Republican presidential candidate Robert Dornan has unleashed his most lethal weapon–his sharp tongue–on a campaign trail that is leading him nowhere.
He has no money. No national organization. Almost no standing in the polls. And his conservative theme–faith, family, freedom–has been gobbled up by the GOP front-runners.
But not everyone who runs for president does so because he thinks he can win. Many relish the opportunity to influence the debate.
For Dornan, who sees himself as “the truthmeister” of the Republican candidates, that means pushing the discussion to the right on social issues, and laying the groundwork for 2000.
If GOP front-runner Bob Dole, the U.S. senator from Kansas, “is gonna run a pussycat campaign, well, I’ll be there carrying the fight right into Clinton’s face,” Dornan says.
Among diehard conservatives, Dornan is a godsend. The nine-term congressman from California’s Orange County is an ardent foe of abortion and wants to hold hearings on Capitol Hill to determine when life begins.
He vehemently opposes homosexual rights, sex education and gun control. And his support for the military is so fervent that his colleagues call the former Air Force pilot “B-1 Bob.” The idea of wearing a POW bracelet to remember servicemen in captivity was his, and he wears one.
Despite his dark-horse candidacy, Dornan has managed to get his message out through nationally televised debates open to all the candidates, through C-SPAN broadcasts of House sessions, and by occasionally sitting in for radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
“My vision is a Norman Rockwellesque vision, minus the racism and the contention that we saw along racial lines in the 1950s and ’60s, an America that I grew up in where you didn’t have to lock your front or back door,” says the 62-year-old congressman.
When he outlines his platform, Dornan has a tendency to digress from the usual subjects and begins with the unexpected: After settling into the White House, Dornan said, one of the first things he would do is to take color TVs and weight rooms out of prisons, and visit federal prisons across the country and congratulate inmates who were getting an education. Periodically, he would take to the airwaves and lecture the country on morality, and he would fly every fighter jet there is to earn the military’s respect.
“I just think it would be the most exciting time,” Dornan says.
While his campaign to win the GOP nomination flounders, Dornan proved during a recent convention of Christian conservatives in Memphis that he is still their hero.
Like an uncle who comes to visit from the big city, he wowed them with tales of his foreign travels, joked about his cash-dry campaign, and did a hilarious impression of Humphrey Bogart. Rev. Jerry Falwell ran up to hug him. A group of women giggled like schoolgirls when Dornan posed with them for a picture. And 16-year-old Chris Sherrod of Nashville was beaming when he shook hands with “the greatest man to live since Ronald Reagan.”
Ask Dornan supporters what draws them to him, and their answer is universal: Bob Dornan tells it like it is.
Sometimes, that gets him in trouble.
Last year the House booted him out for 24 hours when he accused Clinton of helping the enemy in Vietnam by dodging the draft.
And during a debate about the draft and the military on the House floor, Dornan got so angry with a former colleague that, according to reports at the time, he grabbed him by the necktie, gave it a yank, and called him a “draft-dodging wimp.” He also disclosed on the House floor that a fellow congressman was a homosexual.
Fellow conservative and GOP presidential challenger Alan Keyes, the lone African-American in the Republican field, explains his friend this way: “Bob Dornan says out loud what a lot of us are thinking on issues that need to be discussed.”
U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) labeled his friend “a split personality.”
First is the man who, once committed to an issue, will follow through, Rangel said, citing his support for the war on drugs as an example.
But there is also a man who will attack without provocation. “When he gets into political personalities, I have no idea who he is,” Rangel said. “It seems that he’s possessed when he speaks on those emotional issues.”
During a recent interview, for example, Dornan said President Clinton is a man “of zero character . . . who should have had a father or brother punch his lights out.” He added: “He is a triple draft-dodger. He is a compulsive adulterer.”
Dornan acknowledges that being “frank and candid” has hurt his campaign, but he also faults the media for portraying him negatively.
One of his biggest complaints against the media, Dornan says, is that they never write that he is a family man, the father of five children, and grandfather of 10. They fail to mention his achievements in passing anti-abortion legislation, or to recognize him as an early soldier of the Republican revolution, a battle he had been preparing for all his life.
As a young boy, his family moved from Manhattan to Beverly Hills with encouragement from his uncle, Jack Haley, the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.”
His businessman father taught him to be “fearless but foolhardy,” and his mother, a voracious reader of history and current events, taught him politics. She often would stay up with him into the early morning hours exhausting the subject. The Dornans ran a strict Irish-Catholic home, and Dornan attended parochial schools.
The congressman would describe himself as “upbeat, optimistic, happy, cooperative–the first guy to change your tire if you have a flat.”
His wife of 41 years would add funny, bright, witty. “His phraseology, to me, it’s a blessing from God,” Sallie Dornan says. “It’s a golden tongue. He’s not mean. Any attacks that have come have first come against him. This is a guy who loves everyone.”
Others see his unbridled tongue as a curse, one that often makes enemies by alienating people.
Over the years, political opponents and the news media have made much of allegations by Mrs. Dornan that he had abused her. Although she formally has recanted the charges, saying her mind was clouded by an addiction to drugs and alcohol, the allegations have dogged the couple in this and other campaigns.
Even the congressman’s older brother, Don, says America is not quite ready for the candidate’s shoot-from-the-hip style.
“He would be very tempted to tell it like it is, and as president, you can’t do that all the time.”
Before addressing the convention in Memphis, Dornan went on the radio and fired this salvo:
“If you think that the Clintons are liberals, intellectually and at heart, and are arrogant now, imagine if he gets another four years.
“He would turn into nothing but a liberal propaganda machine, abusing, as I believe he already has, those two 747s.
“I’ve said from day one, and I told this to George Bush, that the 747s are excessive. The first thing I’d do, or second or third thing in the first week if I were president, is I would ask the airlines to take these two 747s off my hands, and I’d be content to travel around in a much smaller airplane. . . .”
