Midwest Today, November 1996

BOB DOLE'S ROAD TO THE WAFFLE HOUSE

Building A Bridge To the Past

"I'm willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that's what you want."

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Bob Dole grew up the son of very common folks, who lost their land in the wheat and oil country of central Kansas during the Depression. Bob's grandfather was a tenant farmer who spent time on welfare. His father, Doran, who never finished high school, did many jobs -- running a cafe, selling cream and eggs, managing a grain elevator -- but the Doles were so poor they once had to move into the basement of their home and rent out the rest.

A true war hero who suffered debilitating combat wounds in World War II that left him permanently scarred -- both physically and psychically -- Dole fought back from devastation during a tortuously long, three-year recovery. He learned to depend on no one but himself.

He writes poorly because of his withered right arm, and has never shown an interest in books, possibly because he cannot hold them to read. He can't cut his own food, but dresses himself with a buttonhook -- a painstaking exercise for a man without the use of one arm, struggling through the top button of his shirt and the knot on his tie.

Despite having only one kidney and surviving prostrate cancer a few years ago, Bob Dole has demonstrable stamina. A master of black comedy and the droll one-liner, Dole loves BLTs, and an occasional vodka with onion juice. He admits to putting "a little stuff" on his hair to hide the gray. He nervously blinks incessantly and talks in a monotone.

Gen. Colin Powell describes Bob Dole as "the candidate most qualified by virtue of his beliefs, his character and competence" to be President. But it's a hard case to make. Perhaps most disappointing for his supporters is that the 1996 version of Bob Dole is a pale imitation of the man who had a lengthy Senate career.

First there is the man who voted for civil rights bills from 1964 through 1991, who backed Affirmative Action; the Dole who stood for fiscal responsibility when the ideologues in both parties were burying their heads in the sand to avoid simple math; the guy who believed government could do good things, who understood, for example, that Kansas farmers and big-city poor people both could benefit from a federal nutrition program.

The new Bob Dole, reports Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, "is none of those things: He has meandered all over the place on abortion, uttered clumsy statements about nicotine addiction, looked addled at times, demeaned himself by denouncing films he has never seen and now has reversed a career's worth of hostility to supply-side economics by embracing its core notion, a tax cut. He seems determined to appear distinctly non-Presidential."

He also is hideously out of sync with the tempo of the times. He opposes labor laws, consumer protection legislation, medical price controls, environmental regulations, and campaign finance reform. On foreign policy, he's an ultra hawk and a frequent ally of Jesse Helms.

Dole has worked for years against the average American, on matters as wide ranging as foreign trade and imports, immigration, taxes, deregulation, anti-trust mergers, layoffs and retraining. He voted against the creation of Medicare, and opposed raising the minimum wage.

While Dole denigrates universal health coverage -- and demagogued to defeat the Clinton plan -- he and his wife are enrolled in precisely that kind of plan through the U.S. Senate.


VOTES FOR SALE: The biggest scandal of Bob Dole's political career is his consistent pattern of doing political favors for his big financial contributors. Dole raked in $500,000 a week last year, even before his Presidential campaign began in earnest. He raised the legal limit of $37.5 million in campaign contributions by March of this primary year.

Mother Jones magazine reports that Bob Dole is "a major innovator...in finding ways to legally amass millions in donations from corporations and special interests. He has developed a network of foundations and other non-traditional organizations legally allowed to receive much larger sums of cash from people with laws pending before Dole. This also hides the contributions from voters, since reporters usually only talk about direct campaign contributions."

Some of his most vainglorious efforts have been on behalf of the Heartland's own Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., the nation's leading producer of ethanol, a corn byproduct used in alcohol fuels.

Dole helped arrange and protect a $3.5 billion tax credit for ethanol. He also used his considerable clout to protect price supports and other agricultural policies that help ADM.

The Gallo winery family has actually given Dole more money than ADM. What the Gallos got in return, besides continuing government export subsidies, was a special transfer tax provision that will save the Gallo family over $100 million in inheritance taxes on the estates of Julio and Ernest.

Bob Dole gave a now-famous speech in Los Angeles in which he blasted the entertainment industry for "debasing U.S. culture with movies, music and television programs that have produced nightmares of depravity drenched in violence and sex."

Then, a few days later, he introduced a bill to give a special financial payoff to the corporations producing the very television violence that he had decried. This followed contributions Dole received from Time Warner totalling $135,950.

Sheila Burke, Bob Dole's chief of staff, helped shape the Senate's Medicare bill -- designed to siphon a torrent of money into HMOs -- while her husband amassed over $1 million in stock options from one of the nation's largest health-care companies that would benefit from the bill.


PERSONAL FINANCES: Bob Dole made a million dollars making speeches until the Senate cracked down, then second wife Elizabeth made $875,000 in just three years, giving talks on the subject of volunteerism to lobbyists who had business pending with her husband. She promised to donate most of these earnings to charity, but was caught keeping $147,663. After a series of negative press stories, she donated another $74,635, blaming her accountant for a mistake.

She also put $243,830 into her "retirement fund."

Bob and Elizabeth Dole have avoided about $300,000 in taxes since the 1980s through a series of tax-shelter investments, according to a published report in Money magazine. The report classified one tax shelter as "abusive," a term used by the Internal Revenue Service to describe deals of dubious value.

David Owen, Mrs. Dole's former investment advisor, called her investment in a real estate partnership, "a pure shelter deal." Owen later served a federal prison sentence for filing false tax returns unrelated to the Doles.

At the time the Doles took a major portion of the write-offs, Sen. Dole chaired the Senate Finance Committee and had spoken out against tax shelters.

In one deal, Mrs. Dole bought about 4% of a tax shelter for $174,000, of which $156,000 was a loan from the partnership. This arrangement allowed her to write off interest paid on the loan, but meant that if the partnership went broke, she would lose no more than her actual investment -- some $17,000.

She also bought the couple s three-room, 12th floor apartment in Bal Harbor, Florida in 1982 for $150,000 -- reportedly 25% below the market value then. The seller was Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland.

After years of her husband fighting against people being able to take a leave of absence for family or medical emergencies, Elizabeth Dole now has taken a year-long leave of absence from the American Red Cross to help her hubby campaign one more time.

The resume woman with the Harvard law degree, who had served six Presidents and been a Cabinet secretary under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Elizabeth Dole likens herself to Esther, the Old Testament queen who clung to her comforts. She says she, too, was once drowning in the flood of her material successes. But now, she maintains, she puts Jesus Christ at the center of her life.


DIRTY CAMPAIGNING: Dole is an old hack when it comes to campaign dirty tricks. In his difficult 1974 campaign for re-election to Congress, he won in large part with attacks on his opponent for having performed abortions. The man, an obstetrician, had delivered thousands of babies and had performed a handful of therapeutic abortions over the years -- hideously deformed fetuses, illnesses where the mother would have died, etc. Dole slammed his opponent for this, asking high school students to "ask your parents if they know how many abortions [his opponent] has performed." Flyers with photos of fetuses in trash cans were placed on cars in Catholic neighborhoods right before the vote. Dole denied any responsibility, and narrowly won re-election (with a heavy majority in those Catholic neighborhoods.)

In August, 1993, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) levied what FEC spokesman Scott Moxley said was "the largest civil penalty...ever" against Senator Dole's 1988 Presidential campaign. The Dole committee paid a fine of $100,000, publicly admitted to taking contributions from corporations, illegally using corporate jets, and violating state-by-state spending limits.

In 1996, The Wall Street Journal confirmed allegations that Dole's campaign used phony "push polls" to smear his Iowa opponents, and paid over $1 million to a firm that specializes in this.

Worse yet, Bob Dole lied when asked about this in February. When the Forbes campaign complained about these fake polls , Dole insisted "We're not making any phone calls."

Sometimes Dole's efforts are comical. His campaign wooed delegates to an important Presidential straw poll in Florida with the ardor of a Don Juan pursuing his latest seduction.

Luxury Belgian chocolates, bath oils, fruit baskets, even a spin on the dance floor with a ballroom dancer were among the inducements being offered to delegates in the hope they would support Dole, according to local media reports.

Dole has chosen as his running mate a man, Jack Kemp, who was healthy enough to be a professional quarterback, but was excused from serving in Vietnam due to an injured shoulder.

ABC News also reports that Kemp's personnel file overstated his educational background and that an Army form incorrectly listed Kemp as disabled.

BAD TAX POLICIES: Dole and Kemp are fond of saying that President Clinton gave America the largest tax increase in American history. Clinton's stimulus package passed without a single Republican vote, but experts say that it is, in large measure, what's responsible for the current boom in the U.S. economy.

The irony is that, according to the Tax Foundation, Ronald Reagan's 1982 tax increase -- authored by Bob Dole -- was a whopping $269 billion, $43 billion more than Clinton's, and was clearly targeted at the poor and middle class.

Jack Kemp propounded the widely discredited Reagan "trickle down" economic theory the Republicans now want to revisit, that tripled the deficit, increased the disparity between the wealthiest and poorest wage earners, and caused long-term social disunity.

Dole supported 450 tax increases during his lengthy career in Washington and in 1990, helped fashion the package of tax hikes and budget cuts that betrayed Bushs "no-new-taxes" pledge.

Bob Dole's much-ballyhooded 15% cut in income tax rates that he proposes this year is not only disastrous for the budget, but, according to economists, will inflict more harm than good on many families.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out that 28 million children -- two out of five -- will not qualify for Dole's $500-per-child tax credit, and many low-income families will actually see their federal taxes increase.

That's because for low-income and lower-middle-class families, Dole's cuts would be more than offset by other tax law changes assumed in the plan, especially an $18.5 billion slash in the earned income tax credit, which is the primary form of tax relief for the working poor.

Thus by cutting the tax credit more than he reduces their income tax rates, Dole actually hikes taxes on these people. A two-parent family of four with an income of $21,500 would end up seeing its federal income and payroll tax bill increase by $335.

Also, Dole campaign ally Sen. Alfonse ("Never indicted yet!") D'Amato, admitted in an interview that Dole's plan would require cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and federal retirement programs. D'Amato went on to say "I would never say it if I were him (Dole) until after the election. No way. No way. Absolutely, I mean, I'm not running this year, so I can say it and tell the truth."

OBSTRUCTIONIST: Back in 1993, when Bill Clinton came into office, Bob Dole joked, "The good news is he's getting a honeymoon in Washington. The bad news is that Bob Dole is going to be his chaperone."
Nicknamed "Senator Gridlock," Dole abused the process by conducting 48 filibusters -- the most in U.S. history -- to block every major piece of legislation before the Congress, including campaign finance and lobbying reform, an economic stimulus package, the crime bill, a national youth corp and more.

Meanwhile, he authored "takings legislation" that would use billions in tax dollars to compensate big business for such things as complying with health and safety requirements.

Some key bills passed only after Dole resigned his Senate seat. Though he had stood in the way of the bipartisan Kennedy-Kassenbaum bill that allows people to keep their health care when they change jobs, the GOP joined the Democrats to pass the bill after he left.

He blocked campaign reform, which had enough votes from both Republicans and Democrats to pass easily, perhaps because he takes in more money from special interests than anyone else.


A BETTER MAN? Bob Dole invited a comparison by asking voters to consider which man -- him or his opponent -- would make a better guardian for their children if something happened. "I think you'd probably leave them with Bob Dole," he said.

Maybe not. It's ironic that such a solid, hard-working Midwestern Republican was such a bad husband and father, while Bill Clinton, with all of the rumors about his private life, has stuck by his marriage and, by all accounts, been a good parent.

Dole's first marriage, to an occupational therapist he met while recovering from war wounds at a Battle Creek, Mich. hospital in 1948, lasted 23 years. Though Phyllis Holden had even accompanied him to law classes to take notes because he couldn't write, Dole unexpectedly de-manded an "emergency" divorce in 1971. Phyllis says Dole was a workaholic, who only had dinner with her and their daughter twice in the year preceding, and slept in the basement of their Kansas City home. She recalls she had to plead with Bob for her and their teenage daughter to be allowed to remain in the family home during the Christmas holidays.

Shortly before this all happened, the Senator hired an attractive blonde former stewardess much younger than he. "This one couldn't type. We really never knew what she did..." recalls an ex-staffer quoted in the New York Daily News.

Dole never even showed up in court on the day of the divorce (he was down in Florida with the blonde). One of Dole's cronies handled the legal work and a judge he was chummy with hurriedly granted the divorce.

Phyllis got no child support, only minimal alimony and her furniture.

"It is reasonable to look at the man's claim."

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