Word: doled
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Clinton's people were better. Clinton surrounded himself with tough and talented tigers who spoke with authority because they had been in the meeting. Dole surrounded himself with second-raters who had the easy arrogance of national-campaign veterans and no national-campaign experience. In the last month they got up every day with what a Washington insider called two and only two objectives: not to get fired and to blame everything on Dole. They succeeded. That was staff. The lobbyists around Dole seemed more interested in getting a piece of the media buy than helping...
...Dole got no breaks. But then he made no breaks for himself. He didn't do the obvious, didn't take full advantage of the conventions of modern campaigning, like the free media of radio talk shows. And he didn't do the daring--picking a Cabinet in advance, making it Our Team vs. Their Team...
...came down to two things. The year began with two reigning cliches. One was that the incumbent would win because the economy was good; the other was that Dole was too old. Normally in an election the early cliches are replaced by newer cliches, but not this time. The good economy denied the challenger the traction he needed to move forward. As for Dole's age, the best political commentary I heard all year came one morning on C-SPAN during the Republican Convention in San Diego. An elderly woman called in to say why she couldn't back Dole...
Reagan was almost 70 when he was elected the first time, and he was not too old. But Dole at 73 was, because he had the crochets of old age--crabbiness, defensiveness. Reagan looked forward toward the horizon, saw the city on a hill and said, Let's go there. Dole looked back and saw flat Kansas, the boarders living upstairs and the family in the basement. He was emotionally landlocked. Where Reagan had a vision, Dole had only a picture: of Bob Dole sitting at a desk in the Oval Office and doing a good job. But a picture...
There is a third school on Dole's loss. It has to do with limitations--and not all the limits were...