Dole Broadcasts Last-Ditch Vote Appeal : Speaking at Historic Debate Site, He Admits He’s the Underdog

Kansas Sen. Bob Dole risked the fate of his floundering presidential hopes on a spin of the television dial Saturday night as he aired a live, last-ditch plea for votes from the landmark site of one of the classic 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Trailing badly in the polls and unable to bait Vice President George Bush, the GOP front-runner, into a debate, Dole staged the 30-minute program--beamed by satellite to a Chicago television station--to shake the doldrums that afflicted his campaign after his drubbing on Super Tuesday.

Dole spoke from historic Alumni Hall at Knox College, a location picked not only for its symbolism but also its proximity to a political dinner that Bush was scheduled to attend on the same campus only minutes after the show concluded.

“It just seems to me we should have had a debate,” Dole said on the program, during which he avoided mentioning Bush by name. “My opponent is less than 100 yards away as we speak. I regret we could not get together.

‘I’m Not Stubborn’

“I know that I’m the underdog in the race,” he said at the beginning of the program. “But the issues are more important than the odds. I’m not stubborn but I don’t give up easily either. I didn’t expect this job to be handed to me. I expect to earn it.”

Dole referred to Bush only in oblique terms: “I’ve been carrying the ball for Ronald Reagan for seven years,” he said at the show’s close. “Maybe I didn’t get the credit, but I did it.”

But, just as Dole’s drive for the White House has been hamstrung by strategic glitches, so was the program marred by technical snafus. The video signal failed midway through the broadcast when a power failure hit the makeshift studio, although the audio portion of the program continued.

Viewers in Chicago saw a still picture of Dole for 45 seconds, and then a video biography of the lawmaker rolled on the screen several minutes ahead of schedule to cover the gaffe. That eliminated remarks by Dole’s wife, Elizabeth.

Program Recut

After the live broadcast, Dole recut the program to eliminate glitches in subsequent airings in several media markets around the state today and Monday.

The foul-ups only compounded Dole’s unfolding woes. The Chicago Tribune reported in its Sunday editions that a new poll it had taken showed that Illinois Republicans preferred Bush to Dole by a whopping 62% to 28% margin. The survey of 504 GOP voters showed Bush’s support uniformly strong throughout the state, including agricultural regions that Dole, a Kansas senator, had expected to turn his way.

Dole’s televised appearance capped a chaotic week for him, in which the campaign abruptly fired most of its paid staffers and tried--as it turned out, unsuccessfully--to yank more than $450,000 worth of prepaid television advertising from Illinois airwaves.

Aides later said the campaign wanted only to use the money to shake up its media strategy. Television stations balked at returning the money so most of the commercials continued to air, but Dole was able to divert about $100,000 of his commercial purchases to pay for Saturday’s program and subsequent airings.

Tough Competition

Initially the program Saturday aired on WGN, a Chicago super station that appears on many cable systems around the country. While the potential for a national audience was large, it was unclear how many Illinois voters would view the program. It aired opposite the top-rated game show “Wheel of Fortune” on one Chicago station and a political satire ironically called “D.C. Follies” on another.

Meanwhile, Bush was acting more confident by the moment as he barnstormed across northern Illinois on Saturday.

“We are going to win on Tuesday because we have the people with us,” he said. “You give me this vote on Tuesday and it seems to me I will cinch the Republican nomination and go on to be the next President of the United States.”