A Tale of Two Liddys
Commentary: Casting her as the "anti-Clinton," Elizabeth Dole's supporters are peddling a different kind of girlie show
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The joke begins innocently. Speaking to 3,000 members of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) in the Washington, D.C., Hilton's cavernous ballroom in February, Elizabeth Dole tells the story of a meeting in the early 1980s at which she and her colleagues in the Reagan White House were deciding which senators to target for a lobbying blitz. As Dole remembers it, when she had to go home and prepare an intimate dinner, her deputy asked whether she wanted to finish the strategy session. With a rosy twinkle, Dole recalls her reply: "'Tonight, I'm targeting Bob Dole.'"
The audience chuckles, but Dole isn't finished. "I want to assure you," she adds jovially, "that though my candlelight dinner was very successful, I never tried it out on any other senator." In the back of the hall where I stand with the few other reporters who have crashed the private event, the crowd's laughter and applause are deafening.
Get it? Dole is running for president as Bill Clinton's antithesis. He's a philanderer; she's a faithful spouse. He represents the evil in the hearts of men; she represents the untapped good in the hearts of women. He's reckless; she's judicious. "She is the un-Clinton, the perfect antidote to the most undisciplined president in history," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd earlier this year. It's a good act. But the real punch line is that Dole's anti-Clinton posturing is part of a campaign strategy built on the very Clintonian idea of triangulation. She's using her gender to play both sides of the political spectrum, matching Clinton's ideological promiscuity with her own.
Dole's game plan is to triangulate on three fronts. First, she is distancing herself from Clinton's lechery on one side and the GOP's impeachment jihad on the other. "The presidency has been tarnished," and the country needs a leader "with the integrity to inspire trust," she declared at the unofficial kickoff to her campaign February 8 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Burdened by negative sexual stereotypes -- weakness, naivete, hysteria -- Dole is exploiting one that works to her advantage. According to at least one poll, Americans think a female president would be less scandal-prone than a man.
At the same time, Dole exploits other feminine stereotypes to distance herself from the Republican inquisition. Her strategy is to contrast her optimism and moral rectitude with her rivals' pessimism and sniping. Where men look for fights, Dole suggests, women look for solutions. "In my church, I learned to serve rather than stand in judgment," she said in Manchester. The "overriding theme" of her career, she explained, has been "to try consensus before confrontation" and cut through the "cacophony of conflicting voices."
In executing this strategy, Dole faces two challenges. One is that rivals will question her conservatism. Her answer is to ally herself with Ronald Reagan's optimism. "Reagan conservatism wore a smile," she argued in Manchester. "It was optimistic, futuristic, and inclusive." Dole's other challenge is to blend her dual critiques of Clinton and the GOP into one coherent message. Her ingenious solution is to make congressional incivility in both parties a moral issue. America faces a plague of "crime, violence, drugs, illegitimacy, and incivility," she declares. "If public life is lacking in civility, then it is our common task to help civilize it." And guess which gender is supposed to be good at civilizing?
The second part of Dole's strategy concerns the role of government. While parroting conservative rhetoric on taxes, drugs, crime, and defense, she takes more moderate positions on education, labor, and consumer protection. Again, she credits her eclecticism to gender. Women bring "unique skills" to management, having learned to "read between the lines" and devise "creative solutions," she tells the CUNA audience. In Manchester she denounced "either-or politics -- liberal vs. conservative, public school vs. private school." As labor secretary under George Bush, she recalled, "I pursued cooperation between labor and management." And as Reagan's transportation secretary, she said, "I did not shy away from Washington's traditional responsibility to advocate and, where absolutely necessary, regulate."
Dole has genuine crossover appeal. She joined Lyndon Johnson's administration as a Democrat and didn't register as a Republican until several years later, shortly before marrying Bob Dole. Some conservatives recall unhappily that she defended affirmative action in the Reagan years. This year, she invited several Democrats to the first breakfast of her New Hampshire campaign. Her pollster, Linda DiVall, and senior strategist, Kieran Mahoney, have worked for candidates or causes that stray from the strict party line on both abortion and gay rights. Her campaign manager, Thomas Daffron, has worked for liberal Maine Republicans -- including William Cohen, Clinton's secretary of defense -- and reportedly cited his own daughter as the kind of Democrat Dole can win over.
While Clinton's crossover strategy is to repackage progressive ideals as conservative "values," Dole's is the reverse. She speaks of her Christianity comfortably and conspicuously, telling the CUNA audience about "Scripture" and "my faith." But unlike her Republican rivals, Dole applies morality to economics. "Like any human creation, capitalism is imperfect," she argued in Manchester. "Conservatives should never hesitate to speak out against the unregulated, unadulterated pursuit of cash if it leads... to the pollution of the airwaves, or the pollution of our air."
Still, Dole's bipartisan gestures, like Clinton's, are often empty and calculated. To foster the impression that Democratic women support her campaign, Dole's aides have released supportive statements from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala (who has the "highest respect and affection" for Dole). But both statements refer to Dole's leadership at the Red Cross.
The third aspect of Dole's strategy is feminism. Her advisers emphasize her appeal to women, portraying her campaign as the strongest assault ever on the ultimate glass ceiling. In every speech, she recounts her professional battles with sexism, applauds progress toward gender equality in the workplace, and cautions that women still don't get their share of pay and top management jobs. In Manchester she referred to the next president as "he," then pointedly added, "or she." The audience roared in approval.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, however, Dole manages at the same time to identify with traditional wives and mothers. Coming from a childless career woman, this is an impressive feat. She pulls it off through physical cues -- girlish hairstyles, immaculate nails, limp-wristed gestures, effusive titters -- and the use of phrases such as "strengthening the family" and "manning" the nation's defense. "I'll do anything for my husband," she tells the CUNA crowd. Weaving together progressivism and conservatism, she acknowledges that in the 1960s, "We made some real gains for minorities and women, and we must never go back.... And yet this country, which has come so far, has lost so much."
Can Dole get away with such equivocation? Can she sell herself as pious and tolerant, libertarian and communitarian, feminist and antifeminist? The answer comes from the audience when, in the midst of praising women's entry into the workforce, Dole abruptly shifts into reverse: "The most important career for a woman is that of mother." Far from balking at this ideological back flip, the crowd surges into an ovation. Dole smiles, lifts her hands above the podium, and claps demonstratively, like a mother teaching toddlers to applaud. The empty, canned gesture matches the empty, canned line and the indiscriminate applause. The moment mirrors everything Republicans hate about Clinton's ideological promiscuity and broad rapport. No wonder they're bullish on Dole. m
