Quips, Power and Persuasion

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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."