Back in 1996, President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign spot-welded the highly unpopular Newt Gingrich to Mr. Clinton's Republican challenger, Sen. Bob Dole. From television commercials to radio ads to speeches, the Darth Vader of the House of Representatives was continually morphed into any image or mention of Mr. Dole - to the point where some Americans actually thought Mr. Gingrich was Mr. Dole's running mate, or at the very least his Svengali. Was a strategy that basically ignored policy and the pressing issues of the time in lieu of a superficial and misleading attack effective? Bob Dole thought it was.
Less than two years after he lost to Mr. Clinton, I went to work for Mr. Dole as his director of communications, a position I held for the next five years. Mr. Dole and I spoke of that Clinton campaign strategy from time to time.
Although frustrated by the Clinton tactic, Mr. Dole saw the value in slipping the Gingrich anchor around his neck. In large measure because of the Gingrich shutdown of the government in November of 1995 - carried out in part, according to Tom DeLay and others, as a petty revenge against President Clinton for shunting him to the back of Air Force One - the former speaker of the House was lampooned from coast to coast and became the poster boy for all that was wrong with Congress in the mid-1990s. After that incident, the highly qualified and decent Mr. Dole knew the Clinton campaign was about to marry him to Mr. Gingrich - and he was powerless to stop this impending political death by association.
