Bob Dole: "I don't know what the appeal is to Rick"

“I don’t know what the appeal is to Rick,” Dole continued. “I mean, he’s a great family man, and he’s certainly a good person, but I don’t see him as a leader. I don’t believe he’s had any real private experience and no position of leadership, well, high leadership in politics. So when you’ve got a person like Romney who’s had it all – private sector, public sector – you know, he’s done it all. And he’s said he was in a state, Massachusetts, where it was about, I don’t know, eight-to-one or seven-to-one or something like that Democrat, and he did a lot of things even though he had that big hill to overcome.”

Dole said Santorum’s surge is “near the end, or maybe it’s already reached the end,” and that “it’s going to be almost mathematically impossible for Romney to lose.” Noting that Gingrich isn’t competing in Kansas, Dole said, “Maybe I helped a little.”

He was referring to a statement he made in January about Gingrich in which he said, “Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand — that was a symbol of some sort for him — and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.”

Asked to elaborate on that weird scene, Dole said: “Beats me. He shows up one day and has an empty bucket, and somebody says, ‘Well, it has to do with spending.’ I said, ‘What does the empty bucket have to do with spending?’ But I’m not sure that’s what it was all about. Newt had a lot of ideas, and now and then, he might stumble into a good one.”