HOW badly has Bob Dole been doing recently? He abandoned most of his prepared text and winged it at the convention of Ross Perot’s United We Stand party in Dallas — and bombed badly. Later, in Indianapolis, the Tele- Prompter broke as he spoke and Dole struggled through a speech endorsing English as America’s official language. In New Hampshire, he awkwardly read 3×5 cards while delivering his opening and closing statements in a nationally televised debate, prompting criticism even from talk radio yapper Don Imus, a Dole enthusiast. Also, Dole boldly asserted his credentials as a tax cutter in a letter to Steve Forbes, the magazine publisher and now a presidential campaign opponent, only to have Forbes slap him down by recounting his record of backing tax hikes.
That’s just for starters. In an important Iowa straw poll, Dole had to settle for an ignominious tie with a Republican rival he loathes, Phil Gramre. He sent back a $ 1,000 contribution from Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group, then changed his mind and declared that returning the check had been a ” mistake.” For this, the media dubbed him a flip-flopper of Clintonesque proportions. Dole found himself on the bad side of Ariana Huffington, the voluble GOP culture czarina, though he’d vigorously supported her husband’s Senate bid in California last year. Mrs. Huffington trashed him publicly (in the Wall Street Journal) and privately. Meanwhile, Dole and his wife Liddy continued looking for a new church after columnist Cal Thomas shamed them into quitting Foundry Methodist in Washington, which has a liberal pastor.
Given Dole’s troubles, he’s now seen in the political community as too old, too pragmatic, and too uninspiring to win the GOP presidential nomination. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. What’s remarkable is not that Dole has stumbled — frontrunners always slip and slide — but how little it has eroded his campaign. Dole remains far ahead of the nine other Republicans in the race. In fact, he has no serious challenger at the moment. If Colin Powell enters the fray, that won’t doom Dole either. Instead, it’s more likely to blow away Gramm, Forbes, and the rest, and create a two-candidate battle between Powell and Dole. In that fight, Dole arguably would inherit enough conservative support from Gramre, Forbes, Pat Buchanan, Richard Lugar, Bob Dornan, and Alan Keyes to ensure his victory.
For sure, Dole has lost some ground, but not much. David Smick, a Dole adviser and former aide to Jack Kemp, says there’s a historical pattern in Republican presidential primaries: The frontrunner gets the nomination, but only after being humiliated. Part of Dole’s humbling is that every small drop in opinion polls is loudly trumpeted. In a matchup with President Clinton in CBS’s national surveys, Dole led 48 percent to 42 percent in August, but trailed 49 percent to 37 percent in October. Among Republicans, though, he’s held his own, leading his closest rival 46 percent to 10 percent (Buchanan) in August in CNN’s poll and 46 percent to 9 percent (Gramm) in October. With Powell added, the race is tied, Dole and Powell both at 31 percent.
Polls don’t tell the whole story. Dole has actually gained in two critical areas: getting along with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, long an irritant, and assuaging the religious right. Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager, has elevated maintenance of good relations between Dole and Gingrich to a top priority. And he’s succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. This has meant adjustments for Dole, the Senate majority leader, including tacit acceptance of Gingrich’s paramount role in devising and driving the Republican agenda. (The two meet every morning at 9:15 now.) Anything short of embracing the Gingrich revolution, however, would have put Dole at odds with conservative activists who dominate GOP primaries. Reed envisions the Dole-Gingrich relationship this way: “Dole is the senior partner, while Newt is the new, young partner who’s brought in the business.” Or this way: “Dole is the co- pilot of the change.”
True, Dole has run into roadblocks in trying to propel the Gingrich agenda through the Senate. “It just takes so long in the Senate,” he told me. “It’s frustrating sometimes. The House can do it so quickly, and when they pass something we’re just warming up. We’re in the opening speeches.” But once the budget is finalized, Dole will probably be able to claim credit for achieving what he calls “the big stuff” — a balanced budget, a tax cut, welfare reform, and a Medicare rescue plan. Then, there’s the smaller stuff, like tort reform, which Dole just barely got through the Senate, and regulatory reform, which may yet pass.
Some of these measures have been watered down to win passage, angering conservative purists. Gramm, the senator from Texas, has denigrated Dole as merely a dealmaker, not a leader. “He’s right,” Dole responds. “And he’s going to vote for every deal I make.”
Dole’s success in wooing Christian conservatives is even more stunning than his sudden chumminess with Gingrich. Of course, he’s been zinged for pandering to the GOP’s right wing. Dole insists that he’s merely stressing positions, like opposition to abortion and support for English as the official American tongue, that he’s taken before. But his dislike of affrmative action is entirely new, and he admits to changing “a little bit” on the issue. Pandering or not, Dole’s pitch has worked so famously that Pat Robertson, president of the 1.7-million member Christian Coalition, had to explain in September that his lavish praise of Dole (“a lifelong conservative” ) didn’t constitute a full-blown endorsement. It just sounded like one.
It was Dole’s stinging attack last May on the TV and film industry in Hollywood that initially warmed his relationship with religious conservatives. “I think we have reached the point where our popular culture threatens to undermine our character as a nation,” Dole said. The speech, delivered in Los Angeles, has turned out to be the only memorable address by any Republican presidential candidate in 1995.
Dole almost didn’t deliver it. The speech was drafted in consultation with Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and former Republican congressman Vin Weber. Reed also talked to Governor Steve Merrill of New Hampshire about it. But John Moran, Dole’s finance chairman and a former New York investment banker, strongly opposed the speech, fearing it would jeopardize fundraising. The night before Dole was scheduled to give the speech, Moran met privately with him in Chicago and lobbied against it. To counter Moran, Reed dispatched Bill Lacey, the campaign’s political director, to California to review the speech with Dole the next morning. Dole delivered it word for word. Fundraising hasn’t suffered.
More recently, Dole’s courtship of the Christian right has left practically no church unvisited. The Doles quit Foundry Methodist after Cal Thomas drew attention to the left-wing politics of the pastor, the Rev. J. Philip Wogaman. The Doles, Thomas wrote, “can pick up materials opposing the House GOP’s Contract with America in the church lobby.” They haven’t settled on a new church. On Sunday October 22, Bob Dole went to First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, a prominent Christian conservative. Elizabeth Dole was in Garden Grove, California, addressing the 11 a.m. service at the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral.
Despite Dole’s gains, his quick demise in the primaries is widely expected. Bob Beckel says the Dole campaign reminds him of Walter Mondale’s drive for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. Beckel was Mondale’s campaign manager. Like Mondale, Dole has gone after big-name endorsements. He’s bagged 13 GOP governors and 23 senators. His latest conquest is California governor Pete Wilson. Dole called Wilson the day he dropped out of the presidential race. Reed made contact with Craig Fuller, Wilson’s campaign chief. After two weeks of negotiations involving Reed and Wilson’s chief of staff, Bob White, Wilson appeared with Dole on October 23 to deliver his endorsement.
Endorsements may not help much, but they don’t hurt. Mondale, after all, won the nomination. What’s harmful to Dole’s chances are three of his personal traits: his tendency to make ill-advised comments, his lack of charisma, and his inability to delegate. Shortly after he was tied by Gramm in Iowa, Dole declared the straw poll of Florida Republicans on November 18 to be the real test. This was news to Reed and other Dole advisers. “I wish he hadn’t said it,” moaned one adviser. “Dole foolishly set himself up,” says strategist David Keene. The Dole comment magnified the importance of a vote that Dole gains nothing from winning. Should he lose, though, his embarrassment will be all the more visible.
To minimize idle comments, Dole’s strategists have advised him to avoid Sunday interview shows. The problem is Dole loves doing the shows. In his last appearance — Face the Nation on October 1 — Dole caused himself trouble by mentioning a tax cut concocted by Senate conservatives, or “hard rocks,” as Dole refers to them. Dole described the tax plan so vaguely that it appeared he was backing away from the $ 245 billion cut agreed on with the House. Gingrich immediately rebutted Dole. And it wasn’t until the next day that Dole could explain he stood firmly behind the $ 245 billion reduction.
To keep Dole from winging it in public, his handlers have scripted more and more of his speeches — with mixed results. His best speeches have been those that Dole read from a prepared text: his Hollywood attack, an economic address in Chicago in September, his speech on values in Des Moines last April. But scripting backfired when Dole read from cards in the New Hampshire debate in October. He looked unsure and sounded wooden. Dole, by the way, was unscripted in October when he changed his mind on the gay contribution and claimed he shouldn’t have returned it. But scripted or not, Dole has a speaking style that fails to excite audiences.
Rather than shedding jobs to devote himself to the campaign, Dole has added one. He’s not only majority leader, but since Bob Packwood resigned, he’s become de facto chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. All this has tugged him in different directions. His Senate staff is cautious, hidebound, and moderate. “Their strategy is to have no strategy,” complains a Dole campaign aide. The campaign staff is more risk-oriented and right-wing, closer to Gingrich’s staff in temperament and ideology. The result is Dole sometimes sound mild and pragmatic on weekdays, strident and ideological on weekends (when the campaign team gets hold of him).
None of Dole’s flaws is fatal, especially against the current crop of uninspiring Republican challengers. But what if Powell runs? Dole likes Powell. He visited him last January and got a tour of Powell’s new home in McLean, Va. They haven’t talked since, but Reed chats occasionally with Powell pal Ken Duberstein.
Dole thinks Powell’s character and bearing may be too little to carry him through the primaries. “You’ve got to get out with the rest of us and go to town meetings with 50 people and the snow’s 10 feet high,” Dole says. “You get a lot of questions you don’t want to answer. Obviously Powell would come into the race in a fairly strong position. But does that translate into winning the caucuses?” Dole thinks not. If he’s right, he’s probably got the Republican nomination locked up.
By Fred Barnes
