Jumping ship - problems between Bob Dole and Republican Congress

National Review, August 12, 1996 by Rich Lowry

### LOWRY, RICH

AT FIRST only members of the House Ways and Means Committee wanted to send President Clinton a stand-alone welfare-reform bill. For months, the Republican strategy had been to combine welfare reforms with changes to the Medicaid system that President Clinton couldn't stomach, guaranteeing a Clinton veto of the welfare -Medicaid package (in what could be his third veto of welfare legislation). But Ways and Means members, after more than a year of labor, were anxious to see their handiwork become law. Committee members John Ensign (R., Nev.) and David Camp (R., Minn.) circulated a letter to the leadership in June asking that the House pass a welfare bill stripped of the Medicaid veto-bait. It got about fifty signatures. Speaker Newt Gingrich opposed the idea, hoping to give the Dole campaign an opportunity to attack Clinton over a third welfare veto. But, soon, it would be a lost cause.

Rep. Jimmy Hayes (R., La.), one of last year's party-switchers, convinced Majority Leader Dick Armey at a June meeting in the Ways and Means room of the Capitol that Clinton would have to veto even a stand-alone bill or risk infuriating his base. Meanwhile, it seemed increasingly senseless for the House to try to protect the interests of a floundering Dole campaign. If Congress passed a bill the President could sign, Members would get credit back home for a major accomplishment. "The campaign wasn't scoring points on welfare anyway," explains one party official. When Ensign and Camp wrote another letter, they got more than a hundred signatures just by walking onto the House floor. House leaders weren't sure they could pass even the procedural "rule" -- typically a party-line vote -- for a bill keeping welfare and Medicaid together. The two would have to be split -- and the Dole campaign would have to fend for itself.

The decision to send Clinton a welfare bill he might sign is emblematic, not only of a potential major rift between congressional Republicans and the Dole campaign, but of the way the weakness of the campaign feeds further weakness; it prompts the GOP to throw good politics after bad. No Republican wins from the welfare decision. If the President signs a bill, Dole loses irrevocably one of the GOP's traditional top three issues (taxes, crime, welfare). Getting anything other than a watered-down bill through Senate moderates, meanwhile, is always a dicey proposition (some Ways and Means members, privately banking on a second Clinton term, argue that any bill passed this year is the best chance at reform this century). Finally, House Republicans may well find that disarming Dole on a major issue would ultimately hurt more than their "accomplishment" helps. "Any guy who is in a marginal district who thinks he needs welfare to boost him," argues a top Senate staffer, "doesn't realize that . . . if Bob Dole is not doing well, it doesn't matter -- he sinks without a trace."

But Capitol Hill Republicans, understandably, aren't in the mood for being team players. The feeling, according to one long-time congressional aide, is reminiscent of 1992, "when we were getting bashed on the fairness issue, [and] Republicans kept waiting for the Bush campaign to rescue them. Finally we realized the cavalry wasn't going to come over the hill." This year no one is expecting a charge of the Dole brigade. "People have given up," says a senior House leadership staffer. "They're looking at Dole and he's awful. He's a nothing. He's a zero." It is only July, with the public more focused on Dan O'Brien's long jumps than Bob Dole's flip-flops. But if the Dole campaign continues to drift, congressional Republicans will resort to more free-lancing like the welfare - Medicaid split. Another House aide gives Dole a few more weeks to find his voice, but "if he doesn't, it's going to be CYA, baby."

IF House Republicans abandon Dole, it will be a sort of rough justice -- since Dole left them first. In a June interview with the Washington Times, Dole gave House freshmen the back of his hand: "Those people who voted for you [freshmen] want you to do, but they don't want you to do it so fast" (sic). His bumbling reversal on the assault-weapons ban cut the legs out from under House members who had made a tough vote to repeal the ban in order to keep the gun-rights portion of the GOP base happy. Dole, of course, was working at cross-purposes, trying to distance himself from that same base (and succeeding -- only 62 per cent of Republicans support him, according to recent polls). The strategy is the mirror image of Clinton's "triangulation," which works for the President because what his core supporters represent is unpopular with the rest of the country. Dole, on the other hand, dampens his own party's enthusiasm by eschewing the very issues with which Republicans win swing voters (abortion, affirmative action, etc.).

Compounding the strategic divergence is the Dole campaign's organizational disarray. Speaker Gingrich convenes weekly Thursday-morning meetings with top staff from the campaign committees, Sens. Spence Abraham (Mich.) and Paul Coverdell (Ga.) and Reps. Bob Franks (N.J.) and Jennifer Dunn (Wash.) -- all former state party chairmen -- to talk about the shape of the national GOP campaign. At first a representative of the Dole campaign would attend the meeting. Lately, the campaign has been AWOL. For Hill offices, trying to reinforce the Dole message --assuming there is one -- is often a shot in the dark; it's easier to find out what the White House will be doing in days ahead than the Dole campaign. A schedule of coming events produced by the RNC for the Gingrich meetings has a column for the Dole campaign --sometimes left nearly blank.