Monday, Aug. 02, 1982

Quips, Power and Persuasion

They are not laughing so much at Bob Dole these days. It is not because Capitol Hill's lip-with-a-quip has lost his sense of humor. His wit is as irrepressible as ever. As he deftly shaped and pushed through the Senate a loophole-closing tax bill last week, the Kansas Republican eased tense moments with one-liners, delivered with his usual boyish grin, a bob of the head and a self-deprecating chuckle. When Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island protested that he could not go along with Dole's key proposal to withhold taxes on interest and dividends because his re-election literature already showed him opposing it, Dole instantaneously gibed: "We'll buy your brochures. We'll get you new brochures."

The difference now is that Dole's colleagues take him more seriously. For some 20 years, through four terms as a Congressman and two as a Senator, Dole was a member of the minority party in his chamber. He often explained his wise cracking ways by saying, "A Republican has to have a sense of humor because there bite, so few of us." And where Dole's sallies often carried a partisan bite, his Democratic foes could laugh along because he carried no clout. But now Dole heads the Finance Committee, his party controls the Senate and even Dole takes himself more seriously. He quickly learned that "you don't get anything done by beating your colleagues over the head." His tongue has lost some of its tartness.

Dole concedes that he often used humor to wound rather than amuse. "I'm very competitive," he says. "And it's easy to move from competitive to combative." Dole's most acerbic period came after Gerald Ford chose him as running mate in 1976. "They needed somebody to go out in the brier patch," Dole recalls. The Kansan tore into the Democrats with a barbed zeal that turned off many wavering voters. In his televised debate with Democratic Vice-Presidential Candidate Walter Mondale, Dole's jokes did not fit the serious forum and his partisanship went too far. He suggested, for example, that World Wars I and II, Korea and Viet Nam could be called "Democrat wars."

When Ford and Dole lost the election, former President Richard Nixon warned Dole that "it's getting to be scapegoat time and you're going to be blamed." Dole admits that the defeat depressed and soured him for a time. By early 1978, however, he was able to joke about the episode at a Washington Gridiron Club dinner. "I'll never forget the Dole-Mondale debate," he said. "Three empty chairs got up and walked out. I was supposed to go for the jugular--and I did: my own."

Dole has not only recovered from that 1976 loss, his first ever at the polls, but from his public defense of Nixon during the Watergate period. Nixon had named Dole Chariman of the Republican National Committee in 1971 and, luckily for Dole, bypassed him to give the Committee for the Re-Election of the President the chore of running his 1972 campaign. When C.R.P. became deeply involved in Watergate, Dole played good soldier and defended Nixon publicly. "I was sort of a two-gun guy, and if anybody would toss anything in the air, I'd take a shot at it," he recalls. Privately, however, Dole, who has a jolly irreverence for higher authority, kept a few trusted reporters abreast of whatever he learned about the White House involvement in Watergate. When Nixon's taping system was revealed, Dole was ready with a quip: "Thank goodness, whenever I was in the Oval Office, I only nodded."

Now a Senator who has seized power rather than a mere lampooning critic of others who hold it, Dole has mellowed and matured. But he still goes his own way, shunning rigid ideology and seeking consensus for what he thinks will work. The tax bill showed Dole at his best, pulling Reagan and the White House toward a much needed package of selective tax increases, while fending off New York Republican Congressman Jack Kemp and other unbending advocates of supply-side economics. Dole also bucked the opposition of Republican stalwarts in the said and financial communities. "If you want to be a leader," Dole said last week, "you must be willing to stick your neck out."

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