The woes of the 1996 Republican presidential campaign are not nearly as lamentable as the disheartened state of baseball. Even if Bob Dole loses in November, the GOP still will have captured five of the last eight presidential contests–but baseball has never replaced Yogi Berra.
And the Republican convention that opens Monday, eerily resembling all the other GOP gatherings of the last 40 years, is best described by Yogi’s most famous malapropism: “It’s deja vu all over again.”
There is again the consternation over the party platform, which Republicans have always given away to the side that lost the nomination; the ritual hoopla over the vice presidential choice, which Republican nominees historically award to people they don’t personally like; and the split between the Republicans who want to focus on economic issues and those who want to dally with social imperatives.
The encroachment of the Christian Coalition into the GOP mainstream has again forced its emotional demand for an exclusionary anti-abortion plank on the Republican platform, and the haggling over that issue overshadowed the pre-convention hopes of Bob Dole to focus attention on his brand-new, 20-year-old economic plan.
But it is as much of a Republican convention tradition for party nominees to surrender the platform to dissidents as it once was to see Yogi Berra in the World Series every October.
And it has never meant much.
Way back in 1948, Thomas Dewey traded away the platform to Bob Taft and the vice presidency to Earl Warren to assure his nomination. In 1960, Richard Nixon, uncertain of his nomination, was forced by the new darling of the GOP Eastern establishment, Nelson Rockefeller, to accept a foreign policy plank that could have been written by Harry Truman. In 1976, Ronald Reagan hounded President Gerald Ford all the way to Kansas City, where Ford agreed to a platform that left people like Jesse Helms drooling.
Of course, the Republicans lost in 1948, 1960, 1976 and 1992. But they lost in 1948 because a lot of them were so sure of victory they stayed home. The fact that Nixon appeared on television looking like his driver’s license picture had more to do with his narrow defeat than the GOP platform.
Ford might easily have won had he not pardoned Richard Nixon. Bush, like many a chief executive before him, was done in by the economy, not Pat Buchanan.
The other element that envelops the San Diego convention with echoes of past GOP conclaves is, surprisingly, Bob Dole himself.
Until the actual eve of this convention, Dole was, despite his longevity, never perceived as a linch-pin connecting political generations.
He was not a Robert Taft forcing the GOP to remember its agrarian, isolationist, Protestant roots. He was not a Richard J. Daley whose inscrutable murmurings forced Democratic presidential hopefuls to fret for 20 years.
But this week in San Diego, he is Bob Dole, who can inspire the memories of the grand age of the GOP when his political baptism was cradled by the landslides of fellow Kansan Dwight Eisenhower.
He is Bob Dole, who served loyally, and, for him, rather silently, as the party chairman during the GOP nightmare of Watergate and survived to serve as Ford’s hatchet man in 1976; and Bob Dole, whose first attempt at the presidency in 1980 left him obscure in a field of luminaries that included Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Howard Baker.
His choice of Jack Kemp as a running mate fits the tradition perfectly. Dewey almost had to promise Earl Warren he could run the country. Eisenhower didn’t even know Nixon, and when he got around to knowing him he didn’t talk to him for eight years.
In 1980, George Bush, the man who almost throttled Reagan’s nomination attempt by coining the catchy (and ultimately accurate) phrase, “voodoo economics,” wound up on the ticket. Whatever nastiness Bob Dole has thought and uttered about Jack Kemp is hardly novel among GOP ticket mates.
Kemp is supposed to bring to the campaign an energy and a “big tent” appeal that will help voters forget the pup-tent mentality of the far Right. But he, too, lets the GOP faithful revel in past glories.
Kemp, like Dole, really got his start in the Eisenhower era. He was drafted in 1957 by the Pittsburgh Steelers, which quickly decided he had no future. The Steelers had made the same decision about a young quarterback they tried the year before, Johnny Unitas.
Republicans, who always remember the 1950s, are hoping that Bob Dole’s instincts for choosing a running mate are better than Pittsburgh’s ability to choose quarterbacks.
As the media analyze and inspect all the cracks that occur this week in the mythic GOP unity, it would be well for Republicans to remember that it has happened before, almost always.
