Elizabeth Dole's Alchemy: Turning Decades of Failure Into Gold

It should come as no surprise that Liddy Dole has supported the failed policies of President Bush ever since we made the huge mistake of sending her to the Senate six years ago. She'd been doing the same for three decades since Nixon appointed her to the Federal Trade Commission back in 1973, and she's made an art of ignoring learned opinion and common sense in favor of blind allegiance to whoever her current master is at the time.

We're going to enter the way-back machine for much of this diary dear readers, and for those young whippersnappers who weren't even born yet when some of this happened, pay attention anyway, as some of this will be on the test. Okay, there's not really going to be a test, I was just trying to get your attention. :)

From information compiled by the Center For Public Integrity for their Buying Of The President page, we'll join Liddy for her first job interview after graduating college:

Elizabeth Hanford applied for a job at The Charlotte Observer, the largest newspaper in her home state of North Carolina. She’d never worked as a reporter, not even on her college newspaper. What’s more, she’d never studied journalism or even evinced much interest in the field. But she figured that she was ready for the influential newspaper — and vice versa.

“I went in assuming that if you wore the right dress and nodded at appropriate moments,” she later wrote, “your credentials would speak for you.”

The editors, however, figured otherwise. Hanford was not hired.

They did, however, offer her a paper route, until they found out she'd never learned to ride a bicycle and could only throw a paper about five feet. The funny thing is, the Charlotte Observer still doesn't believe she's qualified for the job she wants:

Dole a surprise, disappointment

Dole should be a terrific senator. She's intelligent, polished and experienced, and has a firm grip on the issues Congress deals with. She can talk in great detail about energy policy, trade deal enforcement and federal programs that help local law enforcement deport illegal immigrants who break the law.

That's why her ineffectiveness in representing North Carolina is such a surprise and such a disappointment.

Over the past six years, Dole's record of accomplishments on behalf of North Carolina is modest. We have no reason to expect that it will be dramatically different in a second term. She has taken the lead on no more than one or two initiatives during her first term, an exception being the buyout of the federal tobacco allotment program. On numerous other issues, she has been late or absent from the table. One notable example: She was too slow to weigh in against the Navy's foolish plan to locate an Outlying Landing Field for jets in northeastern North Carolina.

Dole's first involvement with the government give's evidence that she values personal gain much more than sticking to ideological principles:

Hanford threw herself into the fledgling consumer movement, wearing her newfound activism on her sleeve. Once, when she had a hot-off-the-press copy of a Ralph Nader report, she brought it along on a date. To the dismay of her suitor, she ignored the Washington Redskins game he had taken her to and spent her stadium time engrossed in the report.

Ten months after she went to work in the Johnson administration, Richard Nixon took over the White House. The consumer office quietly backed off from its activism to focus instead on distributing product information and mediating conflicts with manufacturers. Hanford dropped her Naderite loyalties and switched her party affiliation from Democrat to Independent. She was rewarded with several promotions; in 1973 Nixon nominated her to the Federal Trade Commission.

Her later tenure at the Department of Transportation during the Reagan administration was rife with examples of her ineptitude, but a few of these examples show how dangerous such ineptitude can be. For many of us, the air traffic controllers' strike and Reagan's subsequent firing of them all is burned into our memory, as is the fear we all shared when their replacements were pushed to the point of collapse:

To get the crippled airlines back to their 1981 levels of service, Dole worked Federal Aviation Administration supervisors and their newly hired trainees to the bone. Vacation and sick leave was cancelled; six-day work weeks were mandatory. When the controllers complained, she ridiculed them in public — and openly dismissed the idea that theirs were uniquely stressful jobs.

By 1987, public confidence in airline safety had crashed. Commercial airliners were reporting near-midair collisions at the rate of more than one a day. In May the National Transportation Safety Board warned that the overburdened and understaffed air traffic control system was headed for disaster. Newsweek magazine dubbed 1987 “The Year of the Near Miss.”

Congress begged the FAA to hire more air traffic controllers, but Reagan refused. His “Safety Secretary” never challenged him. “The skies are safe,” Dole repeatedly told reporters. “We have the safest system in the world.”

And this debacle would be funny if it weren't so frightening:

In December 1984, Dole invited a crowd of 600 reporters and industry executives to the California desert to promote a new airplane fuel that was designed to prevent deadly explosions during aviation mishaps. Dole and the other VIPs watched from a nearby rooftop as the FAA intentionally crashed a remote-controlled Boeing 720 carrying 75 crash-test dummies, 12 high-speed cameras, and 350 electronic sensors in the cabin. After slamming into the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base in California, the old Boeing was engulfed in a fireball three times the height of the plane. The fire burned ferociously for another 19 minutes, until a radio call for help came from technicians closer to the crash site: “We’re having some problems putting this fire out.”

By the time the startled reporters turned to her for comment on the miserably failed test, Dole had vanished. FAA Administrator Donald Engen was left to field the embarrassing questions. Dole’s office said later that she had another appointment that conflicted with the $11.8 million FAA demonstration.

And for those of you "states' rights" folks out there, I want you to pay close attention to the following excerpt from Dole's statement to Congress about the Trucking Deregulation Act of 1985:

Prevent states from "encroaching" — imposing new
relation* on trucking operations that previously were
regulated by the ICC:

The Administration bill's "anti-encroachment" provision is designed to prevent states and other levels of government from stepping in and deregulating any aspect of interstate trucking, once the ICC has ceased regulating it.

Although several states have totally deregulated their
intrastate motor carriers since 1980, and a number of
others never did regulate theirs, over 40 states
currently regulate intrastate motor carrier operations
to some degree. We do not wish to see the potential
benefits of deregulation at the federal level
significantly eroded by ambitious but misguided state
regulation.

Bolding mine. For your information, "intrastate" means trucks driving back and forth internally inside state lines. So this deregulation bill, at its heart, actually contains overriding Federal regulation of a state's ability to pass laws it feels are necessary. And in case anybody's wondering, this Act caused a lot of experienced truck drivers to lose their jobs, to be replaced by lower-paid, less-experienced ones. Sound familiar?

But it was Liddy's stint at the Red Cross where she discovered the gold mine of public speaking engagements and faux charity organizations:

Likewise, Dole used her tenure as the president of the American Red Cross to boost her profile — and fees — as a speaker. Although she was president of the charity through the end of 1998, none of the money for the 29 speeches she made that year went to the American Red Cross. (Dole was prohibited from accepting speaking fees while she served as a Cabinet secretary, though she did take in $100,000 in fees during the year between her stints at the Transportation and Labor departments.) While Dole took large fees for her speeches, her predecessor rarely charged anything. “Most of the time, I didn’t get remuneration,” Richard Schubert, who was the president of the American Red Cross from 1983 to 1990, told the Center for Public Integrity. “If I did, it was in the form of a donation to the Red Cross.”

Throughout the early 1990s, Dole tried to deflect criticism of her seemingly mercenary speaking habits by repeatedly promising to donate the money to charity. But of the $875,000 in speaking fees she earned from 1991 to 1994, only $405,513 — or just .46 percent — went to charitable organizations. The rest went to cover her personal expenses, and to her substantial retirement fund. (In response to heavy criticism in the wake of a January 1996 story in the Los Angeles Times about her tight-fisted giving, Dole blamed her accountant for the errors and made an additional charitable contribution of $75,000.) And the charity to which Dole donated less than half her speaking fees was none other than the American Red Cross, which under her leadership was facing one of the most severe financial crises of its 100-plus-year history.

Dole, apparently, no longer gives to the Red Cross. The proceeds from her speaking engagements in 1998 went into the Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation, about which her campaign would provide no information.

Of the $1,136,000 in speaking fees that Dole received in 1998, only $602,458 went to the Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation, the Center’s comparison of her financial disclosure form with her foundation’s tax return shows. The rest of the money went to taxes and to another generous contribution to her retirement plan, according to Robert Davis, Dole’s longtime lawyer and another of the foundation’s three directors. The Dole Foundation is a creation of a Cleveland-based accounting firm called Investment Advisors International, Inc., itself a subsidiary of the renowned celebrity agency International Management Group, which is best known for its representation of such sports superstars as Tiger Woods, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, Andre Agassi, and Arnold Palmer. (The agency has also represented violinist Itzhak Perlman, supermodel Tyra Banks, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II.) The Elizabeth Dole Charitable Foundation is controlled by Elizabeth Dole. In 1998 it gave away only $29,157 out of more than $1 million in assets, the minimum required by law to maintain its foundation status.

Elizabeth Dole has continually put her own interests and that of her wealthy friends ahead of the needs of North Carolinians and the U.S. public at large. We have the right, the ability and the responsibility to put a stop to this career of disservice, and the way to make this happen is to help Kay Hagan keep her momentum going by donating money or time, both of which are critical at this point.