ronald Reagan’s legacy by declaring in 1988 that he wanted a “kinder, gentler America.”

Hubert H. Humphrey’s agony over the Vietnam War in 1968 perhaps most closely parallels Dole’s situation today. As Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, Humphrey was waist-deep in the muck of the administration’s policy on Vietnam--just as Dole has his fingerprints all over the GOP’s 1995 congressional agenda. Like Dole today, Humphrey struggled to find his own voice without repudiating the man in whose shadow he stood.

During the spring, and again just before the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Humphrey sought to break from Johnson and articulate his own position on how to wind down the war, recalled Ted Van Dyk, a top Humphrey aide. But each time, Van Dyk said, Johnson pressured him into silence.

Finally, with his campaign stalled, and antiwar protests disrupting his rallies, Humphrey in late September broke from Johnson and called for a unilateral halt in the bombing of North Vietnam to jump-start peace negotiations. The effect was “electric,” Van Dyk says: Not only did the protests stop overnight, but the move “liberated Humphrey as well.” Campaigning with new vigor, Humphrey steadily gained ground through October--though in the end he still fell just short against Richard Nixon.

Though the stakes aren’t as big, nor the passions as intense, the wreckage of the congressional Republican agenda may be Dole’s equivalent of Vietnam: the issue on which he has to establish an independent identity if he is to be heard by the voters on everything else.

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Like Johnson with Humphrey, Gingrich shows no sign of receding gracefully. Some Republicans believe that Gingrich may ultimately acquiesce in a choreographed distancing; but so far, he has responded to criticism by lashing himself ever more tightly to Dole.

When Gingrich was asked on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” two weeks ago about reports that some Dole advisors were urging the candidate to distance himself from the speaker, Gingrich bristlingly replied that he was among Dole’s closest advisors. The next day, Gingrich said it was impossible for Dole to distance himself from the “contract with America”: “He helped pass the ‘contract with America,’ ” Gingrich said. “You can’t run from your record. . . . “ Clinton aides, such as Ann Lewis or Gene Sperling, would hardly have put it differently.

Even last week, when Dole moved to symbolically separate himself from Congress with his resignation, Gingrich was glued to his side on the stage. Afterward, Gingrich said he saw in Dole’s decision no evidence that he intended to politically distance himself from Congress--and he let reporters know that Dole himself had “asked me to come over and stand next to him. . . . “

This egocentric behavior has produced a fair amount of private grumbling about Gingrich in Republican circles. “The arrogance!” fumed one Dole campaign consultant. But the problem isn’t only Gingrich; it’s that Dole has been unwilling to risk a backlash from the right by clearly signaling any intention to reconsider the 1995 agenda.

Dole, in fact, can’t seem to make up his mind whether to embrace that record or allow for second thoughts. With his resignation from the Senate--and his intermittent primary season protests that as president he would not “take the country over a cliff”--Dole at points has suggested he would restrain the insurrectionary impulses of congressional Republican conservatives. (Even the new GOP budget plan, which cautiously sands down the 1995 House-driven document, implicitly sends that message.) But at other times--as in Thursday’s first post-resignation speech--Dole insists that voters should throw out Clinton precisely because he vetoed the GOP budget, tax and welfare plans.

Clinton’s argument is much more settled. Clinton accepts the premise that government must be trimmed, but maintains that voters need him in office to prevent the “Gingrich-Dole” Republicans from going too far.

For Dole, quitting Congress was one modest step in denting that argument. More aggressively defining his own post-congressional agenda would be another. But there may be no substitute for acknowledging--in whatever artful phrase his speech writers can construct--that he recognizes the Republican Congress in 1995 exceeded the voters’ tolerance for rolling back government.

Dole aides correctly point out that Americans remain sympathetic to the underlying Republican goals of less government and lower taxes. But it’s willful self-delusion to maintain, as so many conservatives do, that Americans still embrace the specific Republican congressional plans to get there.

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Unless Dole signals that as president he would reshape those blueprints--and not merely sign into law the fondest dreams of House conservatives--he may never escape the debilitating shadow of Congress, even after he cleans out his office in the Capitol.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.