MISSOURI COMMENTARY: `I GUESS IT'LL BE GOOD OLD DOLE'

"So I guess it'll be good old Dole. He had no message that came through, and I thought that was wrong. But, good old Dole it is." -- Ruth Nottage, New Hampshire Republican Voter

In New Hampshire, good old Dole ran a close second to the wild man, Pat Buchanan. It was enough to survive -- enough ultimately to go on and win the Republican nomination, but not enough to win the November election.

It was a distressing week for Bob Dole in New Hampshire. Governor Stephen Merrill moved him around like a prop for a sales pitch. Dole's audiences sat in a trance while he told them that "I am experienced." Being "experienced" in government, at a time when most people resent the government, isn't enough to fuel a presidential campaign. Merrill dragged Dole from town to town, but between the two of them, they never discovered a message. He was just "good old Dole."

On the final day of his New Hampshire campaign, Dole said "We didn't plan it this way. I didn't realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue ... "

Dole has spent his entire life in politics. He is one of the greatest legislative technicians of his era. Yet he seemingly had no sense of the anxiety felt by millions of people that they are falling behind the economic curve. Although many Americans are striking it rich, many more are either standing in place or are being downsized out. Corporate profits and record Dow Jones averages don't translate into economic happiness across-the-board.

On election night, as he stood before the TV cameras to claim a near victory, Dole read his statement and stumbled more than once. No politician reads a victory or even a near-victory statement on election night. If your political gut is functioning, if you have a sense of what's going on about you, you know what to say without laboring through a prepared script.

Dole's saving grace is that he is well organized and well financed. He can move on and compete in the flood of primaries in the next few weeks. Pat Buchanan and Lamar Alexander are piece work politicians. They can bid on a job one project at a time -- first Iowa, then New Hampshire. But they don't have the depth of organization or the deep pockets to participate fully in bunches of simultaneous elections.

Pat Buchanan is a scavenger politician who exploits opportunity wherever it knocks. Having won New Hampshire, he will live out of a suitcase and taunt Bob Dole until his voice runs out. Winning isn't everything to Buchanan. It's the sport of destruction that makes Pat run.

The Buchanan mystique is not a U.S. copyright. Years ago, Enoch Powell traveled the fear road in Britain. Jean-Marie Le Pen made racism his specialty in France. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the world's most famous Jewish anti-Semite, bombasted his way to fame in Russia.

All play a common tune of distrust, suspicion, bigotry, nativism and xenophobia. All yearns for good old days which, in truth, were not always all that good.

Buchanan wants to go back to the '20s when women, black,s Hispanics and Jews all supposedly "knew their place" and did what they were told. The problems of Europe and the rest of the world were deemed to be of no concern to us. After the Great Crash of '29, President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff to protect us against foreign competition and the Great Crash grew into the Great Depression.

Protectionism and isolationism have great political sex appeal. It is comforting, albeit simplistic, to blame one's plight on a bunch of foreigners. Sophisticated arguments about free trade and the "global marketplace" don't always resonate in human terms. If it's a choice between clever demagoguery and more nuanced fundamental wisdom, demagoguery will win most of the time, at least in the short term. Dole, a life-long free trader, has his work cut out for him in putting the human face on lowering trade barriers.

The field will ultimately be winnowed down. Alexander will run out of money. Forbes will run out of smiles. Lugar will run out of shoe leather.

It's Dole and Buchanan all the way to San Diego with Buchanan enjoying every drop of Dole's political blood spilled along the way.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.