The Morning Dispatch: Remembering Bob Dole

Happy Monday! For those of you who took a break from the news over the weekend, we are pleased to report President Biden sounds like George Clooney now.

(He told reporters he caught a cold from his grandson.)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that U.S. employers added 210,000 jobs in November—well below the Dow Jones estimate of 573,000—while the unemployment rate fell from 4.6 percent to 4.2 percent. The labor force participation rate increased from 61.6 percent to 61.8 percent—the highest level since the pandemic started—but approximately 3.9 million fewer Americans are working today than February 2020.

• An anonymous Biden administration official told the Washington Post over the weekend that a U.S. intelligence assessment has found that Russia is planning a “multi-front offensive” against Ukraine as soon as early 2022. “The plans involve extensive movement of 100 battalion tactical groups with an estimated 175,000 personnel, along with armor, artillery and equipment,” the official said. President Biden is scheduled to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday via video call, and told reporters he expects to have a “long discussion” with his counterpart regarding the planned offensive.

• Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Apple notified 11 U.S. State Department employees in Uganda their iPhones were hacked using a tool—known as Pegasus—developed by Israeli technology company NSO Group, which the Biden administration blacklisted last month. The breach appears to be the first successful Pegasus hack targeting American officials.

• Gen. Paul Nakasone, leader of U.S. Cyber Command, said on Saturday the U.S. military has “taken actions” and “imposed costs” on ransomware groups around the world as the frequency of such attacks has risen. Nakasone’s comments represent the first acknowledgment of offensive measures against ransomware groups.

• John Eastman—a prominent lawyer who advised former President Trump in his quest to overturn the 2020 election—asserted his Fifth Amendment rights on Friday in a letter to Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6 select committee.

Bob Dole Dies at 98

Robert “Bob” Joseph Dole—a World War II veteran and Republican leader who served 36 years in Congress—died early yesterday morning at the age of 98 following a battle with stage IV lung cancer. The career public servant and one-time Republican presidential nominee was remembered fondly on Sunday by friends across the political spectrum, with many of his former colleagues contending Dole’s career achievements were rivaled only by his personal decency and kindness.

“Most people have heard about the Bob Dole who heroically served and recovered from injury in World War II,” former Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle wrote yesterday, referring to the April 1945 shelling in the Italian mountains that struck 21-year-old Dole’s right shoulder and spine, returning him home to Kansas in a full body cast. “But few know the Bob Dole who called up a Florida dentist in 1993 to encourage him after losing his right arm and help find him a specialist for a prosthetic arm. Or the Bob Dole who took a detour from his 1996 presidential campaign to attend the graduation party of a young girl in Indianapolis who had been partially paralyzed by a car accident.”

Dole’s death in many ways marked the definitive end of a political era. Born in 1923 in Russell, Kansas, his childhood was shaped by both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and his service in World War II ended his hopes of becoming a doctor. In 1996, he became the last WWII vet to secure either major party’s presidential nomination.

Dole was elected to the Kansas House of Representatives in 1950. A decade later he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he voted to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By 1968, Dole was a U.S. senator, a position to which he was reelected four times before he resigned in 1996 amid his presidential campaign. As chair of the Senate Finance Committee during President Ronald Reagan’s first term, Dole helped pass Social Security reform. As Senate minority leader in 1990, he rallied support among Republicans for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Dole was never the most ideological member of the GOP—he once recounted a reporter asking him what his agenda would be once elected and him responding, “I’m going to sit back and watch for a few days, and then I’ll stand up for what I think is right”—but he quickly became a partisan animal upon arriving in Washington. A staunch defender of President Richard Nixon, Dole served as chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1971-73, and, after Nixon resigned in disgrace, was selected as President Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976. He mounted ill-fated presidential campaigns of his own in 1980 and 1988 before securing the GOP nomination at the age of 73 in 1996. At the conclusion of an awkward and bumbling general election campaign, Dole lost to incumbent President Bill Clinton 379 electoral votes to 159.

In the decades that followed, Dole was celebrated both for helping secure funding for the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., and for his willingness to poke fun at himself. Just days after losing the presidential race in 1996, he appeared on Saturday Night Live alongside Norm Macdonald and on the Late Show with David Letterman. “My slogan was ‘A Better Man for a Better America,’” he told Letterman. “But I’m going to head for Florida, my slogan’s going to be “A Better Tan for a Better America.’”

Dole is survived by his daughter, Robin, and his second wife Elizabeth, who had an incredibly impressive public service career of her own, serving over the years as an FTC commissioner, secretary of transportation, secretary of labor, and U.S. senator. Now 85 years old, she heads up the Elizabeth Dole Foundation that works to support military families.

President Biden remembered his friend as “an American statesman like few in our history.” Former President Bill Clinton praised his one-time adversary as someone whose example “should inspire people today and for generations to come.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell—who passed Dole as the GOP’s longest-serving Senate leader in 2018—highlighted his longtime colleague’s lifetime of looking out for others.

“Whatever their politics, anyone who saw Bob Dole in action had to admire his character and his profound patriotism,” he wrote Sunday. “Those of us who were lucky to know Bob well ourselves admired him even more. A bright light of patriotic good cheer burned all the way from Bob’s teenage combat heroics through his whole career in Washington through the years since. It still shone brightly, undimmed, to his last days.”

Some Cautious Optimism on Omicron

When we first wrote to you about the Omicron COVID-19 variant last week, the point we most wanted to drive home was just how much remained uncertain. “If I was writing an article on this, the title would be ‘We Don’t Know,’ because that basically sums up almost everything,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch, a clinical epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Toronto, told The Dispatch at the time. “We’ll find out [soon].”

Since then, cases of the Omicron variant have popped up in dozens of countries and at least 16 U.S. states. Markets experienced their most volatile week in months, and governments around the world outlined differing approaches to combating the potentially threatening variant. We went back to the same experts we spoke to a week ago, asking them one simple question: What knowledge have we gained about Omicron?

“I would describe it as accumulating anecdotes and early data,” Bogoch said Sunday. “That’s what we have this week that we didn’t have last week.” And although it’s early, those initial anecdotes and data are making the case for cautious optimism. 

As of Sunday, the largest known Omicron outbreak outside of southern Africa can be traced to a corporate Christmas party in Oslo, Norway, where public health experts believe “at least half” of the 120 fully vaccinated attendees were infected with the variant. Noting that most of the partygoers were on the younger side, Preben Aavitsland of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health confirmed that “none of the patients [have] severe symptoms” and “none [are] hospitalized.” Outbreaks at a San Francisco area wedding and within a Toronto prison have thus far yielded similar results. The World Health Organization said over the weekend that it has yet to see reports of a death attributed to the variant.

“There’s just a growing number of these anecdotes: bigger outbreaks, even among vaccinated individuals, and those who are vaccinated having no-to-mild symptoms,” Bogoch said, though he cautioned against drawing any sweeping conclusions. “I always say, you can never ignore anecdotes, you just have to put them in the appropriate context.”

Preliminary data out of South Africa’s Gauteng Province paints a similar picture. “The relatively low number of COVID-19 pneumonia hospitalizations in the general high care and ICU wards constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves,” read a non-peer-reviewed study of one hospital system in the region where Omicron was first detected.

Still, it’s worth waiting at least a couple more days before dismissing concerns about Omicron’s virulence entirely. “It’s always been the case that when we’ve had waves or surges in infection, it always takes about two weeks to see the clinical manifestations of that in hospitalizations, and then it takes another 10 days or two weeks to see the rise in deaths, if there is one,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health who has conducted HIV research in South Africa.

But the lack of severe disease is, thus far, consistent across the globe. “The mildness persisting, you can’t get away from that,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease and global medicine researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “Usually hospitalization should be getting, by this point, bad. Not just because [Omicron] was detected 12 days ago, but because it’d probably been circulating for a while before that, maybe three weeks or so at the least.”

Gandhi has generally been more of an optimist about the state of the pandemic, while Dr. Anthony Fauci has very much not. But in an interview with CNN on Sunday, even the NIAID director provided some (caveated) positivity. “Though it’s too early to really make any definitive statements about it, thus far, it does not look like there’s a great degree of severity to [Omicron],” he told Jake Tapper.

What the Omicron variant appears to lack in virulence, it seems to make up for in transmissibility. The number of new cases in South Africa quadrupled from Tuesday to Friday, Omicron has overtaken Delta as the most prominent strain in the country, and a second non-peer-reviewed study out of South Africa found the new variant was about three times as likely to reinfect someone who has already recovered from COVID-19 than its Delta or Beta predecessors. (The study looked only at natural immunity; research looking into the efficacy of vaccines against Omicron is ongoing.)

“It’s very clear that the transmissibility is indeed high. It’s certainly as high as Delta, and likely about twice as high,” Beyrer said. “There’s definitely waning immunity happening from the people who had COVID last winter. It’s been a year now, and they had a much earlier variant. So relying on natural immunity with Omicron is unwise.”

But as Gandhi noted last week, this surge isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the virus trading virulence for transmissibility could ultimately bring about the end of the pandemic. “It’s really hard for a variant to become more transmissible and more virulent,” she said. “For it to be more mild, that would be an amazing hope, because in a way, that’s how the 1918 influenza pandemic ended. It just became more mild and burned out.”

“It appears that there are some genes in the Omicron variant that have come from ordinary coronaviruses that cause the common cold,” Beyrer added. “Nobody dies of the cold—or very, very rarely—but immunity does not last either. So there’s at least one hypothesis that what we’re seeing is what people had predicted, which is the evolution of a less virulent, more infectious COVID variant that may be some indication of what our future with this virus is going to be as a species.”

Worth Your Time

• Nelson Warfield—press secretary for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign—remembered his old boss’ propensity for going off script in a piece for the New York Times yesterday. “While many politicians show themselves to be cynical, cruel or inauthentic in those off-script moments, Mr. Dole instead revealed a rare empathy. For example, in 1996, Gov. Pete Wilson of California, a Republican, had won re-election two years prior with a tough law-and-order message, so we organized a trip to a jail in Los Angeles, with Mr. Wilson in tow, for a tour and a news conference. It was a perfectly staged opportunity for Mr. Dole to say something bashing the miserable offenders he had just seen in the lockup. Instead, his first comment was to wonder aloud whether some of the men in those cells had ever been touched by the hand of someone who loved them. Nobody had written that note of humanity for Mr. Dole. I’m not sure it was even picked up by the press. But it sprang from a compassion that he found hard to switch off for political purposes.”

• Steven Greenhut’s latest Orange County Register column focuses on the problems inherent in viewing politics like a team sport. “The end goal is good public policy, and it shouldn’t matter who champions it,” he writes. “But when we view politics as a grudge match, we lose our leverage to change the way that ‘our’ allies operate. Perhaps holding both Republicans and Democrats accountable for routinely violating their stated principles might push them to reconsider the positions they take. … Self-imposed ideological tyranny leads politicians to spend their time posturing rather than governing. They mainly try to energize their base. They eschew reasonable ideas but seek only to heighten the partisan anger.”

Something Heartwarming

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• In Friday’s G-File, Jonah discusses vaccine mandates and the Omicron variant, arguing it’s time for everyone to just let it go. “If you want to stay home, stay home, he writes. “If you don’t want to get vaccinated, don’t get vaccinated. You can deal with the consequences yourself. Don’t drag me into it. And please, until there are new facts worthy of freaking out over in either direction, just shut up about it already.”

• ABC News’ Jonathan Karl joined Sarah and Steve on Friday’s Dispatch Podcast for a conversation about his new book on the waning days of the Trump administration. 

• In the wake of last week’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization oral arguments, there’s been much discussion about adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. In his Sunday French Press, David—an adoptive father himself—treats the issue with the delicacy and grace it deserves.

• The second Uphill of the week (🔒) focused on House Republicans, and the dilemma facing Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy when it comes to reining in the conference’s fringiest members.

• Tom Joscelyn’s latest Vital Interests (🔒) focused on a rare speech from Richard Moore, the chief of the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service. “It’s easy to see why Moore decided to engage the public now, even if it was a break with precedent,” he writes. “The public’s faith in government institutions has been shaken.”

Let Us Know

Upon learning of Sen. Bob Dole’s death, recent Remnant guest Jay Cost argued his support for the 1996 GOP nominee was the “best vote [he] ever cast.”

What do you consider the best vote you ever cast?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).