But Did Dole Self-Destruct? : Bush Surprised Foes With Strong Showing

Six months and 100,000 miles ago, as the Republican campaign for President drew into focus, George Bush stood in Brussels and told the world how Detroit could learn a thing or two about quality maintenance from Soviet tank mechanics.

Here was the vice president, heading into the opening test of the campaign--the Michigan GOP caucuses--mocking the auto industry.

Bush doubters rejoiced: Didn’t we tell you the vice president would blurt out something stupid or blunder into something stupid, or both, and do himself in?

Opened to Ridicule

Remember, here was the fellow who opened himself to ridicule four years ago for telling the Democrats he would “lay my record on manhood” up against theirs any day. And in the campaign before that he said sure, nuclear war is winnable. Bush himself admits he has had to “pull his foot” out of his mouth any number of times in the past.

So people watched with disinterest through Ronald Reagan’s second term as Bush built himself a huge organization, fat with money and strategic plans and talent and riding on years of political know-how and IOUs. Won’t matter, the doubters said. Bush will bumble it.

Since then, the nation has witnessed any number of ordeals certain to be the finish of him--televised debates, the so-called wimp factor and in Iowa, a major electoral loss.

And each time, Bush walked back from the brink. His now-familiar crooked grin turned wider and more confident.

And quite unlike Bush, his chief rival, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, faded into the dark umbra of his own stereotype.

Yes, Dole was known as the better public speaker, the more engaging personality, the sharper wit; he was his own man, a dominant figure on Capitol Hill whose influence had shaped the actions of Congress for more than two decades.

But the doubters said Dole could not build and tame a fast-moving organization. They said he could not delegate authority or truly invest trust in subordinates. They said he had a meanness in him that he could not harness.

The Dole doubters now say: “We told you so.”

As the vice president’s nomination grows increasingly probable and the contest heads toward an apparent end, there is this to ponder: Has Bush been underestimated all along? Has he grown, gained self-possession and proved himself durable enough along the way to weather the next challenges--including national electability? Or were Dole and the other Republican challengers so feeble and luckless they never really gave Bush a test?

Put another way, why are the Democrats still apparently so happy at the prospect of facing this man, George Herbert Walker Bush?

“Even among Republicans, Bush still has certain problems. Even among Republicans, he is not seen as a particularly strong leader,” said I. A. Lewis, director of the Los Angeles Times Poll, after extensive surveys of voters in nine state elections this year. “And remember, there are a lot more Democrats in this country than there are Republicans,” he said.

Dwight Pelfrey, 33, a beefy electrician at the Ingalls shipyards in Pascagoula, Miss., voted for Bush. He explains it this way:

“He really doesn’t appeal to me. But he’s the best running. . . . He’s probably got an edge in that he’s the vice president. He’s sort of got dibs on it.”

Victories in 19 of 20 primaries (excluding caucuses) and a prodigious advantage in numbers of nominating delegates have, in just one month, created an aura of certainty behind Bush’s nomination. But looking back at the contest so far, many of those who have watched the race the closest, who have participated in it, are reluctant to grant Bush full credit even as they grant him the inevitable.

“I don’t think Bush has really been tested,” said Larry Berg, director of USC’s Institute of Politics and Government. “Every candidate either gets better or falls by the wayside. Dole is responsible for Dole, and it follows that he’s also partly responsible for Bush.”

In those first weeks, Bush owned the road. Despite his crack about the Soviet mechanics, Michigan party regulars rallied to him. Former religious broadcaster Pat Robertson hoped to upend Bush in the January caucuses, but Bush operatives were able to keep the party machinery in friendly hands. Both Robertson and Bush claimed victory and moved on to Iowa, where Dole was waiting.

There, Bush was not just beaten, but crushed. He came in third, behind Dole and then Robertson.

This was figured to trigger Bush’s dreaded “free fall,” the point when a front-runner can no longer hide his weakness, and his friends melt away so fast that he cannot even count on the family dog’s hanging around.

Dole had crafted a neighborly, I’m-one-of-you message that seemed to satisfy conservatives with a little anti-communist fire-eating, and to please moderates with some compassion for the underprivileged.

It looked to be more of the same in New Hampshire.

Bush arrived and promptly stumbled. He showed up in sub-freezing chill at 6:30 a.m. to shake voters’ hands at a Nashua computer plant. Bush was trying to reach the ordinary worker. Unfortunately, he showed up at the executives’ entrance by mistake, and thus was able to clasp only a few dozen hands while scores of workers streamed out another exit.

‘I Am One of You’

Then, next day, he unveiled a speech in which he told New Hampshirites, “I am one of you,” awkwardly cribbing one of Dole’s signature lines.

The end is near, the doubters whispered not so softly to each other.

But later that week, Bush rallied. On Wednesday night, he showed up at a meeting of the Nashua City Republican Committee with the other candidates, swallowed his disappointment and gave a solid, if not stunning, defense of his positions.

His spokesman, Peter B. Teeley, called the event the turning point of Bush’s campaign.

“It was a very, very embarrassing situation for Bush, who had literally been humiliated in Iowa, a state he’d beaten Reagan in in 1980,” Teeley said. “He wasn’t sensational, but he was good. . . . I felt we had bottomed out at that point.”

Bush canceled a planned appearance in New Orleans on Thursday morning and shed some of the imperial trappings of the vice presidency. He toured a lumber yard and stopped for coffee at Cuzzin Richie’s Truck Stop in Greenland. He drove an 18-wheeler and shook hands at a shopping mall, and then he penitently spoke to senior citizens about his oratorical shortcomings and his commitment to the country.

“There are two things people tend to underestimate in George Bush,” Teeley said. “First is his energy. Nobody works harder. . . . And second, he can take a punch. He doesn’t have a glass jaw.”

Up and at ‘Em

Bush showed both qualities that week. Up before dawn, he would call the drive-time radio talk shows. He called them again in the afternoon. He did radio interviews from the car telephone. He held press conferences and showed up for local television interviews live at 6 o’clock. This was in addition to the regular 14-hour-a-day campaign schedule.

“The one thing we really wanted to do in the last few days is really own the news. And at that point Dole’s campaign retrenched, sort of went into a shell,” Teeley recalled.

The New Hampshire effort leaned heavily not only on Bush’s own local organization, but also on that of Gov. John H. Sununu, setting a pattern that would hold in South Carolina with Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. and in Illinois with Gov. James R. Thompson.

Bush won by a mere 14,493 votes. But they were votes that paid off a hundredfold in building the vice president’s confidence and momentum in the days ahead.

Field Was Narrowing

For one, the field was narrowing dramatically. Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. chose to withdraw before the New Hampshire vote, former Delaware Gov. Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont IV right after it. Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, unable to capture conservatives’ hearts, went on for a few weeks before pulling out. Robertson ultimately was reduced to hoping he would remain the leader of a Christian cause within the GOP, but he was certainly not a presidential contender.

By now, people were turning blue in the face waiting for some sure-to-come, colossal Bush blunder.

And there remained the feeling that it was Dole who was losing, not so much that Bush was winning.

Rep. Lynn Martin of Rockford, Ill., a prominent Bush supporter, said she believes Dole handed over the nomination on the night of the New Hampshire primary. Live on NBC News, Dole snapped at Bush: “Stop lying about my record.”

“I think it was that 20 seconds after the New Hampshire primary--Bob Dole defeated himself around the nation. That was the campaign,” Martin said.

“There was a little time there before New Hampshire that my pollster called me Mr. President,” Dole recalled wistfully. “Didn’t last long.”

The New Hampshire defeat stuck in his throat so horribly because this was one time Dole fought his instincts to control everything. He listened to advice. The advice was to be cool and not to engage Bush. Do not be combative.

“It may appear that Dole’s troubles resulted from his stereotype. But the opposite is true. His troubles are because he didn’t follow his instincts,” said David Keene, a former adviser who was later fired in a dispute with William E. Brock III, the national campaign chairman and former secretary of labor, over the direction of the campaign.

“The stereotype is that Dole can’t be managed. Well, having listened to that criticism, he turned it over to the Brock team in New Hampshire. Money got spent. Ads didn’t get made. If Dole had gotten involved, it may have been different,” Keene said.

Seriously wounded at the end of World War II, Dole almost died at the hands of military doctors who administered inadequate medical care, an experience that left him embittered and distrustful of dependency. The 9-percentage-point loss in New Hampshire seemed to reinforce his worst fears about trusting the judgment of others.

Hired Consultants

Like Bush, Dole had hired high-paid consultants, strategists, media wizards and pollsters to chart the course of his campaign. Unlike Bush, however, the Kansas lawmaker was, from New Hampshire on, loath to trust the advice he paid for.

Those on Dole’s charter plane started calling it “the campaign from hell.”

Stories may be told in political saloons for years about those desperate and luckless days. About the day Dole circled Cody, Wyo., for 45 minutes while the 737 jet pilot sought counsel from a young advance man whether to attempt a landing in 120-m.p.h. crosswinds that blew out windows on the ground. Finally, no attempt was made.

But the plane did land one afternoon in Jacksonville, Fla., where Keene and another longtime adviser were kicked off, and their luggage too, in full view of reporters. This settled an internal campaign power struggle but squandered a day of campaigning, and there were only a precious 20 days between the New Hampshire and the South Carolina primaries.

Surprise, Surprise

On another day, Dole went to give a major speech at Universal Studios in Tampa. But again his staff had miscalculated. There was no studio, just hundreds of acres of bulldozed, treeless red dirt. Waiting to greet him were grown people wearing the costumes of Woody Woodpecker and the Frankenstein monster, characters who will entertain at the studio once it is built.

Rather than concentrate on a few Southern states for the 17-state Super Tuesday primaries on March 8, Dole set off on a rambling odyssey through Dixie, squandering scarce resources and time in states such as Alabama and Florida, where all the evidence was that Bush was invincible. The campaign seemed driven as much by whim as by strategy.

The senator took to joking about it: “We all get in the plane and say, ‘Go that way for a while.’ See a lot of nice states.”

Meanwhile, there was no secretary aboard to type his speeches, and for awhile not even an airplane telephone. There were none of the accouterments of a halfway serious campaign for governor, let alone for President.

‘Magical Mystery Tour’

The scenes made it easy if not compelling to wonder: What kind of a White House would Dole preside over?

A frustrated Brock began sardonically referring to the entourage as the “the Magical Mystery Tour.”

One time, Brock sighed: “You remember that character in Li’l Abner who walks around with a cloud over his head. . . . I feel like that.”

Bush hardly had to do more than keep jet fuel in Air Force Two to highlight the contrast. Dole was shut out on Super Tuesday.

Then there were the events of Illinois.

In a small conference room at a Chicago law firm, faced with a make-or-break effort, Dole and his advisers met and talked about television advertising. Strategy so far had centered on an ad called “Strong Man,” which emphasized Dole’s toughness and leadership qualities. But tracking surveys showed it was having little effect.

At the meeting, Dole agreed to scrap “Strong Man” and replace it with a hard-hitting new spot stressing poll results indicating that Dole would make a much stronger Republican candidate in November than Bush would.

But the next morning, Dole aides were spooked by a USA Today poll showing Bush with a slight lead in head-to-head match-ups against three top Democratic contenders. They quickly tried to yank $450,000 worth of prepaid ads already on the air, but did not follow through by replacing the ads with something else.

The chaos grew uncontrollable when Brock chose the same day to announce massive staff layoffs, many of which had been routinely planned to trim down the operation after Super Tuesday.

Strategists decided to divert some of the ad money to buy a half-hour block of time for Dole to make a dramatic appeal for votes. But Dole rejected advice to tape the program in a Chicago studio to reduce costs and the chances of technical glitches.

Instead, to heighten the drama and focus attention on the program, Dole insisted the show be done live at a site in remote Galesburg, where Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas once debated.

Dole’s demands created a technical nightmare for his staff. Galesburg had no satellite transmission facilities, so special equipment had to be hired and ferried in from hundreds of miles away.

The final technical arrangements that enabled the show to go on were not hammered out until just 30 hours before air time. And only then did serious discussions begin in the Dole camp about what to say on the show. The only time available and in Dole’s price range was directly opposite the top-rated game show, “Wheel of Fortune.”

Got a Late Start

Less than eight hours before show time, Dole speech writers had yet to be told even the framework of the program. The final outline for his remarks was not handed to Dole until just seven minutes before he went on the air. Even though Illinois campaign officials had urged Dole to come out swinging against Bush in the broadcast, Dole took a cautious tone and delivered an address little different from his standard stump speech.

And then everybody’s worst fears were realized. A mysterious power failure hit the makeshift studio in mid-broadcast, wiping out the video portion of the program for several minutes. Viewers at home saw only a still picture of Dole, although they could hear his words.

Bush, meanwhile, ran smooth as a Rolex.

He worked the Illinois landscape for every possible vote everywhere from Chicago to a tent in a field. Outside the community of Schaumburg one afternoon, Bush’s advance team had scouted out a cluster of 50 people gathered, eating pancakes in sub-freezing weather under a yellow-and-white striped tent. They were listening to the Warrenville Folk Music Society play zithers. Perhaps not a perfect crowd for an Establishment, New England-cum-Texas Republican, but you never know. Bush went ahead, parked his limousine, and plunged into the crowd.

Bush beat Dole by almost 20 percentage points.

Former Dole adviser Keene said he believes the vice president may benefit only in the short term from Dole’s calamities.

“Bush has not been as well tested as he might have been--he hasn’t felt real pressure,” Keene said. “He has not developed as you might expect in a hard-fought pre-nomination struggle.”

On this foundation, Bush doubters--Democrats and Republicans--build the case that relatively little has been learned this primary season about Bush’s electability.

“That’s -------!” snarled Bush aide Teeley.

Attacking a front-runner as unelectable is an old wheeze in politics. Teeley said: “We tried it against Ronald Reagan in 1980. . . . Then the Democrats, they couldn’t wait to tangle with Reagan.”

Personality Themes

Primary election campaigns are not always about major issues or new directions for the country. But this contest between Dole and Bush seems particularly without engaging differences. Their themes are about personality--what editorial writers in the 1980s call “character” and what the candidates call “leadership.”

That is sure to change once the Democrats pick their candidate.

“Basically, George Bush is going to have to run with all of Ronald Reagan’s negatives and none of Reagan’s positives,” said Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston of California. “The country clearly disagrees with Reagan on any number of things--aid to the Contras, the environment, social programs. But they like the man. Bush will have to defend all the programs but he’s not the same man.”

To that, other Democrats add: Iran-Contra, the homeless, transportation, education, ethics in public service and on and on.

Depends on Opponent

Teeley said: “Yeah. Who the hell do they have? (Gov.) Mike Dukakis and the Massachusetts Miracle? There are six states in New England. He’s got the fourth-best economy. And the only foreign policy experience any of them had was they once debated at the International House of Pancakes.”

So, of course, it comes down to who carries the Democrats into battle.

And on that foundation, the case for Bush is most often made.

“The biggest thing he’s got going for him is the old saying: ‘In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king,’ ” said Eddie Mahe Jr., an unaffiliated Washington-based Republican consultant. “There is no exciting man in this race. . . . The thing George Bush has going for him--he’s been around a long time and the electorate really believe they know George Bush.”

Staff writers Cathleen Decker with the Bush campaign and Bob Secter on the road with Dole contributed to this story.