Highland Park, IL — Why won’t the Republican Party let Congressman Bob Dold give the GOP response to President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight? What he lacks in gravitas, Dold makes up for with deep partisan roots.
Nowadays, Dold either painfully avoids mentioning his unpopular political party or talks as if all he did was flip a coin to decide which party’s ticket to run on. But that’s preposterous. Dold worked for Vice President Dan Quayle and then on Bob Dole’s failed campaign to retake the White House for Republicans.
Then Dold joined other Republicans obsessed with investigating the Clintons as part of a congressional committee so reckless that it managed to embarrass even Newt Gingrich. When the Chairman of Dold’s committee (Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN)) wasn’t busy shooting watermelons to desperately prove a conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton murdering her friend who actually had committed suicide, he was wasting taxpayer money on heavily-edited tapes to show that she was guilty of yet a different crime (The Washington Post, 1/31/12).
What more does Dold need to do to prove his Republican party loyalty, sign a secret contract? Well, he did that last year (The Washington Post, 9/3/15).
If the Republican Party wants a committed partisan to give its response to the President’s State of the Union address, it would do the right thing and let Bob Dold give it.