July 10, 1996
Senator David Durenburger (R.) Minnesota. He ran prayer breakfasts for the Senate every morning.
FL:
Although we can never know what is in the mind or the soul of a person, do
you have any insight at all into Dole's religious faith
DURENBURGER:
When you talk about a Bob Dole or any other politician or political
office holder, and their personal faith, you're judging somebody by probably
your own standards, and if I try to think of a neutral standard, I'll pick
Moses, let's assume Moses is a neutral standard, Moses said about leaders he
said they oughta be three things---they ought to be God-fearing, they ought to
be men of integrity, don't take bribes, and they ought to be leaders. In
other words they ought to be able to identify with people and define their
choices for them in some way. And I mean I can just say from my personal
experience, 16 years with Bob Dole, that all three of those are important to
him. Even though I can't tell what church Bob Dole goes to, I know that
God-fearing is where it begins, that integrity is number one, with him, and
that leadership is his life, I mean it is really the important thing in his
life.
FL: You also said that you think that the glimmerings of the faith that you
think he has are really rooted in many ways back in Kansas --in the landscape
of Kansas, in the valleys of Kansas, in hard work, .....
DURENBURGER:
If we talk about either a Bob Dole or a Bill Clinton, we're not going to
just find smart men, or good politicians or whatever you're going to find
somewhere in there is a person. And in both of them, that person is shaped in
some small town someplace. And there is a religion attached to it. I mean Bob
Dole going to church in Russell, Kansas, and Bill Clinton growing up a Southern
Baptist in Hope, and the other communities in which he and his family lived.
It's sort of like what do you do with it afterwards, I mean, everyone of us has
strayed in some way from whatever put us on a spiritual track if you will, in
other words, what does a faith in God mean and in the kind of life that you
want to lead. And everybody may stray from that in one way or the other.
But some people I think are shaped into the form that their faith gave them
early on, much more quickly. And Bob Dole had that shape put on him when he
was still very very young. He spent 39 months struggling with his incredible
disability. And it has to be that his faith took on a lot of meaning. But at
the same time so did his humanity. And what we of the American people struggle
with now is the fact that the humanity is still there working on the
spirituality. In other words, Bob Dole is not a person who wants to talk to
you about what he believes, because he's dealt with that and he deals with that
whenever it's important in terms of applying his faith to his life. In many
ways, Bill Clinton is similar, except that President Clinton doesn't mind
talking about it because it's important to him to be able to do that. Bob Dole
is just the opposite, but it doesn't in either case deflect from the importance
of personal faith in their lives.
FL: What do you know about Methodism. Midwestern Methodism. That's the church
that he went to when he was growing up.
DURENBURGER:
Well, if you want to talk about Russell Methodism, I'm not the guy to
talk to. I can't talk to you about Minnesota high Lutherans, low Lutherans,
and so forth, and there may be some, some similarity. But the interesting
thing in this discussion is that there's probably more of a similarity there
between a Hillary Clinton and her Midwest Methodism and Bob Dole and his
Midwest Methodism.
Both of those religions are judgmental. Perhaps more so than a lot of others.
And there's a sense of being righteous, of seeing clearly good and bad and so
forth. But I think at that point, there's a difference between Hillary Clinton
and Bob Dole because his belief system is none of your business. He will be
judgmental, he does know right from wrong. Hillary Clinton is working to make
sure that when she expresses her judgement, that she does it in basically in a
politically correct kind of way. And that's maybe more the difference between
the more liberal person in Mrs. Clinton and the more conservative person in Bob
Dole.
FL:
Overall Bob Dole's personal style in the Senate......he's a very private,
laconic person isn't he. Has he close relationships with people in the Senate
or is it more admiration but at a distance. Do you feel close to him?
DURENBURGER:
Those of us for whom he has respect will feel close, but we won't feel
close in the same way we do with a lot of other people. It is the essence of a
really close personal friendship is the kind that he has obviously with
Elizabeth or with former congressman Bob Elsworth. In which he doesn't mind
opening up, you know he doesn't mind trying things on you, you know he doesn't
mind letting you see you know where he's, where he's more concerned than he
lets on. Or where he's more in doubt than he might let on. But he doesn't do
that with very many people. And so in the Senate, I would say the feeling of
closeness comes with the respect that Bob shows for your understanding your
ability, your trustworthiness, you know your ability to get things done
because that's how he sees public service.
FL:
Was he someone that you know have relaxed with, and laughed with, spent time
noodling at the end of the day.
DURENBURGER:
Well, Bob Dole and I are not going to go out and have a drink
together. And I don't know anybody else that would say, Bob let's go have a
drink, you know that sort of thing. Bob's got a lot of work to do and when
Bob's through with his work at ten o'clock at night or something like that and
he picks up.... and off they go to home and Elizabeth. And that is the
relationship you have with Bob Dole.
In between that, during those working hours though, you can count on Bob Dole
when he gives you his word that he's going to do it. In return for that, when
you give Bob your word, you better be there as well. Because, I remember the
day after he announced that he was going to leave the United States Senate, I
came back here and talked to the men and women who have been around her a long
time, who are the sergeant at arms and do a variety of these tasks and they
were all down in the mouth. I said why? And they said well Dole is the last
person here in the Senate that can be a professional partisan, but at the same
time, he can bring this place to consensus. And he never leaves here at the
end of the day, without everybody knowing exactly where they stand and where
the body is going with the particular challenge that faces it. He brings out
the best in a George Mitchell, he brings out the best in a Tom Daschle, I mean
over time. And the sense here is that no one can quite measure up to that
particular standard, that it is really important to Bob that if he's going to
be a partisan, that he's going to be a partisan. But if he's going to be a
leader, he's going to get a consensus.
FL:
Let's talk about that with some specificity-- the art of the deal,
he has a legendary reputation for being able to do it. And for most people
outside politics, this is very mysterious. What's involved in getting all
these Senators together to agree on something?
DURENBURGER:
The key to consensus in a body of 100 people or however large the body
may be, with this incredible divergence of interest that 260 million people in
50 states bring, is the essence of two related things that every American is
looking for in a President. Trust and character. If I am going to make a
deal, I have to know that however that deal was represented to me, that the
person on the other side is going to deliver. That I can have my amendment on
this bill or I can't have my amendment on this bill, I can have my amendment on
another bill. Whatever my problem is in helping the body come to a consensus,
I have to trust what you call the dealmaker, to get the job done.
But I mean the foundation for trust is in character. And I have to know that
time after time after time, faced with the identically same situation, the
person with whom I'm making the deal, the person always is a person of his
word. And that's why Bob Dole is so good, I mean that's why they say they are
going to miss him in this place. Is that he does have, the integrity, if you
will that Moses talked about, and he does have the leadership ability to tell
you that you know you're not always going to get your way. But you are always
going to get what you need. And let me help you be the judge of what it is
that you need. I mean that is the essence of a good leader. Not getting his
way, but helping everybody get in effect what they need during the course of a
process, this is probably why you know, a Bob Dole has a hard time answering
the question what am I going to do on the first day in the White House, because
what he's going to do is what we need done. Not what he thinks, you know, is
good here, or is good there, but what we need done. And that in part you can't
always leave to us to be the best judge of what we need. You need to develop a
consensus around that as well, elections are a large part of what that's all
about.
But the other part of it is just basically you have to trust the person that
is putting it together. And he is in all of the cases, I mean some really
tough cases when he was the majority leader the first time, that famous first
of April or rather end of March, the balanced budget vote. Votes on campaign
finance reform, I mean the really really tough issues that we've taken,
particularly some of us the so-called moderates, who fancy ourselves the bridge
builders and then so forth. Dealing with us is even more difficult for a
leader than dealing with someone who is clearly positioned as a liberal on the
left or a conservative on the right with very predictable needs as well as very
predictable aspirations. That that vote on the balanced budget in 1985 was
just an incredible display of trust.
I remember three Republicans cast their no votes and walked out of the room
very quickly because they couldn't trust themselves to stay in that room and
face everybody else who was there because their judgement was different. But I
also remember seeing the two senators from North Carolina who had to cast their
first ever vote as I recall on the tobacco tax or something like that. John
Eastland looked at Jesse Helms and Jesse said hey we gotta do this one because
it's the right thing to do. As Dole had presented it. And so he said are you
going to do it, and Jesse said yep. And John went up there and he cast his
vote. Bob Dole, because you know where he stands, and you know why he's
standing there, has the ability to bring that out of a Jesse Helms or out of a
lot of other people. That particular case, he didn't know that both Ronald
Reagan and Tip O'Neill were going to pull the rug out from under him. But he
did what he and a lot of other Americans believed at that time was a really
important thing to do and that is balance the federal budget. The price of
doing that for individual senators would vary, you know there was the tobacco
tax in there, social security freeze, but on the whole imagine what this
country would have been like if we could have put that deficit behind us.
I mean that night will be remembered by everybody as 1:45 in the morning --and
Pete Wilson who had his appendix out that morning--was wheeled in on a gurney
with that great big Pete Wilson smile on his face voting "I."
And then Ed Zarinski being the only Democrat from Nebraska coming up and
casting another I vote. Which made it 50 to 49. And that's kind of what
people remember, but the context is different, the context you have to go back
all the way to the beginning of 1981, and you have to look at this period from
'81 to '85. Ronald Reagan is elected, 20 Republican senators are elected, or
16 Republican senators something like that, I mean Republicans are going to
take over the Congress, we're going to get government off your back, out of
your pockets, drop your tax rates you know, do all that sort of stuff, and in
1981 on July 31st or something like that, we did it, I mean we did it. There
were dramatic changes in the tax code, the income tax rate, the marginal rate
was brought down and all kind of enormous changes in the tax code. But by the
next year, we understood that just dealing with certain forms of tax spending
wasn't enough to deal with the problems of inflation and all those other
issues, impact on the spending, we had this big deficit.
So the next year, again remember Bob Dole is the new chairman of the Finance
Committee. He has to deal with all the tax issues, and he has to deal with the
health care issues, medicare, medicaid, social security, I mean all of the big
money issues are in the finance committee. So the first year, gets government
off your back, reduces the tax rate and so forth, the next year has to deal
with a very large deficit beginning to build up in a large part because of the
prevalence of inflation.
So in the second year, he's proposing a $960 billion tax increase. And, you
know, if you're a Republican, you really swallow on that one. but then that
begins to shape the future. Until you get to 1983 when you have to deal with
Social Security. Social Security is like 8 days from your paycheck to your
mother's Social Security. Well that 8 days, you gotta deal with that one. So
what do they do? They raise payroll taxes in order to to balance that so again
we're back to that one. And meanwhile, even though the economy is beginning to
behave better, the impact of tax rates on tax revenue is not keeping up with
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the rest of these things.
So Bob Dole goes to work on Medicare and Medicaid. You know in 1983 we began
the reforms in that area. So each year, we're struggling. We got our high on
this cloth that shows the deficit going like this, and we're struggling with
the only tools we have available to us which are either the tax code, medicare,
created BRGs prospectively priced hospital payments and all things like that,
we're struggling on all fronts with an economy that is when an economy grows
slowly, the spending side of it, the legacy of the past 30 years or something
like that, keeps those spending numbers going up much faster than this. So we
come to the first part of 1985 and the issue was all about the deficit, and how
are you going to deal with it? And your choices are you're either going to put
everything on automatic pilot, somebody says we're going have to limit
everything to two percent growth, somebody else says the KBG freeze,
[Kasenbaum, Baucus and Grassly,] we're just going to freeze everything,
everybody has either a gimmicky approach to it, or something that's kind of
real. Bob Dole deal in the real. So Bob Dole comes up with some combination
of some tax increases, Social Security freeze, some Medicare part freezes, you
know, we're going to try to slow down the spending like that and we're going to
try to get the taxes up like that and if we do it by 1990, we should have a
balanced budget. And to get people that that's an important thing to do, is
probably requires two things.
Number one, they gotta trust you to know what you're talking about. You're the
chairman of the Finance Committee, you've been around for 20, 25 years, you're
not going to lead anybody down a blind path. You really believe this, you Bob
Dole really believe this is going to make a difference. That's the first thing
you need. And the second thing you need is some way in which to protect them
from the sort of political consequences like the tobacco tax if you are from
North Carolina or whatever the case may be. And Bob has to sell that one
person at a time, or he has to say, Dave, I'm counting on you to deliver Rudy,
or Rudy I'm counting on you to deliver Dave. Or you know whatever his
technique is that he's developed. And during the course of moving that budget
resolution, we had a lot of stuff to overcome. 1981, we had said something
about social security, and we should limit social security. 1982, the
democrats ran against all of us, including me, on social security, so it was a
tough tough political issue. I mean mostly the people knew that they were
going to, somebody was going to try to do this to them. But the importance of
the leadership, of a trustworthy person, in this case Robert J. Dole, and the
significance of putting this huge issue behind us so that every single year we
didn't have to come back and fight to do battle is what Bob Dole sold. And in
the end he also sold it to one Democrat, Ed Zarinski, and he got Pete back from
the hospital. He couldn't sell it to Ronald Reagan, because it had taxes in
it, and he couldn't sell it Tip O'Neill because it had social security in it.
And those two people failed the leadership test that Bob Dole had demonstrated
on the floor.
FL:
Could you talk some more about the art of the deal in a detailed way.
The Dole style --it's been said he keeps meetings going on in five different
rooms, he's the only person that knows all of them.
DURENBURGER:
I think the first thing that we all need to understand is that in any
given year there are a certain set of must-do issues. There is sort of a
consensus when the year begins that this year you have to deal with
telecommunications or you have to deal with health care reform as was a couple
of years ago, or you have to deal with an agriculture bill because that's up
for, or how are you going to deal with clean air, clean water act. There is a
certain set of givens in the beginning of the year.
Bob Dole's ability of course is to know that issue inside out. I mean he
doesn't know any of the technical details. But he kind of knows the three
important issues and I remember in 1990 was the year in which George Bush did
all of his legislation, clean air bill, which was very controversial, Americans
with Disabilities Act, and I think it was another civil rights bill if I
recall. Every one of those required somebody like Bob Dole to know where all
the pressure points were. He didn't have to know the details of any of those
bills, he just had to know who was on what side of which of these issues, and
which of the issues were more important than others to the various people
involved. And he just knows that, and he knows that from experience. I mean
he's just a a smart man, he kind of knows us all. Tough guys, I mean a lot of
the tough people are serving on the finance committee with all those taxes,
trade and related issues, anyway, so you see a lot of that sort of thing and
you kind of get to know somebody after a while, you know what makes them bend
you know what makes them break, you know what makes them sit up straight and do
what's right.
So Bob's talent is simply to know when to call the meeting and who to invite.
When you have to have a few house members over because you ought to consider
what the republican good is, or something like that, you'll find those guys
sitting there. But he just has he has the timing talent, he knows who ought to
be in the room, he knows how to deal with conflict, I mean you can't always
have two sides in the room and not expect to see some sparks. You don't always
get sparks, we're a very a collegial body and all love each other but,
sometimes you're going to get sparks. And that's where the Dole humor or
"somebody go get a cup of coffee for Dave he's getting hot, or get him a cold
drink, he's heating up," but whatever it maybe. You know that sort of thing of
course is when to end the meeting. Who to say, who in that group is going to
be sort of like the person responsible for going off and sort of dealing with
this someplace else, or whose staff, you know, are we going to have deal with
this issue, and which one of my staff, Bob Doles's staff, is going to take care
of this. You can do so many of these things at the staff level if you know
exactly where the members are at. And then the White House, I mean when
George Bush was President, I thought they were a particularly effective
combination, because with John Sunnunu in the White House, there was never
anysort of leaking behind George Bush. I mean they'd have their outs over
there. And when we had the civil rights bill up or when we had the clean air,
or something really controversial, Americans with Disabilities Act, there were
untold hours that we sat in that middle room in Bob Dole's office in his ante
room, in his personal office, you had that around that mahogany table. And
Sunnunu is there, the Attorney General is there if that's necessary, or the
secretary of either energy or EPA administrator or something like that, whoever
has to be there is there. But in the Bush presidency, they always spoke with
one voice, and John Sunnunu could cut their deals and that was it.
When we did the Clean Air Act, George Mitchel was of course the majority leader
then, and George had a very unique process that Bob Dole acquiesced in to that
and yet all the principles sat in his office for the better part of two and a
half weeks. Including people from the administration, just to work out all of
the basic differences. And then to get people to agree when they go out on to
the floor, you know everybody stands, stands on those principles. So I mean
just to summarize a Bob Dole consensus style, to say it's all about timing and
it's all about his judgement of people, and it's all about his standing by his
word if you stand by yours. And then in the end, there always has to be a
common good that we appeal to, you gotta close the circle. And it's either
going to be for the Republican party, or for the good of the President, in the
case of the President, it's for the good of the country, whatever the case may
be. But Bob Dole closes the circle and everybody takes the pledge so to speak.
And off you go and you get your work done. And that's, you know, that's the
leadership style or the dealmaking style as I would call it.
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