Tolerate Dole? - presidential candidate Bob Dole and the abortion plank - On the Right - Editorial

National Review, July 15, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The division within the Republican Party at this writing is over the question how much tolerance is tolerable. The first step, as we know, had to do with the abortion issue. In the GOP platform, beginning in 1980, there has been a call for a constitutional amendment on the abortion question. There are several versions floating about on what language would be appropriate in such an amendment. The most permissive of these is simply to overturn Roe v. Wade. In that event, every state, as was the case between 1789 and 1973, would be free to make its own laws. The strictest proposed amendment would impose a ban on abortions everywhere.

Senator Dole knows better, possibly, than any other man on earth what is and what is not going to happen when revising the Constitution comes up. He tried to get through an amendment that would forbid deficit spending, but failed. The chances of getting through an amendment that would absolutely forbid abortions has the same chance an amendment to abolish slavery would have had in 1850. He knows this, and so do informed partisans on both sides. For that reason the phraseology of the platform is the only substantive matter to fight over, and Senator Dole's contribution to Republican concinnity was his idea that the platform should also profess "tolerance" for positions different from the Pro-Life position.

But one recalls here the critic Hugh Kenner's stricture that writers should not hang their meaning on the correct placement of a comma. Mr. Kenner was talking about newspapers and the necessary hustle and bustle of going to press every day. The Pro-Life people are talking about back-of-the-bus treatment on abortion. If the platform goes out of the way to express "tolerance" for deviation on abortion, doesn't that make it sound as though abortion were uniquely privileged to emerge as the issue on which ambivalence is permitted? After all, there's nothing proposed for the platform that expresses tolerance for those who oppose Social Security laws, or a federal post office, or free lunches for children.

So Senator Dole is now thinking to defuse the situation by getting the platform to state that the GOP is tolerant about other things, for instance, trade, gun control, and term limits. This is supposed to convey that the Republican Party will be happy to have the votes of anybody even if he favors high tariffs and gun control, and opposes term limits. Where does tolerance prospectively end? Presumably on issues where lobbies on one side or the other are so diminished in strength as not to have vast followings even in California.

Mr. Dole is said to make up his own mind about how to deal with political and indeed other matters. This is in refreshing contrast to the poll-watchers whose views are exactly tailored to plebiscitary readings of that day's opinions. But Mr. Dole needs to watch his step here. His tolerance/no tolerance zag suggests something less than consolidated thought on these politically sensitive issues.

What does not make much sense, to partisans either of Life or of Choice, is Bob Dole's attempt to play with words. We all know, or should, that political platforms are there to be seen but not acted on. It hurts the theatrical stand one wants to take to say this out in the open. But surely there are ways out of this. Senator Dole, with relative impunity, could say that in the best of all possible worlds there would be no abortion because there would be no unwanted children, but that the codification of the public mood on abortion is more than a platform could begin to handle, so that other than stating the paradigm (no abortions), the candidate will await the distillation of public opinion. There would be fireworks, but not the kind that last from now until November.

Senator Dole needs encouragement from his friends and supporters. The polls have given him a little lift in the past few days and there may be, creeping into the voter's mind, some sense of the gravitas of Bob Dole. He really does have it, so much so that one is occasionally tempted to reject the nickname and refer to him as Robert Dole. He is a handsome man; his countenance is both that of the American who enjoys impieties at the Mark Twain level, and that of the American one goes to war with, knowing that, at your side, is a noble man and true companion. The other stuff he's not very good at, and it goes against his natural character as presidential candidate.