If someone took over Washington politics in the late 20th century – good, bad and bad – then it was Robert Dole, a former Republican senator from Kansas, who died at the age of 98.
He represented his party as President in 1996, for a second term 20 years earlier and ran twice in the middle, losing all four votes to national office. In return, he twice served as a senior senator in the Senate and for eight years ran a minority, as well as chairing the chamber’s finance committee. His hand was seen in innumerable rules, at least for the poor and the disabled. The commemoration of the second world war at the National Mall could not have been constructed without his efforts.
And he no doubt had the sharpest tongue in the capital, an acerbic combination of humor and humor. In 1976, he persecuted the 20th-century “democratic wars”, and thwarted a party opposing his two-letter word; today, Republicans just refer to it as they did then. Later, when asked to comment on former speaker Newt Gingrich’s lament that he did not understand why he was attracted to the “instant love,” Dole said: “It saves time.”
Because of its history of uncooperative participation, such as the Vietnam War veteran and his vicious opposition to Clinton’s medical reforms, he often represents the now extinct nations – the established Midwestern Republican. He supported many of the civil rights laws of the 1960s and formed political alliances, which resulted from his favorite legal negotiations. Evidence of this was the visit to the home of President Joe Biden, a Senate ally for over 30 years, the day he was diagnosed with cancer. Few of that spirit exist today.
Robert Joseph Dole was born in Russell, Kansas, on July 22, 1923 and, although living in Washington, still retains the house he grew up in as his first home. His father did some physical exercise but the family suffered a setback during the Depression. He was a basketball player and a football player at the University of Kansas before the war called him. In 1945, while serving as a 2nd major army officer, he was seriously wounded by a German machine gun outside Bologna, which left his right arm paralyzed.
After graduating from the University of Arizona with George Washington University Law School at headquarters, in 1952 he entered the Kansas Parliament and became a Russell County attorney for eight years. This led to the House of Representatives in 1960 and the Senate eight years later.
Following vice-president Nelson Rockefeller’s resignation, Gerald Ford nominated Dole as his running mate in the 1976 campaign, when he formed a vicious circle against Walter Mondale, second in command of Jimmy Carter. The comments of the “democratic wars” in their debates attracted widespread criticism. He competed against them four years later but came out quickly after a bad primary result.
He ran hard in 1988 but the same rage did not help. Asked on TV if he would say anything to George HW Bush, the vice president, who had just won New Hampshire primary school when Dole finished Wednesday, he retorted: “Tell him to stop lying about my reputation.” Although he won some of the Midwestern primaries, he did not get a chance.
In 1996, he started as a leader in the variegated Republican field including, to his right, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas; Pat Buchanan, defendant; and Steve Forbes, magazine publisher; and, to his left, Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, who also grew up in Russell. Buchanan won the opening New Hampshire primary school but after a long and frustrating career, Dole won, choosing Jack Kemp, Congressman and a former football player, as his running mate. At age 73, he was the first president to be elected president.
But it was always a struggle for Bill Clinton, a former, whose popularity is rising due to economic growth, not to mention the nomination of Ross Perot, a well-known billionaire, even though he had to do less than half. was four years earlier. In desperation, Dole resigned from the Senate to stay in the campaign, but Clinton made it a point for Gingrich, whose closure of the federal government at the end of 1995 was unpopular. There was no difference between them and Clinton won the national vote by 49-40 percent, while Perot won 8 percent.
He became involved in retirement work, as a television commentator, writing books and working with his former Senate opponent George McGovern, on child malnutrition. But his coda under the Senate at the end of 2012 was a sad comment on how times changed. He was ousted as a symbolic supporter of the UN conference on disability issues, but the Senate voted against it, saying it would violate American sovereignty.
Dole was married twice, the first to Phyllis Holden, who had a daughter and divorced him in 1972 (he died in 2008). In 1975, he married Elizabeth “Liddy” Hanford, a politically well-known figure, later secretary of state for operations and operations in Reagan and Bush Bush following the Republican Senator in North Carolina from 2003-08. Like her husband, she briefly ran for Republicans in 2000. They formed the quintessential Washington insider power couple and survived.
His base announced that Dole had died Sunday in his sleep, saying he had “served the United States of America faithfully for 79 years”.
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