One of the all-time master wheeler-dealers was back in town last week, reminding the kids back in Washington that there’s nothing shameful about the word “compromise.”</p><p>Bob Dole, 86 and 13 years removed from his days as the Senate Republican leader, said it plain and clear: Deal-makin’ time has come on health care.</p><p>“There are times in this country’s history when … we agree there is a problem that needs to be addressed,” he said in written remarks for a health summit. “We are at such a point with regard to health care.”</p><p>Social Security reform, he pointed out, is a classic example of a monster issue that can be addressed by members of both parties. In 1983, the system was running out of money. Bankruptcy loomed.</p><p>A seven-member commission, which included Dole, a Republican, and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, was faltering, with no solution in sight.</p><p>That’s when Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat, approached Dole on the Senate floor. “One more try?” Moynihan asked.</p><p>That led to an 11-day marathon meeting at White House Chief of Staff James Baker’s home, a series of sessions that produced something called the Social Security bailout. The plan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67 but kept the system afloat.</p><p>Dole’s career was full of such moments. He wants to summon that same spirit to the final sprint on health care.</p><p>One of the problems with the current Washington scene, as has been pointed out in this space and elsewhere, is the out-of-control partisanship that has turned Washington into a food fight fit for first-graders.</p><p>With so few centrists in D.C., doubts remain over whether the current gang in Congress can come together on such an intensely controversial topic as health care.</p><p>One of the problems, as Dole knows, is that the very idea of compromise has negative connotations. It’s akin to caving in, selling out, forsaking principle.</p><p>Not so, Dole said. With so much on the line, Democrats need a bipartisan health care bill.</p><p>“It’s not in the country’s interest, or the president’s interest, to do this without bipartisanship,” Dole said.</p><p>He drew a distinction between “principled partisanship” and bipartisanship. The two, Dole said, “are not mutually exclusive.”</p><p>Now it’s not lost on me, nor was it on Dole, that he was a key player in the demise of Hillary-care a few years ago. On Wednesday, he blamed himself and Hillary Clinton.</p><p>“Politics took over,” he said. “And you lost.”</p><p>Still, Dole has the street cred to carry his message. But you wonder: Is anybody in D.C. listening?</p><p>••• </p><p>Asked, kiddingly, if he might run for the open U.S. Senate seat back in Kansas next year, Dole didn’t hesitate.</p><p>“Run? I can’t hardly walk.”</p><p>••• </p><p>The word out of Jeff City on Friday was that Senate President Pro Tem Charlie Shields is growing weary of the ongoing Missouri Senate investigation into E. coli-gate, which refers to Gov. Jay Nixon’s response, or lack of one, to unsafe bacteria levels at Lake of the Ozarks.</p><p>Members of both parties told me Shields is ready to move on.</p><p> In an interview, Shields wasn’t quite so blunt. He said he wants the committee to focus on whether there’s a need for a legislative fix to the problem of state government bottling up information on unsafe bacteria levels.</p><p>The focus needs to be on ensuring that information is not ever withheld again.</p><p>The panel needs to wrap up its work by January when the General Assembly convenes, Shields said.</p><p>As to the hunt for whether the governor’s office knew about the high bacteria levels and did nothing, Shields said that “the who-what-when” will be “a natural outgrowth of what we’re finding out.”</p><p> No matter what comes out of this, he said, Nixon and lawmakers “need to be able to work together” to also resolve one of the biggest budget crunches in state history.