As his family announced, he died on Sunday at the age of 98. Dole was one of the political heavyweights of the Conservative Party in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1996 presidential election, he lost out to Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton. He represented the state of Kansas in the US Senate for almost three decades.
When he ran for president, Dole was 73 years old. Until the duel between Donald Trump (74) and Joe Biden (78) in the 2020 election, he was the oldest person who had ever been sent into the race for the White House by one of the two major US parties. Dole was also the last World War II veteran to run in a US presidential election.
Dole was considered a representative of the conservative wing of the Republicans. He was elected to the Senate in 1969. Seven years later, US President Gerald Ford made him his vice-presidential candidate, but the two went down with flying colors in the 1976 election.
But this did not affect Dole’s political career. In 1985 he became the leader of the Republican parliamentary group in the Senate, three years later he could not prevail in the US Republican area code against the incumbent Vice President George HW Bush. Eight years later the time had come. The opposition Republicans named Dole their challenger in the 1996 presidential election.
The Democratic incumbent Clinton was able to stay in the White House in particular because of the appearance of the Texas right-wing populist Ross Perot, who received eight percent of the vote. Although Clinton won 49 percent to 41 percent, Dole’s result was considered formidable.
After the end of his active political career, Dole by no means withdrew, but remained active, among other things, as a sought-after television commentator. Before the 2016 presidential election, he supported Florida Governor Jeb Bush as a Republican presidential candidate. After Trump’s primary victory, Dole was the only living Republican ex-president or presidential candidate who stood behind the controversial right-wing populists. After his election defeat in 2020, Dole distanced himself from Trump and emphasized that there was “not the slightest electoral fraud”.
Source: Nachrichten
