The Doles: Unlimited Partners.

The Doles: Unlimited Partners

ONCE UPON a time, books by politicians or books about politicians written by their flacks meant something. John Kennedy, for example, used Profiles in Courage to counter his image as a suave lightweight. Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative gave Americans a readable introduction to modern conservative thought. Other examples of the genre, most of them campaign autobiographies, have served to introduce the press and voters to a candidate's background and career.

During the 1988 campaign, however, the public has come to want something different. A newspaper camped outside Gary Hart's bedroom window to find out just what kind of "loner" he really was. When a respected senator like Joe Biden made the unremarkable assertion that he had graduated from law school with honors, the press checked it out.

If the public wants a new Profiles in Courage, or another Donna Rice, they won't find it in Bob and Elizabeth Dole's Unlimited Partners. As far as you can tell from this campaign autobiography, the most colorful thing about Bob Dole is that he wants to be the second divorced President of the United States. Unlimited Partners woodenly documents the Doles' careers with occasional and brief digressions into religion (Elizabeth) and political philosophy (Bob). The sincerity of their reflections cannot be doubted. As thinkers and prose stylists, though, the Doles are far from provocative. The senator explains that his conservatism is "a creed of opportunity, rooted in the ability of seemingly ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things." It's nice, meaningless, and pure Dole.

The theme of the second half of the book is Senator Dole's leadership as chairman of the Finance Committee and a Senate Majority Leader. He shepherded budget cuts, tax cuts, tax increases, Contra aid, more tax increases, and Social Security reform through the labyrinthian legislative process. Leadership is also the theme of his campaign. Presidential success, however, requires more than just an ability to cajole or maneuver Congress. Lyndon Johnson was as dexterous a leader as Dole is, but his Presidency was destroyed when members of Congress from his own party deserted him. And Johnson's principal accomplishments--passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts--were products not merely of leadership but of vision. Bob Dole, the champion of such vague principles as opportunity, cooperation, and equality, can hardly be called a visionary.

What the Doles lack in imagination, they try to make up for with homey truisms like "Whoever said you can't go home again didn't know Russell, Kansas." Russell is Bob's hometown, and he reminds us that in the Wizard of Oz, "what people tend to forget is that Dorothy spent the rest of the movie trying to get back to Kansas." What Dole tends to forget is that he has spent most of his life trying to stay in Washington, D.C., as a congressman, senator, Republican National Committee chairman, vice presidential candidate, and now twice a presidential candidate.

Elizabeth Dole, who recalls her childhood in Salisbury, North Carolina, with equal fondness, has followed a similar career path. She came from a more privileged background than her husband; she was Delta Delta Delta at Duke and then one of a handful of women to graduate from Harvard Law School in the mid 1960s. Since Harvard she has moved from one job in the Federal Government to another: from bureaucrat at the Department of Health, Eduction, and Welfare, to public defender, to consumer bureaucrat for the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, to member of the Federal Trade Commission under Ford and Carter, to director of the Office of Public Liaison, and finally Secretary of Transportation, the last two positions under Reagan.

Secretary Dole is particularly interested in the advancement of women. Again and again she notes that many of the positions she has held had previously been filled only by men. Mrs. Dole says she has challenged "the sexual stereotyping that begins at birth, when a pink blanket is used to identify a girl and simultaneously limit the range of opportunities open to her when she grows up." Like her husband's endorsement of racial equality, Dole's cheerleading feminism is diluted and increasingly irrelevant.

However attractive her resume, Elizabeth Dole is not a conservative. She has worked for every President, Republican or Democratic, since 1964, in positions far from the political firing line. Bob Dole does have a conservative record, but his eager pragmatism has prevented him from taking the lead on many key issues. Dole's vaunted leadership was no more effective than Howard Baker's, for example, in the struggle over the Bork nomination. The hallmark of Dole's devotion to public service is "fiscal responsibility," concern about the budget deficit. He rejects supply-side economics, which he contemptuously characterizes as a "magic formula that would give us lower taxes, all the benefits voters clamor for, and every weapons system on the military's wish list." And he rejects spending cuts on the ground that in the past such proposals "touched off a public outcry."

If Senator Dole is as nasty as he is sometimes reputed to be or if Elizabeth Dole is as ambitious as she is sometimes reputed to be, it doesn't come across in this autobiography. Unlimited Partners is a nice story by nice people who would be nice neighbors, whether you lived on the unfashionable North Side of Russell, Kansas, on South Fulton Street in Salisbury, North Carolina, or at the posh Watergate in Washington. Pennsylvania Avenue is another story.