Bob Dole (was non-obit post, now RIP)

Politics & Elections
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Senator Bob Dole.

A man of warmth and integrity compared to today’s Republicans.

Dole was left permanently disabled by severe injuries in the Second World War.

Quite a contrast to coward presidents from both sides who cheated their way out of going to war as boys.

The only person in Washington during Dole’s time there who remembered to reach out to shake Dole’s non-paralyzed hand was Richard Nixon. Dole never forgot Nixon’s kindness.

If he lives three more years, he passes Alf Landon (Republican, 1936) to become the longest-lived major party candidate for President. Strom Thurmond was a few months older than Landon when he died. Thurmond won 39 Electoral votes as the Dixiecrat candidate in 1948. The only two states that Landon won in 1936 were Maine and Vermont which comprised 8 electoral votes.

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Three more years! Three more years!

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The guy supported Donald Trump. I don’t consider him to be “a man of warmth and integrity compared to today’s Republicans”, because he IS one of today’s Republicans. He’s an elder statesman of the Republican party. He has substantial credentials as a political icon, and he chose to put those credentials behind a total piece of shit. I don’t view him as a man of integrity. A man of integrity would have stepped up in this situation.

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MODERATOR: Senator Dole, 10 days ago when Senator Mondale raised the issues of Watergate and the Nixon pardon, you called it the start of a campaign mudslinging. Two years ago when you were running for the Senate you said that the pardon was prematurely granted and that it was a mistake. You were quoted by The Kansas City Times as saying, “You can’t ignore our tradition of equal application of the law.” Did you approve of the Nixon pardon when President Ford granted it? Do you approve of it now and, if the issue was fair game in your 1974 campaign in Kansas, why is it not an appropriate topic now?

DOLE: It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it’s not a very good issue any more than the war in Vietnam would be or World War II or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century.

I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit. If we want to go back and rake that over and over and over, we can do that. I think Senator Mondale doesn’t want to do that. And it seems to me that the pardon of Richard Nixon is behind us. Watergate is behind us. we have this vision for Americans who are really concerned about those people out there and their problems, yes, and their education and their jobs, we ought to be talking about that.

I know it strikes a responsive chord in some to kick Richard Nixon around. I don’t know how long you can keep that up. How much mileage is there in someone who’s been kicked, whose wife suffered a serious stroke, who’s been disgraced in office and stepped down from that office. I think after two years and some months it’s probably a dead issue.

But let them play that game. That’s the only game they know.

MODERATOR: Senator Mondale.

MONDALE: I think Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as hatchet man tonight by implying and stating that World War II and the Korean War were Democratic wars.

Does he really mean to suggest to the American people that there was a partisan difference over involvement in the war despite Nazi Germany. I don’t think any reasonable American would accept that.

Did he really mean to suggest it was only partisanship that got us into the war in Korea? Did he really mean to forget that part of the record where Mr. Nixon and the Republican Party wanted us to get involved earlier in the war in Vietnam, and long after Mr. Nixon and the Republican party promised to finish the war in Vietnam, they kept urging us forward, and that in fact it was the Democratic Congress that passed the law ending the war in Vietnam and preventing a new war in Angola?

Now on Watergate, we are not charging, and he knows it, his involvement in Watergate. What we’re saying is that they defended Mr. Nixon up to the last.

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Whoa, I had no idea Alf Landon lived until 1987. That’s wild. Is 1945-1987 the longest stretch of time when one major-party candidate in a presidential election was alive and the other one wasn’t?

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Bennett Cerf told the story that Landon once introduced his wife to the Socialist party candidate, “Dear, I’d like you to meet the man I beat so badly in the 1936 election”.

Landon’s daughter (granddaughter?) later served as U.S. senator from Kansas, like Dole.

Dole also has a delightful dry sense of humor.

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Re: Dole and Nixon:

Dole was overheard commenting on the sight of Ford, Carter, and Nixon seated side by side: “See no evil, hear no evil… and evil .”

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It was his daughter, Nancy Landon Kassebaum. She was the first (and thus far, only) woman elected* to the Senate from Kansas. She was also the first woman elected to the Senate whose husband had not previously served in Congress.

*Sheila Frahm was appointed to the Senate in 1996, when Dole resigned to run for President. Frahm was defeated in the election by Sam Brownback.

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42 years is also the longest a First Lady of the US has spent in retirement - Sarah Polk.

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I believe he is the only living Republican candidate for president that supported Trump. He just felt a huge obligation to the party that selected him as its candidate and he would not betray that party-loyalty, even for Trump.

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exactly. He’s been a Republican for almost seven decades. He is loyal to the party not Trump.

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One more comment on Dole’s sense of humor.

When Bush 41 nominated David Souter for SCOTUS, Dole was present at a press conference where was asked whether he was looking forward to leaving (his home state) for Washington.

Souter replied, “I don’t think anyone wants to leave New Hampshire.”

Dole muttered under his breath, “I did”, a self-deprecating reference to his loss in the (1988) Republican NH primary.

That wasn’t written by a speechwriter,

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Also 1976 Bob Dole was not the same as 1996 Bob Dole.

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I’m more willing to give people a pass for supporting Trump in 2016 than in 2020. I get it. They had their reasons. He was new and exciting and got everyone energized with his unorthodox campaign and hard-hitting blah blah blah, I get it, I GET IT. But in 2020? After COVID? Sorry, I don’t see how you could support him and still be considered a reasonable human being.

All of which is to say -did Dole support Trump the second time around?

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What about Frances Cleveland? It looks to me like she was an ex-First Lady for either 50 or 54 or 58 years, depending on how you count…

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Bob Dole was one of two Republicans who became presidential candidates after I reached voting age who I thought had integrity and might make pretty good Presidents. Both of them wound up disappointing me.

Dole, after being critical of Oliver North over the Iran/Contra affair and calling him “a loose cannon” wound up endorsing and campaigning for North during his Virginia U.S. Senate race and Dole’s PAC donated to North’s campaign. This apparently was because Dole had his eye on the '96 Presidential race and didn’t want to piss off North supporters.

The other Republican Presidential candidate whose catering to sleazy elements was a sorry revelation was John McCain.

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I think there’s something morally suspicious about being loyal to a political party. Loyalty to a person? Sure. Loyalty to your family, your home state, your nation? Sure. But to a political party?

That leads to evil. Evil like supporting a con man as president because he conned enough people into voting for him.

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A man truly loyal to the Republican Party would have done everything in his power to save it from Trump.

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I hope he can chuckle about The National Park Service’s Bob Dole Plaque.

All the photos of it try to obscure the fact that Bob Dole got a plot of land six feet on a side in the middle of a parking lot (it’s next to the WW2 memorial, so it’s a meaningful parking lot…).

But I could not stop laughing about it when I saw it, one of the most absurd things I’ve seen.

Here’s the widest shot of it in existence… Imagine mini-vans loading up bored cub scouts all around it.

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Care to elucidate? I only remember one individual who cheated his way out.