Bob Dole, who spent decades as a Republican Senator and ran for president against Bill Clinton in the ‘90s, died today. He was 98 and had been diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer earlier this year. You can go elsewhere, like The New York Times, for an obituary that highlights his status as an “old soldier and stalwart of the Senate,” but here at The A.V. Club we believe it’s more appropriate to highlight the surprising impression that Dole left on popular culture—though it’s not surprising because it’s massive, it’s mostly surprising because it exists at all.
Dole wasn’t exactly a charismatic or easily likable figure (and he was a dedicated Trumper long before the Republican establishment embraced that horrific ideology), making him more like a John McCain type without the “I’m a maverick!”-streak that he liked to play up. Still, that made it easy for shows like Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons to poke fun at him.
Norm Macdonald’s impression on SNL was popular enough that Dole actually stopped by for a self-aware cameo in which Macdonald broke character and talked to him about potentially running for president again just so they could keep doing sketches about him falling down. Dole (or whoever ran his social media account) even marked Macdonald’s death earlier this year with a reference to the SNL impression.
Over on The Simpsons, Harry Shearer played Bob Dole opposite Phil Hartman’s Bill Clinton in the now-iconic “Citizen Kang” segment of Treehouse Of Horror VII. A before-it-was-cool satire of the kind of both-sides-ism we deal with a lot these days, the segment involved Clinton and Dole being replaced by aliens and then forcing the American people to still choose between two presidential candidates who will both… take over the world when elected.
Shearer’s Dole gets a couple of standout lines (“What the hell is this, some kind of tube?”), but the former presidential candidate’s greatest contribution to American culture will probably end up being Homer’s reaction to the election: “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”