Bush Mounts Drive to Crush Dole Campaign

Vice President George Bush, moving inexorably to lock up the Republican presidential nomination, is going all-out to finish off Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole’s already crippled candidacy in Tuesday’s Illinois primary.

The kind of overwhelming Bush victory now indicated by public opinion polls and predicted by political analysts would give the vice president a seemingly insurmountable lead in the GOP race.

Dole has pinned his fading hopes for survival on a final, 30-minute appeal to Illinois voters and a feeling expressed by Republicans in a Chicago Tribune poll that they would be reluctant to see the GOP race ended here long before the party’s nominating convention in New Orleans in August. Slightly more than half of those surveyed said it was important that the Kansas senator do well in Illinois so the race could continue.

The same poll, however, showed Bush leading Dole, 62% to 28%, with the vice president’s strength distributed throughout the state’s GOP electorate. Former religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, whose campaign has faded into that of a fringe candidate, drew only 6% support, and two-thirds of the Republican respondents expressed negative feelings about him.

Bush, who swept 16 of 17 GOP contests last week on Super Tuesday, now has locked up 705 of the 1,139 delegates needed for the nomination. Dole has 165 delegates, and 92 delegates are at stake on Tuesday in Illinois.

After Super Tuesday, Dole taunted Bush to join him in a debate in Illinois and “finish me off.” While Bush has rejected the bid to debate, he has shown every intention of trying to accommodate Dole on the other score.

Barnstorms Illinois

In the last few days, the vice president has barnstormed the state, walking in a St. Patrick’s Day parade in Rockford, touring the state’s agricultural centers and speaking to the Chicago Governor’s Club. And his campaign staff has mounted a massive telephone lobbying effort by volunteers who have been calling 8,000 voters a day; about 1,200 phone lines were in operation the final weekend.

At virtually every campaign stop, Bush, demonstrating supreme confidence but no complacency, has declared: “We’re going to try to win as big in the Land of Lincoln as in the land of cotton.”

“If you give me your vote on Tuesday,” Bush told a rally at Crystal Lake, “it seems to me I will cinch the Republican nomination and go on to be the next President.”

Bush is so confident of winning the nomination--and, at the same time, so concerned that the GOP race will leave Dole embittered and the party divided in the general election--that he has begun looking beyond the Illinois primary and preaching Republican unity. And he has begun to direct his fire at the Democrats.

“We’re all Republicans,” he told supporters at a McLean County GOP fund-raiser in Normal, Ill. “We agree far more than we disagree and we ought not to get so negative that we can’t close ranks in the fall. Let’s not forget that our real objective is to put a Republican in the White House.”

And at an Arlington Heights rally, he said he would win the nomination, but added: “I don’t want to do it by tearing down some of the Republicans, not by weakening this party.”

Dole, who has given Bush good reason to worry that their rivalry could cause problems for the vice president in the general election, told reporters on Sunday that “it remains to be seen” whether he could work with Bush if he is the nominee.

The senator, who bluntly accused Bush, immediately after the New Hampshire primary, of “lying” about his record on tax increases, said Sunday he would have to review the record of Bush’s comments about him before deciding whether he could work with him.

Questioned Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Dole rejected flatly a suggestion that he intends to slow his campaign or close it down if he fails to do well in Illinois.

“We are going full bore,” Dole said. “We do have a lean staff, but . . . we’ve got to save our resources. We have people in Connecticut (and) Wisconsin (sites of coming primaries). . . . I am going to be in those states, we are going to do everything we can. And sooner or later, the voters in one of those states are going to say, ‘Hold it a minute, we are about to nominate the candidate who can’t win in November; we’d better turn around and vote for Bob Dole.’ ”

Dole denied any personal dislike for Bush even as he observed that the vice president has “gotten quite a ways without ever really doing very much.” But there is a long history of animosity between the two, dating from 1972 when Dole was compelled to step aside as Republican Party chairman to make room for Bush’s appointment by President Richard M. Nixon. And Dole has become increasingly bitter since his defeat in New Hampshire, abetted by Bush television commercials suggesting the senator would approve tax increases, and followed by Bush’s landslide victory on Super Tuesday.

Problems Mount

Dole’s campaign problems, which have proliferated since the New Hampshire primary a month ago, grew even more pronounced in recent days. After the New Hampshire loss, William E. Brock III, the campaign chairman, fired two top campaign advisers--David Keene and Donald Devine--in a strategy dispute.

Since Super Tuesday, Brock has fired most of the paid campaign staff. Even Dole’s last-ditch bid for support through a live, 30-minute television program Saturday night was marred when a video signal failed midway through the broadcast because of a power failure in the makeshift studio. Viewers in Chicago saw a still picture of Dole for 45 seconds, and then a video biography of the senator rolled on the screen several minutes ahead of schedule to cover the gaffe.

After the live broadcast, Dole re-recorded the program to eliminate the glitches for subsequent airings Sunday and today in several Illinois media markets.

As Dole’s campaign troubles dominated political talk in Illinois, Bush ordered his staff members not to fan rumors of the problems and to refrain from criticizing Dole.

In his Illinois campaign, the vice president has unwrapped a more cohesive series of speeches keyed to themes he is expected to develop at the Republican convention and beyond.

Brothers and Sisters

“A man who’s out of work downstate looks pretty much like the man who’s out of work in Savannah, Ga.--same strain on the face, same hard lines on the brow,” Bush said. “You travel this country and talk to people and you realize: It’s true, we are brothers and sisters, and we are responsible for each other.”

Although Bush has said he sees the Republican nomination as tantamount to election because he expects no serious challenger on the Democratic side, his role in the Iran-Contra scandal has continued to dog him in the presidential race.

When asked in Rockford whether the Democrats would make that role part of the general election campaign, he conceded the possibility, then broadened his reply, saying:

“They’ll raise it, but I can’t wait to debate any one of those Democrats on foreign policy abroad. None of them have had any experience except when they had breakfast at the International House of Pancakes.”

The closest Bush and Dole got to each other in their Illinois campaigning was along the roadways of Galesburg on Saturday night. Dole taped his marred 30-minute telecast at Knox College that evening as Bush was appearing at a 17th Congressional District Lincoln Day dinner there. Their motorcades passed in the streets.

Meanwhile, Robertson, now more than ever on the sidelines of the presidential campaign, spent part of the weekend seeking Republican votes in predominantly black districts on Chicago’s South Side.

The white, conservative former religious broadcaster, stumping in Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson’s back yard, urged the congregation at the Liberty Temple Full Gospel Church to cook up a surprise for Tuesday.

“It would astound the experts if, in this congressional district, three delegates to the Republican convention came out of here for Pat Robertson,” he said.

Because the South Side is so overwhelmingly Democratic, the election of Republican delegates in any of its congressional districts could be decided by a relative handful of voters. And that is what Robertson had in mind by campaigning there.

“It wouldn’t take many people,” Robertson said. “I know it’s tough on this part of town to vote for a Republican. But anybody can vote for one--Democrats, Republicans or whatever, it’s an open primary. And we’ve got a slate of delegates. And every one of them is a black person, every single one of them. . . .

“It wouldn’t take more than about three times the people sitting here in this room, right here, to win those three delegates to the national convention.”

About 500 people, or one-third the church’s capacity, attended the midday worship service and political rally. Church leaders said the gathering was smaller than expected and suggested that backers of Jackson stayed away.

Staff writers Cathleen Decker, John Balzar and Bob Secter in Illinois contributed to this report.