Like a lot of people, I feel an almost personal loss at the passing of Bob Dole.

And I wonder why that is.

I did not know the man personally, although somewhere I have a note from him, sent after I wrote about his 1996 presidential campaign and his loss to Bill Clinton.

I wrote about his campaign, which was sleepy and unfocused. And I wrote about his character, which was neither.

Candidate Dole promised only competence and to hold the line on federal spending.

And small town, Russell, Kansas, values.

He promised, implicitly, to behave like a president – with dignity and restraint.

Plus one other thing: Mr. Dole believed the president has to be above party once elected. It’s OK for the veep to be a junk yard dog for his party. But not the POTUS. He must seek the common public good between elections and be president for all.

Mr. Dole got that idea from Dwight Eisenhower, his personal hero.

In other words, Mr. Dole was a conservative. A true conservative.

That’s not enough to get you elected president. Even less so today than then.

Imagine Robert Taft in a 1950s gray flannel suit running against a Kennedy, or Beto O’Rourke who looks like a Kennedy, or Pete Buttigieg.

Even in his time, Mr. Dole, who sought the White House thrice, was a throwback: A Coolidge in a magical thinking age.

Today, presidential candidates promise to remake the country, either to the right or left. They promise either something incredibly progressive and new, or a past we have imagined into memory.

But the premise is the same, left or right: Big change must come because something is terribly broken in the American political system and the American psyche.

Bob Dole could not advance that premise because he did not believe it. He could barely fathom it.

He believed there was nothing substantially wrong with our political system. He believed it to be a work of genius and perfectly functional – so long as men and women of goodwill, and great skill, managed it.

He was such a person, of course. He was a master of the Senate as Republican leader, just as Lyndon Johnson had been master of it as Democratic leader.

He called the Senate, where he served from 1969 to 1996, “the zoo” because Mr. Dole had a joke for everything and everyone. But he loved the Senate. He cherished our political institutions and customs as only an old pro who loves his craft could.

And he was right. When you have people like Bob Dole manning our institutions, the system does work.

Hence the president’s emotional eulogy for Mr. Dole. It was really a eulogy for a politics now past – the politics of Mike Mansfield, Jerry Ford and John McCormack; of Hugh Scott and Robert Byrd and so many other leaders of Congress who knew our system and cared for it, as well as for their colleagues. (Mansfield talked Joe Biden out of quitting the Senate after Neilia Biden’s death. If you were a constituent, or a first-term congressman, and you lost a family member, you got a handwritten letter from Speaker McCormack, in clear but elegant script.)

They were partisans, to be sure, but friendships across the aisle were possible and comity was the house rule.

Mr. Dole’s character was composed of lasting things: Great physical courage in battle; the equally great heroism of beginning life anew after being severely maimed; faith; wit.

He was also just a good dude – the kind of old fashioned pol whose word was his bond and whose image mattered less to him than the work.

I fear that Bob Dole is what we were and Donald Trump, and his minions, are what we have become.

Mr. Dole’s finest trait was the ability to change. The guy who was Richard Nixon’s hatchet man in his early career became a consensus builder who ran the Senate on respect. The running mate who, in 1976, was known as the new Agnew, whom liberals loathed and feared being “a heartbeat away,” was proudest of his part in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

He said, at the end of his 98 years, that he was most effective when he put the country first and least effective when he acted as a partisan.

So ends the lesson, according to the man himself.

But how do we get back to country first? Service first?

Do we need a third party? Term limits? Public financing of political campaigns? A tax on social media to fund real journalism, assuming it can be found?

Or just decency and modesty.

For today we have not just hyper-partisanship, but our two religion substitutes – right-wing nihilism and left-wing wokeness. Tear it all down versus We are the people who know.

Both ersatz religions say the system is broken, and the country is sick. Bob Dole’s assertion was that the system can work, and the country is great – that is precisely why we don’t need a president to save and remake us.

Bob Dole served. He almost died for the country. He served our system of constitutional liberty for most of the rest of his almost 100 years. Maybe he was right, and we should listen.

Keith C. Burris is the former editor, vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (burriscolumn@gmail.com).

First Published: December 19, 2021, 10:00 a.m.