If you’re vacationing in new Hampshire this week, be sure to stop at Lake Winnipesaukee. Its water is cool, its shore rustic. The wildlife is remarkable. If you’re lucky, you even may catch a glimpse of a threatened species. He’s migratory, hunts alone, stands six feet tall with dark brown eyes and an adder-sharp tongue: a Republican front runner. Approach cautiously. He’s in a bad mood.
For Bob Dole, penance for not winning last week’s Iowa straw poll is a “working vacation” in New Hampshire while pundits cluck about how his victory is no longer inevitable. Dole always knew that; he’s had more than his share of disappointment in three losing national campaigns since 1976. But this was supposed to be a final week to luxuriate. Instead, he’s losing altitude in national polls, and traipsing through a suddenly thickened schedule of picnics, coffees and boat rides while his wife, Elizabeth, tries in vain to guard his time.
Like a chill wind at the end of summer, the Iowa results were a harbinger of the harsh political winter to come. Next door to his Kansas home, Dole settled for an embarrassing first-place tie with Phil Gramm, with only 24 percent of the vote. TV talking-head Pat Buchanan ran a close third. The vote-buying free-for-all may have been cynical, but the messages were clear. Fervent conservatives control the grass roots–and Dole has trouble connecting with them. He is a cool legislative tactician with decades of seniority at a time when GOP voters want red-meat rhetoric, not resumes. He is garlanded with endorsements-he raced around the country last week to pick up more–at a time when voters aren’t in a mood to take anybody’s word for anything. At 72, Dole faces younger rivals who understand better than he does “message driven” campaigning, the messianic ardor of the new GOP faithful–and everyone’s yearning for an outsider.
In recent weeks, Dole’s campaign has stumbled whenever he’s ventured beyond his familiar Senate lair. Speaking at a GOP national meeting in Philadelphia in July, he was all too candid. “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan,” he said, adding: “if that’s what you want.” The line, startling to reporters and delegates alike, made beliefs sound like a suit of clothes. Then, at Ross Perot’s gathering in Dallas in August, Dole bombed with a meandering, unfocused speech that sometimes sounded more like a legislative briefing than the call to arms the anti-Washington Perotians wanted to hear.
Dole’s aides are churning out spin that must sound depressingly familiar to a boss with so much experience in national politics. In Philadelphia and Dallas, aides said, Dole had not used a TelePrompTer. He would from now on. Iowa, they claimed, was a blessing because it lowered expectations–a classic spinmeister line. Campaign staff had been lazy; locals had let them down. No one had bunched Dole’s supporters in the hall for maximum effect. There was even “wrong ink” spin. Every straw-poll voter’s hand was supposed to have been marked with indelible ink. Washable markers were used instead. Delegates rubbed it off and voted twice–only for other candidates, of course.
None of this mollified Dole. When he left the stage after speaking to straw-poll voters in Ames, he was full of steely anger. “What’s happening out there?” he snapped. “Where is everybody?” He grew even angrier, but remained tight-lipped, when aides gave him the bad news that he might not win. On TV the next morning, Dole was a model of avuncular self-control, having been warned by his advisers not to lapse into the bitter “Old Dole.” But behind the scenes there were no smiles. At the Marriott in Des Moines, a solemn Dole held court in his suite as aides trooped in to offer their abject apologies. “It wasn’t your fault,” said one top campaign official. “The campaign let you down.” The candidate raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. “You’re right,” he said curtly.
Private pleas: Now the Dole camp may be only one misstep away from the kind of shake-ups he has engineered in the past. So far, deputy campaign chairman Bill Lacy and campaign manager Scott Reed are safe. But skirmishes are breaking out. Some insiders blamed bad speeches on communications adviser Mari Maseng Will. She and her husband, columnist George Will, are longtime Dole friends. Other old allies, in-eluding former GOP chairman Rich Bond and Washington superlobbyist Tom Korologos, were weighing in with private pleas for a tighter operation. Conservative activist Don Devine, a friend frozen out of the campaign, used the Iowa results to argue for a shift to the right–and a role for himself.
But the trouble with Dole is Dole. He conveys the air of a man peeved at having to beg for a job he thinks he deserves – and at having to prove an ideological purity he believes no one can reasonably expect him to have. Through four different decades, Dole has worked his way to the pinnacle of Congress. His ideological record is necessarily mixed. He was conservative before conservative was cool, voting against the creation of Medicare, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Department of Education. But as a GOP leader he brokered deals with Democrats on civil rights, food stamps and tax increases. So next week in Chicago Dole will propose a flat tax in an effort to beef up his “message” and capture supply-siders.
Dole has never liked to lay down fixed principles. His natural inclination is to shy away from divisive talk on issues such as abortion, affirmative action or immigration. His diffidence is rooted in his political upbringing in the ’50s, a pre-ideological age of consensus. He became a Republican in his hometown, he says, only because the local party was conveniently lacking in talent at the time. He has an understandable aversion to sweeping visions and warlike rhetoric. Ideology can start wars, and cankill-as he learned when he was wounded in World War II.
Dole faces a fundamental dilemma. If he doesn’t tack right, he may lose Iowa next Februaryy – and the ball game. But if he does move right, he’ll be less able to move legislation in the Senate, where Democrats can slow things down and make him look ineffectual. And even if Dole could somehow transform himself into an eloquent ideologue, he would jeopardize his mainstream appeal as a sober, tested leader for the general election. “I admire him, but he can’t do it all,” says Buchanan, rival and friend.
Nor can Dole play the outsider in an era when voters’ yearning for one keeps increasing. After 35 years in Washington, he is comfortable in a world circumscribed by his Senate office, his Watergate apartment and a table in aback alcove of the Galileo restaurant on 21st Street. His real vacations are quick trips to The Sea View condominium in Bal Harbour, Fla., where he lounges around the pool with Washington cronies such as Robert Strauss, David Brinkley and Howard Baker. It’s a long way from sunning at The Sea View to glad handing at Lake Winnipesaukee–but for Bob Dole there is no turning back now.
