‘A gesture like Dole’s says nothingabout intellectual independence, andeverything about her slavish desire toappear ”mainstream” in the perceptionof the self-appointed mainstream.’
MAKE no mistake: Elizabeth Dole is Growing. Just a few weeks ago, four months into Mrs. Dole’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the consensus among political junkies was that Dole was a disaster. She had raised almost no money, did nothing but duck questions about her political positions and horrified folks on the campaign trail because she was so programmed and inflexible.
Well, it turned out Dole and her aides – among them Kieran Mahoney, the New York political consultant whose work on behalf of Republicans in 1998 practically handed the Empire State to the Democratic Party on a silver platter – had a secret weapon.
At a moment’s notice, when the occasion presented itself, Elizabeth Dole could Grow. To Grow, all she had to do was betray any semblance of conservative principle and court conventional liberal opinion – and the mainstream media would do the rest.
And that is exactly what happened last week. Dole came out for various gun-control measures in the wake of the Columbine massacre, all the while reiterating her view that the pro-life cause had reached a dead end.
And like Pavlov’s dogs, the media salivated on cue.
William Schneider on CNN declared her gambit the ”play of the week.” ABC News said she had given new life to a struggling campaign. Throughout the press corps, Dole had become the recipient of this year’s ”Strange New Respect” award, granted occasionally to the Republican or conservative who says things or behaves in ways that make liberals happy.
Such behavior is taken by liberals as a sign of a Republican’s ”growth.” The word was first used in the case of Reagan surgeon general C. Everett Koop when he became a captive of the AIDS lobby, and then of Justice Anthony Kennedy when he began to turn away from the original-intent jurisprudence that led Ronald Reagan to nominate him for the Supreme Court.
You can see how seductive it would be to be heralded for your personal ”growth” by the most powerful people in the media business, but in truth the term is as insulting as it is seductive. After all, things need to grow only insofar as they are unnaturally stunted. Which is precisely why liberals are always on the lookout for Republicans willing to Grow. The notion that conservatives ”grow” when they act like liberals is the product of a self-infatuated liberal belief that conservatives are emotionally and politically dwarf-like.
And that’s what’s contemptible about Dole’s game here. She wants the liberal media to help her with her campaign – even though the prevailing opinion among the liberal media is that Republicans like Dole are at best stupid and at worst malign.
What’s even worse is that Dole isn’t Growing out of principle. If she were, that would be a different story. Why did it take the Littleton massacre for her support of mandatory trigger locks on guns to become known? Because she doesn’t believe it.
Dole has just jumped on a gun-control bandwagon, believing that her campaign’s explicit appeal to women needs to be strengthened with the sorts of Clintonite policy pronouncements female voters evidently adore.
Requiring trigger locks is a perfectly respectable, if gimmicky, policy pronouncement. And this country could use, in the aftermath of Littleton, a genuine debate on guns and gun control – one in which the full gamut of opinion was made public and made known.
The demonization of guns plays well among those (like me) who don’t own a gun and don’t want to – and would love to blame all of society’s problems on people who do. But facts are stubborn things, and facts intrude whenever you talk seriously about gun control.
Something like 100 million people in the United States own guns – by some estimates, there is a gun in 50 percent of American households. What’s more, a meticulous study by John Lott of the University of Chicago revealed that in almost every U.S. county in which people are allowed to carry a concealed weapon, the crime rate drops.
And I haven’t even used the words ”Second Amendment” yet.
This is a debate that Dole doesn’t actually want to participate in. Rather, she wants to float positions that will seem heterodox enough to get her media praise. In the footage shown on CNN and ABC, one person actually booed Dole when she said she supports gun locks, which is exactly what she wants. She’s hoping against hope that pro-gun wackos will play Sister Souljah to her Bill Clinton, taking positions so irresponsible that it takes no courage at all to attack them – but will earn her plaudits for being courageous nonetheless.
Every Republican candidate will probably have to pick a fight with an entrenched conservative constituency in the next 12 months to demonstrate his or her intellectual independence. But a gesture like Dole’s says nothing about intellectual independence. Rather, it says everything about her slavish desire to appear ”mainstream” in the perception of the self-appointed mainstream.
Contrast that to Sen. John McCain’s two expressions of independence – his attack on Big Tobacco and his effort to overhaul the campaign-finance system. I think he was, and is, wrong on both counts. But in each case he took a stand that could do him real harm – and has, in many quarters of his party. I have no doubt that McCain, however mistakenly, acted out of principle.
Elizabeth Dole has now proved that her candidacy is an expression of nothing but naked expediency.
Now it’s time to find out what George W. Bush is made of.
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