The two Bobs

National Review, Dec 2, 1991 by William McGurn

Meet Bobs Michel and Dole, establishmentarians extraordinaire. As long as they're the Minority Leaders, they don't seem to mind that their troops are more of a minority with every election.

WHEN Warner Brothers cast Ronald Reagan alongside Pat O'Brien in their 1940 classic Knute Rockne-All American, they could not have known they were creating a metaphor for a future President. In its usual way Hollywood played down the Rock's biting sarcasm in favor of sentiment, reaching a teary pitch in the famous "Win one for the Gipper" halftime speech that sent a divided Notre Dame football team back onto the field looking for blood. Less well known is an equally telling incident, which the film omitted. After listening to a whole conversation about what good sports his Notre Dame players were when they lost, Rockne couldn't take it any longer. "Show me a good and gracious loser," he said curtly, "and I'll show you a failure."

With an attitude like that, Rockne never would have made a Republican. A Reagan Democrat, yes. But a Republican? Hardly. Today-eleven years after the Gipper took the White House with a brand-new GOP majority in the Senate, seven years after his mandate was renewed and the established Beltway wisdom about the inevitability of one-term Presidencies was turned on its head, and scarcely three years after Vice President George Bush was swept into the Oval Office as the anointed heir of the Reagan Revolution-the Republican Party remains a good and gracious loser. Worse than that, at a time when Republican Party registration is on an upswing (as many people call themselves Republicans as Democrats these days), Republican numbers in both Houses of Congress have been shrinking: in the Senate, from 53 Republicans at the outset of the Reagan Administration to 43 today: in the House, from 192 in 1980 to 166 today.

Presiding over these disastrous losses are the best sports the Congress has ever had. These are the two Bobs: Bob Dole and Bob Michel, Senate and House Minority Leaders.

Fair enough: some of the blame rests with George Bush. But blaming Bush for the GOP's wimpiness in Congress is a chicken-or-egg proposition. While Dole and Michel would probably perform better (as they did under Reagan) with a President who was out in front on the issues, Bush himself would unquestionably be better were he served by House and Senate leaders who weren't so defeatist. Congressional leaders, after all, tell Presidents what can be done and what can't. "What comes out of George Bush's mouth is George Bush's," concedes an Administration official. "But if he were meeting weekly with CochranGingrich instead of Dole-Michel, you'd have the President's capital-gains-tax cut on the table instead of worker's compensation. No President is going to put his credibility on the line when the top two Republican leaders are telling him he can't win."

Establishment Men

LIKE BUSH, the two Bobs are charter members of the Republican establishment. Unlike Bush, however, they are also members of a more significant establishment -the congressional establishment. Hostile to the supply-side economics that gave Republicans their best decade ever and Dole a stint as Majority Leader, both men have more in common with the Congress President Bush is attacking than the one he would like. Bob Michel has labored for four decades in the Republican vineyard without ever having tasted the power of a committee chairmanship; if everyone in the House retired today he would draw the biggest pension. Over in the Senate, only four men have served longer than Dole, all but one of them Democrats. In every sense of the word, these are pre-Reagan, Nixon/ Ford Republicans who believe that getting along with the Democratic majority is more important than advancing the Republican standard. Just a few days ago Bob Dole said as much on the floor, when George Mitchell warned that unless the Senate got through a civil-rights bill, an environmental bill, an EPA-Cabinet-level bill, and the parental-leave bill, senators wouldn't go home on time. Far from taking issue with Mitchell's laundry list of liberal concerns, Dole said he hoped to "accommodate the Majority Leader" in moving all this legislation through expeditiously. Senator Thad Cochran (R., Miss.), incensed by what he was hearing, rose to remind the chamber that what Mitchell put forward was "not on the Republican agenda." Mr. Dole was silent.

In the case of the civil-rights bill, Dole made good on his promise to accommodate Mitchell. The package was hatched in one of those backroom deals in Dole's office with almost no other Republicans knowing what he was up to. The next day, staffer Sheila Burke kept Republicans from even looking at the bill until after the Democrats had had a chance to consider it at their morning conference. Republicans didn't get to discuss the compromise until the afternoon, by which time Teddy Kennedy had already put his spin on it (the bill would negate several Supreme Court decisions, Kennedy welcomed the President's change of heart, etc.). No wonder some call Dole the "Assistant Majority Leader" behind his back.