Word: doles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...believe Bob Dole, President Clinton has singlehandedly besmirched the highest office in the land and is the primary cause of the public's distrust of government. Last week, in the wake of Dole's final debate with Clinton and with less than three weeks to go until Election Day, Dole made the centerpiece of his campaign not his 15% tax cut but Clinton's moral fitness. "We're just starting to get tough," he told an audience in Riverside, California, noting that for the next 19 days he would highlight what he called "the sleaze factor" in the White House...
...debate, despite his handlers' touting of his aggressiveness, Dole was curiously ambivalent, the reluctant prosecutor. Less than 10 minutes into it, in response to a touchy-feely question from a schoolteacher lamenting the lack of civility in public discourse, Dole said, "There's no doubt about it that many American people have lost their faith in government. They see scandals almost on a daily basis." He then glancingly cited the 900 FBI files that turned up in the White House, without explaining the potential abuse of power they represented. And when he did raise questions about the Democrats' sloppy handling...
...called character issue finally lumbered to center stage of the campaign, the press continued to be confounded by the fact that most Americans believe Dole has a "better character" than Clinton, yet most prefer Clinton to be President. But to American voters, there is not much contradiction here. To them, it's not so much character as competence mixed with compassion that matters. In the post-cold war era, when ideological differences between the parties are receding, voters know that they are not so much electing the Leader of the Free World as voting for the Mayor-in-Chief...
...Richard Nixon's crimes, John Kennedy's infidelities, Lyndon Johnson's ballot rigging, Ronald Reagan's and George Bush's involvement in Iran-contra--these disclosures have so eroded the moral capital of the highest job in the land that Americans expect less from the man who holds it. Dole can try to argue, as he did last week, that "there is one thing history will not forgive: to hold an office and leave it diminished." But if history won't forgive you in the end, the American people apparently will...
Ultimately, the way Dole has raised the character issue this past week reveals as much about his character as Clinton's. He telegraphed an all-out attack and then went halfway in the debate, making himself look vacillating and changeable, the very things he accuses the President of being. Dole waited until the last few weeks of the campaign to raise ethics in a serious way, making him seem more expedient than honorable, the same thing he accuses the President of being. It seems a political illustration of Freud's tenet that we accuse others of the flaws...