In early 1995, no one was stirring the pot more actively in Republican presidential politics than Phil Gramm, the senior senator from Texas. “I’m going to run for president and I’m going to win this race,” he had declared to his inner circle the year before. He was 52, but his own polls showed voters thought he was 65. An almost coy smile often rose on one side of his mouth, his head poking out and forward awkwardly like a turtle. Slightly wizened, his large, heavily lined forehead ran back to thinning white-gray hair. His eyes, deeply set behind his glasses, roamed his surroundings eagerly. Gramm had no apparent personal physical vanity, and from clothing to hairstyle he looked more like the former college economics Ph.D. professor he had been than a U.S. senator. He spoke with utter confidence. The tone was oddly soft at first, but he could be hard, even brutal, and certainly impatient, as he got wound up.
“One question is whether somebody as ugly as me can be elected president,” he said. “Lincoln did it.” He did not blush at the comparison.
As he surveyed the political landscape, one of Gramm’s big problems was that a lot of people didn’t like him. Even his wife Wendy freely admitted that her first impression of Gramm had been “Yuck!” He had a penchant for walking over people, including his natural allies, and he had alienated people who otherwise might be supporters.
Senator Orrin Hatch, the 18-year Senate conservative from Utah and an ideological soulmate of Gramm’s, was among this group. As the head of the GOP Senate Campaign Committee in 1994, Gramm had refused to give Hatch, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the $140,000 of committee money that Gramm earlier had pledged to his reelection campaign. Gramm had argued that incumbent senators like Hatch would have easy races, and the money should go to help Republican candidates who had close races so the party could win a majority in the Senate.
“I’m not going to give it to you,” Gramm said at his most defiant.
“I could lose,” Hatch explained. Strong Democrats were waiting to pounce.
“Bullshit!” Gramm said to Hatch, a practicing Mormon. He looked Hatch right in the face and could see Hatch was desperate, acting as if the world was coming to an end. As if saying no was not enough, Gramm forged on. “Orrin,” Gramm said, “grow up! You don’t need this money and I’m not going to take it away from somebody whose ability to win or lose depends on it.”
Hatch persisted. This was contrary to all traditions of the Senate club, where looking after your colleagues, especially in the same party, was almost rule one.
“I ain’t going to give it to you,” Gramm said. “Forget it. Don’t keep talking to me. I ain’t going to give it to you.”
Hatch sensed Gramm was trying to use humor to diffuse the disagreement, but he felt that Gramm had broken his word. Gramm had explicitly promised the money. Hatch believed senators should live up to their word. Gramm easily could have requested to be released from his pledge and Hatch would have let him off the hook.
He thought Gramm gave the impression that he would walk over his mother to become President of the United States. Gramm was too brusque, too hard-edged, trying to look big and tough.
In the raw political calculation, Gramm turned out to be right about the money. Hatch won reelection in 1994 with more than two thirds of the votes—69 percent to 28 percent. And the Republicans took over the Senate, in part because Gramm had raised millions for the marginal candidates. But in the human calculation, Gramm had paid a big price. Hatch did not endorse him.
The Hatch relationship was part of an unnerving pattern for Gramm. He displayed an impulse to conquer people.
In one interview, I asked Gramm why he was so driven to become president.
“Sort of the zealot’s zeal,” he replied.
He recalled what victory was like when he first won his Senate seat in 1984.
“At that moment there was a calmness that it was over,” Gramm said. “It’s like being an ancient warrior, and you’re involved in this combat, and you suddenly look around the hilltop and you’re the one left alive.”
While many others involved in the Republican revolution of 1994 had taken some time off or basked in the victory, Gramm hit the money trail. In state after state, he personally gave a big-screen, multicolor slide presentation of his fund-raising Juggernaut with charts and graphs depicting stacks of greenbacks.
“In a campaign,” Gramm said, “if you’re down on your luck, but up on your money, you’re okay.”
Gramm essentially laid out his campaign theme as a lesson in economics. He described the big negative impact the federal deficit had on the overall economy—higher interest rates, less investment, fewer jobs, huge national debt. All else being equal, the elimination of the federal deficit could unleash an unparalleled economic boom that over years would benefit nearly everyone in the country. On the technical macroeconomic level, Gramm was dead right. But Gramm was framing his candidacy as if he were running for accountant-in-chief, not leader of a nation.
He formally began a national tour to announce his candidacy on Thursday evening, February 23, 1995, with a kickoff fund-raiser in Dallas that raised $4.1 million, the most ever raised in a single event by a candidate for national office. “I have the most reliable friend that you can have in American politics and that is ready cash,” Gramm said that night.
Gramm was walking taller than ever, strutting around, almost bursting with energy and wondering if in fact the polls might have it wrong, that he, not Dole, was the real front-runner. He could feel it, people were for him, noticing him.
Charlie Black, one of the Republican Party’s most enduring trenchwarfare consultants, whose experience went back to Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1976, had been tutoring Gramm for years. Though Black was now a lobbyist for major old-line corporate clients, he avidly mixed business and politics. Thin, with thick dark hair and a gentle North Carolina accent, Black had long been friends with Gramm, and he was the campaign’s chief strategist.
“Number one,” Black told Gramm in a strategy session, “you don’t want to be the front-runner. You just want to have the threshold credibility to be taken seriously—and you’ve got that. I couldn’t say that six months ago but I can say it now.”
But Gramm could feel the support and attention building for him.
“Bob Dole is the front-runner, and your position is that Senator Dole is more popular than he’s ever been and front-runners often win the Republican Party nomination. If he leaves an opening, you’ll be there ready to move into it.”
Gramm could feel openings all around.
Black, sensing Gramm’s swelling confidence, cautioned, “Humility time is here.”
James B. Francis, Jr., a Dallas businessman who had managed the successful campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush, President Bush’s son, was planning to manage Gramm’s national campaign. In his conversations with Gramm, Francis gave what he called his “father-figure speech.”
“The president,” Francis said, “is sort of a father figure. It’s a personal vote. It is not, ‘I like his voting record,’ when they elect a president. It is something bigger than that, it is something more encompassing than that and part of that has to do with”—there that word was again—“humility. Frankly, when Bill Clinton is at his best, it is when he is making fun of himself, that’s when he is at his best, and all of these big, powerful politicians need to realize when they’re running for president, and they are president, that people look at’em as a human being and they want to see good human traits of not taking yourself too seriously and being able to take a punch and get up.”
William Weld, the 49-year-old Massachusetts governor, had spent several months considering a run for president, asking himself questions. Am I the man? Is it my time? Could I embarrass myself? Would it be premature? His reelection victory in 1994 with an astounding 71 percent of the vote meant he could at least talk about the presidency without being laughed out of town.
But the 1994 victory was not the only reason Weld was considering the presidency. Dick Morris, who was now working for Clinton, had been Weld’s consultant and had helped on polling in 1990 when Weld first ran and won the governorship. Then Morris was his strategic consultant in the 1994 reelection campaign. After the win, Morris had urged Weld to run for president in 1996. The 1996 presidential race was going to be about ethics, Morris said, Clinton’s ethics. The Whitewater scandal would blow up, Morris said. He knew this from his longtime association with the Clintons back in Arkansas.
“Clinton is going to be indicted,” Morris insisted one day in late 1994 to Weld and several of Weld’s aides. It was typical overblown Morris rhetoric, but Morris insisted he knew the problems firsthand. The Rose Law Firm where Hillary had been partner was involved in all kinds of strange enterprises. It resembled the movie The Firm, based on John Grisham’s legal thriller about a secretive and corrupt law firm, Morris said.
Weld was shocked when he learned later that Morris was working for Clinton. At first Morris denied up and down that he was advising the president, but later he had to acknowledge it.
Though Morris’s advice could be dismissed, Weld was still weighing the possibility of running in 1996.
A Republican in the heavily Democratic state of John Kennedy and Michael Dukakis, Weld’s gubernatorial campaign had been drawn from three themes: tough on crime, tough on welfare reform, and lower taxes. But he also argued that government had little or no role in personal decisions such as abortion and sexual orientation. So he was pro-choice on abortion and pro-gay rights. If he ran, his message would be “fiscal conservative, socially libertarian, pro-environment, tolerant, inclusive.”
In mid-February, Weld asked Ray Howell, 34, his previous campaign manager, to put together a feasibility study. If he ran for president, he wanted Howell to run the campaign. “You can call me an asshole,” Weld said.
“I can call you an asshole,” Howell agreed, “you still need someone to run a campaign who knows what they are doing.”
“Let’s get something on paper so if it’s a go, we’re not caught flat-footed,” Weld said. It might be a unique chance. He could not let the Republican Party be taken over by the Christian right if he could possibly stop it by offering an alternative. It would be a disaster for the party to nominate a right-winger who couldn’t beat Clinton, Weld said.
Howell examined the national polling data, and found something that had to be treated very delicately. The strong conservatives controlled the Republican Party on the national level. Whatever nice labels might be put on the various groupings and factions in the conservative wing, it really got down to two, the polling showed. The first of those two were the Archie Bunkers—the so-called Angry White Males, who felt the economic squeeze acutely, hated affirmative action and were often intolerant of other races. The second faction was the Christian right. The pollsters said that no one could win the nomination who couldn’t get at least one of those two factions, either the Archie Bunkers or the Christian right. Weld, Howell believed, could get neither. He was way too moderate.
Nonetheless, on February 24, Howell put together a seven-page memo for Weld called “What It Takes.” Howell estimated that $17 million would have to be raised. Over the next ten months that would mean raising nearly $400,000 a week. In all it would require 168 fund-raisers, at least, or four a week.
Howell found five negatives for Weld in the Republican Party. Weld was pro-choice; pro-gay rights; a creature of the eastern establishment and its core institution, Harvard, where Weld had graduated and received his law degree; he had been born with a silver spoon and had money; and he was from Massachusetts, which most people would assume meant he must be a liberal. All five reinforced each other and all came back to Massachusetts, Howell wrote. The most effective way to handle the negatives was to meet them head-on and convert them to Weld’s advantage. This could be done by building a message around Weld as the leader who changed the political culture of Massachusetts almost singlehandedly in four years. In the state known for high taxes (Tax-achusetts, as it was sometimes called) and liberal social engineering, he had produced nine tax cuts and started sweeping welfare reform. Who better to change the Washington political culture?
That Friday, February 24, Weld met with Howell and two other advisers for an hour and a half. The problem was that the first primary was going to be fund-raising, the first tangible measure. Weld would not be taken seriously if he failed to enter the money race. With the memo as an outline, Weld typically tried to poke holes in the arguments. Say he entered late or shunned fund-raising, and won New Hampshire and made the cover of Time magazine. What next? He wouldn’t have the money for the next round, they all agreed. All their experience in Massachusetts was that you needed money to respond if the others were running negative advertising on television. It would be won or lost on television, Howell said.
Over the weekend, Weld discussed it with his wife, Susan, who was a great-granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt.
She had always been opposed. “I can’t think of anything more horrible,” she said. They had five children—four teenagers and one only 11—and all five had expressed considerable enthusiasm that their father not run. Weld concluded that his wife probably would go along and could play it either way. The kids couldn’t. As he weighed all the factors, Weld realized that if he ran, he would have to say goodbye to his family and to his day job as governor.
On Monday, February 27, Weld declared in a press conference he would not be running for president in 1996. “I suppose it is possible to be a presidential candidate, governor and father of five teenagers all at the same time, but I think at least one of those roles would have suffered, probably all three would have suffered.”
On the morning of Tuesday, February 28, in the East Tennessee mountain town of Merryville, a slender, plain but restless man in a red and black plaid shirt walked to a podium outside the local courthouse.
“I am announcing today that I am a candidate for the office of the presidency of the United States of America,” said the former two-term Tennessee governor, Lamar Alexander.
Alexander, 55, had been laying the groundwork to run for president ever since Bush lost to Clinton more than three years earlier. Alexander knew Clinton and his wife from their overlapping years as governors and there sure was no magic about them. Alexander felt it was incredible that Clinton, six years younger, had made it to the presidency, a job that Alexander coveted for himself. And Al Gore was vice president, the former senator from Lamar’s own state of Tennessee and seven years younger. If the Arkansas governor and the junior senator from Tennessee could do it, there was no question in Alexander’s mind that he could do it.
When his political mentor, former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, Jr., was considering a run for the presidency in 1988, Alexander had watched as Baker fumbled around at one private meeting listing all the obstacles. Alexander had grown exasperated and said, “Look, Howard, if you want to be president, no price is too high.”
Alexander had started planning early. He was obscure and not as well known as the Washington-based figures. His wife, Honey, had been strongly opposed. “I don’t want you running unless you can say clearly why you’re running,” Honey had said to him in 1992, “and what you hope to accomplish.”
Alexander had been Secretary of Education in the Bush cabinet. The ink was barely dry on the newspaper political obituaries of Bush when Alexander and Honey spent the first weekend after Bush’s defeat, November 6–8, 1992, at their cabin in the mountains for a three-day meeting with five of their closest political advisers to discuss and plan his run for the presidency. It was probably the earliest such meeting for any candidate who would seek the Republican nomination in 1996, and it hadn’t been a great success. A number of Alexander’s advisers felt that his rationale for the candidacy was simply his ambition and drive for the office. None of those advisers would wind up working full time in Alexander’s campaign.
Alexander focused in the following two years to establish his credentials and develop a strong anti-Washington message. He hired one of the most promising Republican consultants, Mike Murphy, as his chief strategist. Murphy, a 32-year-old chunky wonder boy with long stringy blond hair and a mile-a-minute patter, was a conservative media wizard who had helped several Republicans win big governorships—including John Engler in Michigan and Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey.
“The problem is to run a campaign that’ll be successful,” Murphy told Alexander, “you’re going to have to do things that the political-journalistic smart-asses in Washington and New York are going to find highly unfashionable. The fact is unfashionable arguments win the Republican nomination.”
Murphy was not bothered that Alexander was so unknown, or that his support was initially in the 3 to 5 percent range, the margin of error in any poll. “We, to the average primary voter, are going to have the most powerful thing in advertising,” Murphy said, “We’re new. New is good. Nothing beats new.” He had the feeling that the race was wide open, the situation incredibly fluid.
“What we’re trying to do here is steal the nomination,” Murphy had said to Alexander. The strategy was for Alexander to surface as the well-organized, well-financed alternative to Dole or Gramm, if the presumed front-runners failed to gain traction or faltered.
After Alexander’s formal announcement at the end of February 1995, his red and black plaid flannel shirt became a symbol of the regular-guy populism he was trying to project. His campaign posters read simply: “Lamar!” He promised that as president he would move power out of Washington and back to the states. He decided he would walk across the state of New Hampshire to meet voters and get some attention.
Bill Lacy was mapping out the strategy in his new office at the Dole headquarters, which had moved to the third floor of a new building next to CNN just north of the Capitol. He wanted some detailed survey research first.
Lacy set out to discover what Dole believed. He sat down with Sheila Burke and some of the people from the Majority Leader’s Office who really knew Dole’s policy positions. He interviewed them extensively, posing a whole series of issues and ideas he knew would be politically very appealing. Dole was not consulted. Lacy was viewing it more as a crafting project. After considerable effort, Lacy had a seven-page catalogue of 83 short statements or positions that he hoped Dole would be comfortable with, reflecting his stand on issues from reining in the federal government and cleaning up Congress to immigration, foreign policy, crime, affirmative action and taxes.
On Wednesday, March 8, Lacy, Reed and Mari Will had a car and driver take them south of Washington about an hour and a half to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to witness firsthand two focus groups. The two small groups of Republican voters would be prodded for their opinions. It was a nasty night, rain turning to the last ugly snow of the season.
Each person in the focus groups was handed a nine-page questionnaire called “Issue Checklist.” The first section listed Lacy’s 83 ideas, posed as statements from a hypothetical presidential candidate. Each participant was to rate each issue on a scale of 0 to 10.
When the groups had finished filling out their surveys, moderators posed some questions. “If someone is 71, what would be the things that would be a concern to you about that person being sworn in for the first time as president?”
“I would want to know who the vice president is,” a woman said.
The group of women laughed.
The men were next. “If Bob Dole were an animal, what kind of animal would he be and why?” After they had written down their answers, they were asked to explain.
“I think the question was ridiculous,” a man named John said. “I just can’t see the comparison as having any significance.”
A participant named Rich said, “When you first asked this question, my immediate reaction was chameleon, so that was the animal I picked.”
Mari Will thought all this was ridiculous. Dole couldn’t stake out his positions based on polls—that was what Clinton did too often.
Lacy reached some broad conclusions. Voters were looking for three things: leadership ability, character and philosophy.
On the first two, Lacy believed, Dole was virtually unbeatable. The focus groups showed that people were sufficiently aware of or impressed with his previous work. They also knew he had character, was a war veteran, and had no scandal in his background. Which brought Lacy to the third area, Dole’s true point of vulnerability. Dole was not identified with any specific idea or even philosophy. His scattered and sometimes confused message had to be brought under control and given definition. If the campaign could handle philosophy or message, then everything else would work for them, Lacy concluded.
Scott Reed wanted something dramatic, some meat. Listening to people describe what kind of car or animal they thought Dole most resembled was horseshit. But amazingly it had taken him weeks just to get copies of Dole’s schedules in advance from the Senate office. Finally, Reed started getting them and he insisted on planning campaign events so Dole could give some newsmaking speeches. To explain in specific terms what reining in the federal government might mean, Mari Will drafted a speech for Dole to call for the abolition of four departments—Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Not just cutting or trimming but closing. Of the 83 ideas they had presented to the focus groups in Fredericksburg, it had been one of the very least popular proposals. But it was the most concrete. Reed and Will did not consult Sheila Burke or anyone else on Dole’s Senate staff. The ideological canyon between the campaign and the Burke Senate staff was too vast. Burke wanted Dole to run as a moderate. In the Senate, she was surrounded by mainstream Republicans and Democrats who basically held the balance of power. Accordingly, Reed felt she had come to believe that moderates had more influence in nominating their presidential candidates than they did.
Dole gave the speech Friday, March 10, before a newspaper group. He dropped some of the rhetorical flourishes, but stuck to the theme and called for the abolition of the four departments. The speech had good media pickup, putting Dole ahead of Gramm and Alexander. It was Reed’s first clear victory, a successful end run around the Senate staff.
Burke first heard about Dole’s proposal when the news of the speech came over the wires. She was angry and disheartened. Her staff person assigned to housing and urban development was apoplectic. Here he was spending his life on HUD issues and out of the blue with no notification the boss was calling for the abolition of the department? Burke was deeply concerned that Dole had made such a sweeping policy proposal without the necessary staff work to measure the impact, or consistency with his previous actions or statements. Her nightmare was that Dole would propose one thing and it would turn out that he had voted the opposite way. Dole had taken his share of federal pork over the years from these four departments. There were bodies buried everywhere, including a $6 million grant from the Education Department for the Bob Dole Hall at Kansas State University.
Burke and Will argued over the interpretation of some part of the speech in a meeting with Dole, who listened and laughed at the end.
Burke and Reed finally had a serious talk. They promised that they would not surprise each other. Lacy had set up a policy group of the key people from both the campaign and the Majority Leader’s Office. They would meet Thursdays to examine the policy options that would be available to Dole, agreeing—in theory at least—that it would be both impossible and stupid to try to repackage him.
As if to prove the point, the next day, Saturday, March 11, Dole joined the weekly meeting of his top campaign aides. Someone was discussing ways to exploit various themes—including gay and lesbian issues.
“We’re not going to go out taking that issue on,” Dole said sharply. “We’re not going to pick out a group and discriminate against them for political gain.”
Lacy had Dole’s pollsters conduct a national poll of likely Republican voters. Dole was favored by 44 percent, a number consistent with other national polls. But there was trouble. The support was soft. When asked, “Are you definitely going to vote for Bob Dole or just probably going to vote for Bob Dole?” 15 percent said definitely and 29 percent said probably. Lacy knew from extensive polling work that normally half of the support for a candidate should be hard. In Dole’s case, it should have been 20 to 22 percent. Soft support was a front-running campaign’s darkest fear. Part of the support was just name recognition or people choosing Dole over a list of relative unknowns. In practical terms the 15 percent solid support meant Dole didn’t have a whole lot more than Phil Gramm, whose numbers were approaching 15 percent. And Gramm’s support was almost all hard and committed.
The campaign needed a press secretary. Will suggested a longtime protégé of hers, Nelson Warfield, who had worked in communications with her during the last six months of the Reagan administration, and then had been press secretary to Estée Lauder heir Ron Lauder in his 1989 campaign to be mayor of New York, doing daily combat with the New York City tabloids. Warfield, 35, was 6 foot 5, an articulate man who wore glasses, in many respects resembling a larger version of Mari Will’s husband, George Will.
“Dole doesn’t like staff being quoted a lot,” Will said. It was a paradox, because for Dole that included his press secretary. “What are you running for?” Dole occasionally asked staffers who were quoted by name in the newspapers. Lacy said that it was important that the press secretary be someone who was not afraid of Dole.
Reed finally called and offered Warfield the job on a temporary basis—a press secretary on approval, meaning they or Dole could send him back. Warfield didn’t like that. Reed proposed making Warfield the deputy press secretary, just in case it turned out he did not get along with Dole. At all costs, Reed said, they wanted to avoid stories about staff shake-ups or people not working out, because in 1988 Dole had shuffled his campaign staff several times in embarrassing public bouts of infighting. They just couldn’t afford to have a press secretary coming and then going. Warfield proposed they hire him as press secretary just for the announcement tour the next month, and if it didn’t work out they could note he was a temporary consultant. Reed agreed.
Warfield’s meeting with Dole lasted seven minutes. Dole asked several New York political questions and wished Warfield good luck twice. Here perhaps the next President of the United States was hiring his campaign spokesman, one of the most personal and important decisions, and Dole blew it off. Warfield felt somewhat slighted.
Will told him not to worry. “He is not a yeller, not a screamer,” Will added. If Dole didn’t like someone, he would just freeze them out or bypass them. “Tell him what you think,” she advised. “That’s what you get paid for.”
Warfield went to many old Dole friends or staffers to ask a simple question, “Tell me how I survive Bob Dole?”
Mike Glassner, Dole’s loyal, attentive 31-year-old traveling aide, said that the first rule was to speak when spoken to. Since Warfield would be going on Dole’s plane for the weekend campaign trips around the country, Glassner explained that Dole had little or no private time, and it was important for Dole’s peace of mind to let him stare out the window if he wanted. It did not mean he was bored. And when Dole sits down for a media interview, especially for television, he gets settled and focused. Don’t go up to him with suggestions or tips. “Recognize that this is not a man given to praise,” Glassner also advised.
Warfield’s first campaign trip with Dole was March 13 for New York Governor George Pataki’s endorsement. One reporter shouted a question at Dole about the pledge to seek only one term and Dole gave an ambiguous answer. Afterwards, Warfield was sitting next to Dole when another reporter phoned for clarification. As Warfield tried to explain and downplay Dole’s comment, Dole offered advice and monitored everything Warfield said. Warfield vowed never again to try to manage a reporter or a story with Dole hovering over him.
Later, on the plane, the subject of an anti-tax pledge came up again.
“I don’t know whether it’s a good idea,” Dole said privately. “Won’t Gramm just take a tougher pledge?”
Three days later, Dole held a press conference while in Ohio for some endorsements. Asked about his reason for running, Dole said, “What we are talking about is, how do we make the government smaller…We think it is time for some conservative, common-sense changes in the country.”
Warfield took a transcript of Dole’s remarks and answers, and did a content analysis, marking the various portions. Some 82 percent had dealt with process and politics. Only 17.8 percent had been message. It was passed to Dole, hoping he would see he needed to spend more time talking about his message and what he wanted to do if elected president.
Scott Reed had a long history with the National Rifle Association (NRA), one of the most potent lobbying groups in the country. Over the years he had learned how they played games. During February, his first month on the job, he had noticed that a meeting with the top NRA people just appeared on Dole’s schedule. Tom Korologos, one of Dole’s oldest friends, was the NRA’s top lobbyist and virtually had instant access to Dole. Korologos had been the Nixon White House lobbyist with the Senate, and he was a big fund-raiser for the Dole Foundation, the charitable foundation Dole had set up to help disabled people.
Reed had the meeting postponed for several weeks, hoping this would be one of the issues the Majority Leader’s Office and the campaign would have a chance to coordinate. Reed knew that the NRA believed there was no such thing as a bad gun. The group had featured Phil Gramm on the cover of their magazine, and Gingrich too was engaged in an active outreach program to the gun people. Gingrich had appointed a task force on firearms issues consisting of six junior congressmen who supported a repeal of the assault weapons ban. In the same period, the Dole campaign was having a big finance meeting with some 80 business CEOs, many of whom were rabid gun guys.
So, earlier in March, Dole had finally met with the NRA people and Korologos in his office. Reed was there, as were Dole’s gun experts from his staff. The NRA representatives argued that they had been instrumental in helping the Republicans take over the Congress, including the 11 new freshmen Republican senators, more than the margin of Dole’s new majority in the Senate. They wanted Dole to pay attention to their agenda. It was a cordial meeting, no screaming or yelling. Everyone was respectful when they got around Dole in person. Dole’s Senate staff discussed sending a letter to the NRA thanking them and so forth. Soon Reed received a draft copy of a letter from the Senate staff. He wasn’t fully sure of Dole’s position and faxed back a note saying it looked fine with him but asked if they were breaking any new ground. He never heard back.
On Saturday morning, March 18, Reed was driving in for the weekly campaign meeting and listening to the news on the radio. A report said that Dole had sent a letter to the National Rifle Association promising to seek a repeal of the “ill-conceived” ban on assault weapons passed the previous year in Clinton’s crime bill. The letter said Dole hoped to have a bill on Clinton’s desk this summer. What the hell? Reed thought. Why was Dole pledging to return assault weapons to the streets?
What happened? Reed inquired immediately. He never got a satisfactory answer. Some pro-gun staff member had drafted the letter and the final copy hadn’t even been signed by Dole! Reed concluded that nobody in Dole’s Senate office could be counted on. It was a classic product from the floating crap game over there with no clear lines of authority.
Korologos read the letter addressed to Tanya Metaksa, the executive director of the NRA, and someone Korologos privately considered “a nut.” The letter was strong and went beyond the meeting, and now that the letter was out, the Democrats and some liberals, like Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, were hollering bloody murder. Korologos was delighted. It couldn’t have been orchestrated better.
Dole, who had voted against the assault ban the previous year, nonetheless wished he could have the letter back. “I don’t have any problem with the meeting,” Dole said, “but I guess I’d have a problem with the letter again. If we’d just meet, and say okay we had a good meeting.” Dole wasn’t sure what to do. As a first principle, the campaign didn’t want to flip-flop on any issue. And no Senate office wanted to acknowledge that many, many letters—even important ones—went out without the senator reading them carefully, if at all. Many other letters were signed by automatic signature pens or by longtime staffers adept at duplicating the senator’s signature.
Dole started getting asked about the assault weapons in public and he received phone calls from some big-time supporters. “Why would any law abiding citizen want an assault weapon,” Dole said at one point, “it’s a good question.” He even approached Feinstein on the Senate floor one day. “You know I don’t want anybody to get shot with a gun,” Dole said. He was looking for an alternative, requiring an instant check to make sure those who purchased a gun did not have a criminal record. Still he wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t ready to label it a mistake in public, and he wasn’t sure if it would be an act of political courage to reverse himself.