aerocontrols said:
Dole stepped down after he got the nomination.
My recollection is that Dole chose to resign because he felt it would be politically advantageous. Running for president while serving in the senate poses a number of difficulties (which may be one reason few sitting senators have succeeded in becoming president).
One of the difficulties is that it is hard to be in 2 places at once, and if one spends as much time on the campaign trail as candidates need to in order to win it means missing votes (and risking being attacked for doing so).
Another difficulty -- and the one that, as I recall, was the one that was said to have weighed more heavily in Dole's decision -- is that there are many votes that one may not want to have to cast while campaigning for president. Candidates for national office like to be able to straddle the fence on controversial issues such as abortion. That's hard if a red-meat issue comes up for a vote, and if the Senate is in the control of the opposing party (as it was for Dole, and is again for Kerry) it's easy for those kind of issues to be scheduled to come up frequently.
Dole weighed his options, and apparently decided he was better off
not being in the senate while conducting his campaign. Tactically, I think it was a good choice, although he still wound up losing. But it is by no means the choice every senator running for president or vice president makes.
In 1960, Lyndon Johnson, then a senator from Texas, was selected as the Democrat's vice presidential candidate (after having been beaten out by JFK for the presidential nomination). By coincidence, he was up for re-election in the senate that year. Not only did he not resign his senate seat, he ran for re-election -- and won! (Which annoyed Texas Democrats, since it meant the Republican governor got to appoint a replacement, costing the Democrats a senate seat they could likely have held if Johnson had let someone else run. But Johnson knew there was no guarantee he would win the vice presidency, and was not willing to give up the bird-in-hand senate seat for the turkey-in-the-bush vice presidency. Like Dole, he made a decision that was in his own best self-interest, not necessarily the best interest of his constituents and supporters.)
In 1964, Barry Goldwater ran for president while serving in the senate. I don't recall his resigning in order to make the run, and don't recall significant calls for him to do so. Since one of the strongest themes of his campaign was that he was so different from his political opponents -- "a choice, not an echo" -- then far from being embarrassed by having to cast controversial votes he probably relished the prospect.
