Dole Walks Fine Political Line in Bid for Presidency : GOP: He’s ahead in polls. But can he convince a party hungry for revolution to nominate a veteran insider?

At 71, Bob Dole is suddenly enjoying a second spring.

More popular than ever in public opinion surveys, he leads his competitors for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination by giddy margins of 3 to 1 or more and regularly tops President Clinton in tests of the general election.

Once derided as a political hatchet man for his caustic attacks, Dole often sounds statesmanlike now next to militant voices like that of Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, Dole’s leading rival for the nomination.

And in a city polarized by the competing visions of Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)--two men stamped indelibly by the 1960s--Dole often seems like the adult supervision: a stoic survivor of the World War II generation who offers stability, balance, maturity. “Isn’t it amazing how I’ve become the voice of reason in the Republican Party?” he marveled earlier this year when he dropped in for a courtesy call at a meeting of Senate Democrats.

That status is the foundation of Dole’s strength in the polls. It is also his potential Achilles’ heel.

After last fall’s historic Republican victory, much of the GOP’s activist core--the partisans who will largely determine the choice of next year’s nominee--are looking for a leader who will be unreasonable, in the sense that he rejects accepted wisdom about the scope of “reasonable” retrenchment of the federal government.

Dole, who sparred regularly with the party’s most conservative elements over the past 15 years, bends toward that current now--sharpening his opposition to affirmative action, hiring campaign organizers from the Christian Coalition and promising the National Rifle Assn. that he will attempt to repeal the ban on assault weapons that Congress narrowly approved last year.

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Those gestures to conservatives ultimately could endanger Dole’s standing with the centrist voters who will be the deciding factor in the general election. At the same time, even these signals may not be sufficient to suppress the right’s lingering suspicion of Dole during the primaries.

So, balancing all of these complex considerations, Dole heads toward the formal announcement of his candidacy Monday as the man on a tightrope: He stands far above everyone else but must walk an exceedingly narrow line.

Dole’s lofty standing in the polls, support from a wide array of leading party officials and virtually unlimited capacity to raise money all give him reason for optimism. But looming over his candidacy is a question as heavy as the dust clouds of his Kansas youth: Even with Dole’s determined effort to tack right, will a party hungering for revolution accept as its nominee a veteran of more than three decades in Washington, a man whose political career has been defined by compromise, conciliation and the search for 51 votes?

“The jury is still out,” says Jeff Eisenach, executive director of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a think tank associated with Gingrich. “At this stage, I don’t think you can identify any of the candidates as a next generation New Republican. The central question of the campaign may be who assumes that mantle.”

In 1992, after Bill Clinton became the first baby boomer elected to the White House, one of Dole’s closest advisers told him that his time may have passed. But now in Dole’s camp there is a sense that the nation may be exhausted with brilliant and mercurial baby boomers (a category in which they privately include not only Clinton but also Gingrich) and ready to turn back one last time to the stolid, steady generation that surmounted the Depression, defeated Adolph Hitler and manned the Cold War watch. No one would put it on a bumper sticker, but at the core of a race between Dole and Clinton would likely be a simple theme: “Bring back Dad.”

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In a parliamentary system, Dole would be an obvious choice for prime minister. No one knows better the terrain between the introduction and passage of legislation.

But in his two previous campaigns for President, he often appeared to be a man without a map. In 1980, after serving as the party’s 1976 vice presidential nominee, Dole finished last in Iowa and attracted only a humiliating 607 votes in New Hampshire. In 1988, he won the Iowa caucus but again crashed in New Hampshire, losing to Vice President George Bush, who went on to win the nomination easily. The defining characteristics of Dole’s 1988 campaign were almost all negative: disorganization, infighting, indecision and the absence of a compelling message.

Message remains a particularly sore spot for Dole. Like Bush, Dole throughout his career has struggled with “the vision thing.” Dole has always put more stock in tangible things: commitments, vote counts, the sharp snap of a deal settling into place. Even now his speeches often sound as if he’s reading the list of bills on the Senate calendar.

That rhetorical style reflects the habits of mind of a man who has spent his entire life as a legislator, one who is more comfortable solving problems and reacting to events than charting a course. Dole doesn’t pretend he can see beyond the horizon, and he’s always appeared suspicious of those who believe they can.

From early on, Dole never had the leisure of theory. He grew up in Dust Bowl Kansas, in a world that gave nothing without sweat, and even then gave grudgingly. His father ran a creamery and later a grain elevator, and his mother gave sewing lessons and sold sewing machines, but there was never much money around. To pay the bills at one point, the family moved into their basement and rented out the first floor.

It was not a life without comforts--football, basketball and track at Russell High, his mother’s fried chicken and homemade ice cream--but it was far enough removed from luxury to instill in Dole a populism more personal than political. As the ultimate Washington insider, he is comfortable maneuvering among powerful interests, many of which have contributed generously to his campaigns over the years. But running in 1988 against Bush, who as a senator’s son was chauffered to private school during the Depression, Dole burned with a barely concealed class resentment: the belief that he had clawed his way to the same heights to which Bush was born and was the stronger man for it.

In Dole’s pantheon, endurance ranks above brilliance, and inspiration is found in perseverance, not charisma. He calls himself a “survivor” and offers his reversals as much as his triumphs as testimony to his capacity to lead. “It just seems to me,” he told a group of newspaper editors recently, explaining his decision to seek the presidency again, “maybe America needed . . . someone who understood hard times and good times, and being tested, and being on your back and being on your feet.”

It was last spring in Italy when he reached that decision, Dole says. He had traveled to France for the ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-day, and then traveled on to Italy. He first arrived in Italy 49 years before as a young lieutenant rippling with rude vigor; he left in a full-body cast, his body shattered by shell or shot or mortar from the Germans burrowed into Hill 913 in the Po Valley.

Dole spent 39 months in and out of hospitals. Painfully, slowly, he learned to walk (confounding doctors who thought he would never again take a step), but not all the hours squeezing rubber balls and sweating on the homemade exercise equipment that his friends constructed in the garage, nor even the operations performed free by a prominent surgeon--an Armenian immigrant who believed Dole epitomized America because “he had the faith to endure”--could straighten Dole’s right arm or return feeling to his left hand. The imprint of the war never left him.

In his previous campaigns, Dole never dwelled on the war or his wounds. Even in private, Dole has never been one to share his feelings about his disability, or much of anything else. When asked with whom Dole let down his guard, one longtime adviser, considered among his most intimate, looked puzzled: “I don’t know of anybody. I don’t know that he ever lets his guard down.”

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But now a generational consciousness grounded in the war is moving to the center of Dole’s public identity. His announcement tour will conclude in his hometown on April 14, the 50th anniversary of his wounding in Italy. He portrays his decision to run again as flowing from the feelings that washed over him last spring, standing in the Italian hills again, looking out over the crowd of veterans and their children and thinking: “Well, maybe there is one more mission out there, one more call to serve.”

First, however, Dole has to receive his commission from the party. And despite his strong position in the polls, that may prove complicated.

The last presidential hopeful to amass so commanding an early advantage was Walter F. Mondale in 1984. But Mondale nearly lost the Democratic nomination that year despite his lead because then-Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado persuasively made the case that the former vice president represented the party’s past, not its future. Many Republicans believe Dole could face the same threat.

In the dismissive argot of young conservatives, Dole is the prototypical “pre-Reagan” Republican: a conservative who looks to temper the growth of the welfare state rather than tear it down. “Dole’s rhetoric comes across as one who is too comfortable with government,” says Grover G. Norquist, a conservative strategist close to Gingrich. “You don’t sense from him unease with the power of the state. You do with Gramm; you do with Gingrich.”

At Republican gatherings around the country, it’s common to hear the complaint that Dole is too much the legislator--too willing to make a deal with Democrats rather than press for total obliteration of the left, the banner under which Gramm and Gingrich march.

Ideology explains part of the friction between Dole and the party’s most ardent conservatives, but it is not the core of the dispute. It is difficult to label Bob Dole as anything but conservative. His overall voting record on economic, social and foreign policy issues, as measured by the National Journal, have been only slightly less conservative than Gramm’s since 1985, the beginning of Gramm’s Senate career.

The issue is more the relative weight of ideology in Dole’s approach to the world. To a greater extent than Gramm or Gingrich, Dole is willing to subordinate ideology to the demands of governing--moving the machine forward, reaching accommodations. Forced to choose between making a point on principle and making a deal, more often than not Dole has chosen the deal. “If somebody asked me what is the unifying theme,” says one close adviser to the senator, “it’s that Dole likes to solve problems.”

That flexibility wins Dole applause even from some Democrats. “Of course I’ll be supporting Clinton,” says Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who has worked with Dole on U.S. policy toward Bosnia. “But I do think Dole has extraordinary experience on the full range of issues, domestic and international. . . . Raw material, does he have the capacity to be a good President? I think the answer is yes.”

But that same approach is the problem for some on the right. “He’s got two problems: one specific and one more general,” says David Mason, director of the congressional project at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “The specific one is taxes. He has always been perceived as being weaker on taxes than your typical Republican activist would prefer. The more general problem has always been this more tactical orientation to politics, the belief that politics is the art of the possible and his job is to draw the best possible deal. And that can lead to the criticism that he’s too willing to compromise.”

The suspicion that Dole lacks sufficient commitment to the Republican counterrevolution is partly a matter of age and style. Once Dole himself was an impatient young turk. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1960, he opposed much of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society (although he did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and supported an insurrection against House leaders by then-Rep. Gerald R. Ford (R-Mich.), who promised a more partisan, sharply edged opposition.

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Arriving in the Senate in 1969, Dole expressed the same frustrated impatience he now hears from some of the Republican freshmen who have parachuted into the upper chamber from the House this year. Disappointed by the reluctance of Republican Senate leaders to defend President Richard Nixon from incessant Democratic attacks, Dole quickly became an aggressive presence on the Senate floor, sparring with Democrats and castigating reporters for alleged bias in their coverage of the Vietnam War.

As a reward for his pugnacious loyalty, Nixon named the junior senator chairman of the Republican National Committee. For two years, Dole excoriated Democrats with such enthusiasm that when Ford needed a replacement for Nelson A. Rockefeller as his running mate in 1976--someone who would fire low and hard at Jimmy Carter while Ford remained presidentially above the fray--he turned to the sharp-tongued Kansan. If anything, Dole accepted that mission with an excess of gusto: In his vice presidential debate with Mondale, Dole declared World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam all “Democrat wars”--a formulation that cemented the reputation as a political “hatchet man” that stuck to him for years.

Even then, however, there were other sides to Dole. As RNC chairman, Dole regularly rebuffed demands from the White House for attacks on Democrats that he considered beyond the line of propriety. And through the mid-1970s, he worked closely with Democratic Sen. George S. McGovern--who, as the party’s presidential nominee in 1972, had been the principal target of Dole’s acid invective--to widely expand the web of federal programs, from food stamps to school breakfasts, aimed at reducing hunger. Dole seemed genuinely concerned about hunger, although it is also true that the programs benefited his farmer constituents.

As he ascended into leadership positions in the 1980s, Dole never lost his partisan edge. But his rhetoric softened, frequently leavened by his insistent, subversive wit, and he began to bury his image as a pit bull by proving himself a skilled legislative tactician.

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Dole gathered the votes for President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, and then the next year turned around and pushed through a $98-billion tax hike aimed at reducing the budget deficit largely opened by those sweeping revenue reductions. The following year, Dole played a critical role in negotiating a bipartisan Social Security reform package that stabilized the system’s finances by raising payroll taxes and increasing the retirement age.

Installed as majority leader in 1985, Dole won Senate approval, on a dramatic 50-49 vote, for a bold package of spending cuts that abolished 13 federal programs, eliminated Social Security cost-of-living increases for one year and froze defense spending. The package died when House Republicans convinced Reagan to repudiate it--a defeat that still rankles Dole. (“It didn’t get through the House because House Republicans at that time weren’t so anxious to cut spending.”)

Along the way, Dole negotiated an end to the standoff over extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, helped to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, and in 1991 brokered the final deal that allowed passage of an amended Civil Rights Act that Bush had earlier vetoed as a “quota bill.” Since Bush’s defeat, Dole has emerged as the leading Republican voice on foreign policy. He has promoted a neo-Nixonian vision of hardheaded self-interest as the basis of America’s engagement with the world, and he has sharply criticized Clinton for relying too much on the United Nations.

When Clinton took office, many conservatives feared--and some in the White House hoped--that Dole might be willing to meet the new President in the center. Instead, Dole quickly carved out a position of intense partisan resistance, beginning with the filibuster early in 1993 that killed Clinton’s economic stimulus plan. Ignoring Democratic efforts to paint him as an obstructionist, Dole led an ever-hardening GOP opposition that doomed some of Clinton’s major initiatives in 1994, from special-interest lobbying reform to health care reform.

The Republican opposition during Clinton’s first two years “was more obstructionist than ever before,” maintains George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic senator from Maine who dueled with Dole as majority leader during that period. “The filibuster was used in a way it was never used before in American history. It was obviously a deliberate strategy to create a gridlock and then benefit from it, which they did.”

Having blunted Clinton’s advance, Dole now must convince Republicans that he can lead their own. In his speeches, Dole presents as his lodestar the proposition that the federal government should radically devolve power to states, cities and individuals. He’s pushing legislation strongly favored by business groups (and denounced by environmentalists and consumer organizations) to roll back federal regulation, and he recently seconded an idea put forth by House freshmen to eliminate four Cabinet departments: Education, Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development.

On social issues too, Dole is squeezing the space to his right--on the assault weapon ban and on affirmative action. In mid-March he introduced a bill to end federally run affirmative action programs for minorities and women in hiring, contracting or other areas. But Dole still faces doubts from some conservatives about the depth of his ardor. Take affirmative action. The deal Dole negotiated on the Voting Rights Act in 1982, as interpreted later by the U.S. Supreme Court, created the legal basis for the dramatic expansion of congressional districts designed to elect minorities--a process now under attack from conservatives as racial gerrymandering. In 1985, a handful of Reagan Administration conservatives sought to eliminate the principal federal spur toward affirmative action--an executive order requiring federal contractors to establish “goals” and “timetables” for the hiring of firms owned by women and minorities. Dole staunchly opposed repeal of the measure.

Now that executive order would be the most important casualty of Dole’s legislation to ban federal affirmative action efforts. But one veteran of the Reagan-era argument doubts Dole truly has the stomach for that fight.

“To the extent the public is behind these issues, Bob Dole is going to be leading the charge,” says William Bradford Reynolds, who backed repeal of the executive order as assistant attorney general for civil rights under Reagan. “To the extent he perceives the politics is such that it appears to be mean-spirited to certain people, Bob Dole will back off. That is the way the man operates.”

Or consider welfare reform. Having seen poverty firsthand in Russell, Kan. (as county attorney he signed welfare checks for his grandfather), Dole has always been more equivocal than many conservatives about retrenching federal programs for the poor. He’s already raised red flags about aspects of the House Republican welfare reform bill to cut off aid to legal immigrants and to mothers younger than 18 who give birth out of wedlock. To the newspaper editors, he said, almost heretically: “I know government does a lot of good things.”

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Taxes are another issue where Dole will struggle. During the 1980s, he feuded with young House conservatives over his repeated support for tax increases as part of overall deficit reduction. Dole heaped scorn on supply-side advocates and took just as much fire in return from House firebrands like Trent Lott (now Dole’s deputy in the Senate), Jack Kemp and later Gingrich, who memorably labeled Dole “the tax collector for the welfare state.”

Dole’s 1988 campaign foundered in New Hampshire largely because he refused to sign a pledge not to raise taxes as President. Under Clinton, however, Dole from the start ruled out tax increases in any deficit-reduction package. This time, those around him believe that when the anti-tax pledge is pushed onto his plate again, he will sign it. To prove “that he has learned the lessons of the 1980s . . . that would be very important,” says Norquist, the GOP strategist.

Dole’s adaptation to the prevailing Republican currents on taxes and racial preferences underscores his peculiar position as he begins the 1996 race. While he aspires to lead the party, he makes no pretense of attempting to shape it in his image.

To the contrary, he is moving forcefully to prove himself compatible with a vision of the Republican future stamped primarily by the young conservatives that he often scorned during the 1980s. Dole now stands closer than at any point in his career to the presidency, the one prize that has eluded him. But for this proud and private man, there may be no path to victory without an element of surrender.