The evening before the recent vote on the balanced budget constitutional amendment, Dole was virtually alone in the Senate chamber, perfunctorily conducting routine business. That included reading a statement praising Oregon’s Sen. Mark Hatfield, 73, who is not seeking re-election. The next day Hatfield, for the second time, cast the only Republican vote against the amendment. The first time Hatfield did that, the amendment lost by one vote. Florida’s Sen. Connie Mack, 55, and Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum, 38, demanded that Hatfield be somehow disciplined. Lott now regrets having spoken too angrily in support of the Mack-Santorum position. However, Lott, like Mack and Santorum, came to the Senate from the House, where he learned the rules of legislative hardball at the hands of an overbearing Democratic majority. Dole, too, came from the House, but long before Lott and other younger, more ideological members decided that comity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
In his farewell address, Dole bestowed praise bipartisanly. He said he was gratified that Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, had decided that “I was not that partisan.” Dole dwelt on his pride in having been involved in enacting food stamps, the school lunch program, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the WIC (women, infants and children) nutrition program. Now, Dole knows better than to get into a compassion competition with Bill Clinton–he of the soulful crack in the voice, the pensive bite on the trembling lower lip, the on-cue telegenic tear. Dole, a genuinely caring man, was not being guileful.
Not then. But what about when he was seeking the Republican nomination? Then he strongly supported the California Civil Rights Initiative, which would prohibit racial preferences by the state government, and he introduced comparable legislation for the federal government. Those conservatives who have a hair trigger skepticism about Dole believe that since he clinched the nomination his legislation has been consigned to the attic reserved for old campaign props. Nowadays Dole says only that “some changes” should be made in federal affirmative-action policies, and he has had next to nothing to say, even while in California, concerning the CCRI.
A Dole aide says the CCRI will pass without Dole’s pushing it and will Pull to the polls conservative Democrats Dole needs, but that the issue is not “presidential.” Oh? If the Balkanization of America–the rise of group rights and the repudiation of color blindness as a social value–is not a topic large enough for a presidential campaign, what is? In the context of Dole’s post-primary reticence about that topic, he and some conservatives last week fell into a caustic, and casuistic, argument about where in the platform to put a statement of “tolerance” of diverse opinions–in the preamble or, as Dole insists, in the abortion plank. Abortion opponents say putting it in the plank will signal diminished interest in the particular issue of abortion. Perceptions matter, so America may be on the eve of what can be gloomily called a golden age of cynicism. Many millions of Americans believe that Clinton does not believe a scintilla of what he is saying to get re-elected, and that Dole did not mean much of what he said to get nominated. Enter Lott, stage right.
Lott was a Democrat when he cast his first presidential vote in 1964, for Goldwater, who received 87.1 percent of Mississippi’s vote in that last election before the Voting Rights Act. Lott is called “aggressive” and an “ideologue.” However, he has seen, up close, the tragic consequences of an excessively aggressive ideology: When he was at Ole Miss, the U.S. Army came to campus to get James Meredith into school against the wishes of mobs incited by Gov. Ross Barnett, who said of integration, “We will not drink from the cup of genocide.” Furthermore, Lott’s governmental minimalism stops short of penalizing Mississippi, a poor state with a big stake in farm subsidies and shipbuilding contracts.
Still, his conservatism is much more clearly defined than Dole’s. This may produce something the public says it likes, and something the public says it dislikes. The public praises politics of principle. But such politics is compromise-resistant, and gives rise to “gridlock,” particularly in the Senate. That institution requires unanimous consent to move at all. And because of the increasingly casual resort to filibusters, 60-vote supermajorities are needed to pass almost any legislation of consequence. Given the public’s skepticism about government, complaints about “gridlock” are puzzling. Because government is a creature of interests, appetites and passions, most of the things it does are mistakes. So why do people want government to do more of them, and quicker? In any case, gridlock is guaranteed for the remainder of this year and for the next four years if Clinton is re-elected and Republicans retain control of Congress.
So the man and the moment may have met on the north side of the Capitol. Lott will be better than Dole was at making gridlock instructive by dramatizing differences between the parties, differences Clinton, for now, is eager to blur. Watch the health bill that offers something popular–portability of insurance. Lott can try to force Senator Kennedy to filibuster it, or dare Clinton to veto it, because it provides for medical savings accounts.
Lott can be conservatism’s Hubert Humphrey, its happy warrior. He revels in the pleasures of partisanship but is a serious, long-distance political competitor. If Clinton is re-elected and his second term, like most, is troubled, there could be 60 Republican senators after the 1998 election. Then Lott will be at the wheel in Washington, and the rule of the road will be: No left turns.
