COMMENTARY: Twilight falls on a candidate and an era

c. 1996 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Bob Dole’s losing effort to win the presidency reminds me of a dour seminary dean I once knew who abandoned the security of campus life and tried unsuccessfully to lead a congregation. The congregation is my metaphor for the 260 million people in America today. The seminary is the […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Bob Dole’s losing effort to win the presidency reminds me of a dour seminary dean I once knew who abandoned the security of campus life and tried unsuccessfully to lead a congregation.

The congregation is my metaphor for the 260 million people in America today. The seminary is the U.S. Congress, where Dole functioned so well for nearly 40 years.


I never understood why the dean, honored and beloved by his colleagues, left the seminary, only to be a miserable failure as a congregational leader. And I still don’t understand why Dole sought the White House in 1996.

The dean discovered that modern congregations are not made up of respectful faculty members and students. Just the opposite is true. A large congregation today reflects all problems of America and the end of the 20th century. As a candidate, Dole confronted the same set of challenges.

How can a seminary dean, accustomed to working with religiously committed students, gain the loyalty of alienated and cyncial young people? How can he provide quality education for the congregation’s children? How can he bring women into full leadership roles? How can he provide pastoral care for sick and elderly members, or from those in broken homes? How can he revere the congregation’s history without becoming its slave?

How can a former dean relate to neighbors in the community _ especially newcomers from foreign lands? And ultimately, how does he articulate his vision that will lead the congregation into the future?

Bob Dole was shocked to discover that the political tactics that worked so well in the seminary of U.S. Senate were inadequate to help him connect with ordinary people.

He made pilgrimages, as many believers do, to monuments to great leaders, seeking wisdom and strength. His early morning vigil to the Lincoln Memorial and his trip to the grave of Harry Truman, the patron saint of every candidate who trails in the polls, were solemn rites of American civil religion.

His attempts to connect with Lincoln and Truman were poignant, but the saddest image occurred when two living ex-presidents, George Bush and Gerald Ford, stood with Dole at the end of the campaign trail.


This was the last, exhausted hurrah of the generation that won World War II and then led America through the Cold War.

And, in the end, that may explain why there was an air of sadness about this election _ a sense that twilight was falling on the men of Dole’s generation. Dole served his nation with honor in war and in the years of uneasy peace. He did his best and deserves our respect.

But as a presidential candidate, he was like the seminary dean who largely found himself unable to connect with the common man and woman.

Though he claimed to be the”most optimistic man in America,”Dole conveyed the image of a scolding, often angry preacher of lamentations _ out of touch with the nation, and seeking to restore to the nation the values of a bygone age.

Consciously or not, President Clinton understood the words of the prophet Zachariah, who taught that we must be prisoners of hope. Bob Dole’s melancholy vision couldn’t compete with that brand of optimism.

In the end, it was no contest.

KC END RUDIN

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