The misanthrope's corner - presidential candidate Bob Dole's irritating reference to himself in the third person - Column

National Review, April 8, 1996 by Florence King

BOB Dole's habit of referring to himself in the third person is having such a disconcerting effect on the primaries that they will have to be renamed the tertiaries if he doesn't cut it out. He sounds as if he really doesn't want to be President, he just wants Bob Dole to be President.

My nerves gave way during his post - New Hampshire news conference when he told supporters, "You're going to see the real Bob Dole from now on." I turned him off and surfed around for an old movie to take my mind off politics. Under normal conditions I never tire of The Third Man, but this time I skipped it. I finally settled on Wuthering Heights but my respite was brief. When Merle Oberon cried, "I am Heathcliff, he's more myself than I am!" all I could think of was Bob Dole.

Object to his age and he will say "Bob Dole is rested and ready." Call him a Washington insider and he will say "Bob Dole has been tested." During one particularly bad week in January when he had to counter speculation that his campaign was bringing forth Lazarus, he said: "I don't think people think Bob Dole is that bad."

Hearing him say these things on television can be either comical or irritating, depending upon your mood; seeing them in print accompanied by the reporter's attributives is positively eerie: "'We must reach out to more and more people, and Bob Dole can do that,' Dole said tonight."

I wait for the day when he objects to the verb that reporters routinely use in describing him. Then we'll read: "'Bob Dole doesn't snarl,' Dole snarled."

Welcome to the Doppelganger school of American oratory. At the rate Dole is going, his rhetorical onanism soon will become so deeply embedded in the soil of American politics that Pat Buchanan will have yet another abomination to rip out "root and branch" -- except that Buchanan has begun using the third person, too.

How long has Dole been doing this? A search of my files turned up a clipping from November 1992 in which he assured gloomy Republicans that Bill Clinton would not have a legislative honeymoon because: "Bob Dole is going to be his chaperone."

From what is known about speech habits, it probably started much earlier than a mere four years ago. This is a question for a serious scholar to explore. If Dole wins the nomination, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason can do a film biography to show at the GOP convention. After the sunny optimism she brought to The Man from Hope, she can demonstrate her versatility by producing The Pronouning in collaboration with Stephen King.

The camera pans over Russell, Kansas, following the candidate through his formative years . . .

To his mother: "Bob Dole's hungry."

To his father: "Can Bob Dole have a quarter?"

To his teachers: "Bob Dole didn't do it."

To nice girls: "Would you like to go to the picture show with Bob Dole?"

To bad girls: "If you did it with all those other guys, how come you won't do it with Bob Dole?"

Neither Dole nor his advisors seem to realize that referring to oneself in the third person has a dark history. Psychopaths are especially prone to it. When Lola Montez wanted to make an impression on King Ludwig of Bavaria, she burst into the royal presence, tore open her bodice, and cried, "Lola has come!"

Worse, it's undemocratic. Given the more-populist-than-thou desperation of Campaign '96, why would a politician risk a usage associated with absolute monarchs, dictators, and supreme egoists like Douglas MacArthur?

Maybe it's Dole's way of avoiding the dreaded "I" word -- that is, "I," the selfish pronoun outlawed by the collectivist government in Ayn Rand's Anthem. When her hero escapes from the re-education camp he has to practice arduously before he is once again able to pronounce "I" properly, a therapy that may become necessary for Bob Dole.

Another possible explanation is a misreading of Middle America's favorite self-help book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. The author recommends repeating the name of the person to whom one is speaking, working it into the conversation as often as possible to serve the dual purpose of flattery and memory training: the listener gets to hear the sweet sound of his own name, and the speaker gets to remember what it is.

THIS is invaluable training for a politician, but repeating names year after year carries the same risk as singing "God Bless America" at Kiwanis luncheons year after year: if you hit the wrong note on the final home you automatically swing into another refrain, and then you can't stop. Fortunately, Elizabeth Dole works for the Red Cross. She'll know how to handle such emergencies if she becomes Third Lady.

Significantly, Dole not only uses the third person, but the Third-Person Diminutive. Now that Americans have exchanged the backslap of the first name for the verbal goose of the nickname as the ultimate sign of equality, he must take care to remind us that he no longer has a full, formal name. He would never say "Robert J. Dole is not imploding" because he knows that voters are threatened by aloofness. To reap the psychological value of his nickname he must say "Bob Dole is not imploding." This, so help me Tocqueville, is America's definition of a soothing statement.