Dole Stays Ahead of GOP Pack By Not Stumbling

The starting lap of the Republican presidential race is over, and one result has become clear--in the eyes of the party activists and professionals who are the candidates’ current audience, none of the hopefuls has so far been able to provide a good reason for rejecting the leader of the pack, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas.

As a result, as Dole and his fellow candidates arrived here this weekend for the latest in a series of regional forums for GOP candidates, the Senate majority leader dominates the early competition much as Green Bay’s beloved gridiron heroes, the Packers, once ruled the National Football League.

Basking in the comfort of his front-runner status, Dole has so far avoided the sort of blunders that damaged him in past presidential drives. Moreover, on issue after issue, from family values to assault weapons to affirmative action, he has adroitly maneuvered to foreclose openings that the others might exploit against him.

Of course, Dole could well slip--he is, after all, 71 years old and has a long history of losing. But his rivals face the frustrating reality that at this point they themselves can do little to force him to stumble.

“It’s very hard to force a professional like Dole to make a mistake,” House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in an interview. “He may make a mistake, but it won’t be because somebody forced him to do it. And in the effort to try to force it, the others may actually chew themselves up.”

Indeed, instead of making Dole slip, his rivals have spent the spring plagued by minor and major miscues of their own--from Gov. Pete Wilson’s embarrassment over hiring an illegal immigrant as a domestic worker to Texas’ Sen. Phil Gramm’s mishandling of relations with conservative social activists and local political figures in New Hampshire, scene of the contest’s crucial first primary next winter.

Gingrich himself has been the latest bearer of bad news to Wilson, Gramm, former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and the five other declared candidates who are chasing Dole.

Earlier in the year, Gingrich disavowed all presidential ambitions. Now he has once again taken to hinting that he might get into the race--a sure indication that he feels none of the others have shown much sign of catching fire.

“I don’t rule out anything,” is now the word from the House Speaker, who plans to visit New Hampshire in early June. Were he to enter the race, Gingrich almost certainly would quickly overshadow Dole’s other rivals.

All that has caused a certain restlessness, even here in the Midwest, Dole’s home turf, where 600 activists from 13 states gathered for a Republican regional leadership conference.

“We need a candidate who can articulate a vision that will mobilize voters,” lamented Betty Jo Nelson, a former state legislator from suburban Milwaukee.

Robert P. Shinkle, a Dayton, Ohio, business consultant, voiced a similar concern. He said he prefers Gramm to Dole because he considers Gramm a “risk taker.” “People who are not risk takers are supporters of Dole,” he said as he headed to a bratwurst-and-beer reception at the Packers Hall of Fame.

As for the candidates themselves, they have mostly remained polite--praising each other by repeatedly saying that any Republican would be better for the country than President Clinton. But that stance could change quickly.

“All of us can’t roll along to the start of the primaries saying: ‘We’re all great guys,’ ” said one of the candidates, asking not to be identified. “If Dole is still up there and we’re still down here, we’ll have to start shooting. Dole is going to find himself under attack in six or seven different areas. That’s the dynamic of the race.”

Indeed some sniping has already begun. At a recent gathering in Denver, for example, Gramm repeated his boast that he deserved much of the credit for defeating Clinton’s health care reform proposal, then sharpened his point with a new line claiming that he had staked out a hard-line position in opposition “when the pollsters in Bob Dole’s office said it was political suicide to take on health care.”

Strategists for several campaigns hope events in the next few months will reinforce precisely that argument. Dole’s ingrained tendency to bargain and compromise on legislation, they believe, could prove to be his undoing, causing him to make pragmatic sacrifices of portions of the GOP “contract with America” cherished by conservatives.

“To me, he’s the contract killer,” said Earl Ehrhart, the Republican whip of the Georgia House of Representatives and a Gramm supporter. “Everything Gingrich sends over, Dole cuts in half and then says: ‘OK, and now we’ll compromise on the other half.’ That just bugs me no end.”

Still others say they believe that Dole’s membership in the World War II generation will ultimately hurt him despite his combat-hero status.

“People are going to want somebody from a younger generation to lead the country into the next century,” said Mike Murphy, chief strategist for Alexander.

So far, however, neither of those arguments has taken hold, and Dole continues to roll on--piling up endorsements from influential party leaders. Eight governors and 16 senators top a 12-page list of VIP backers compiled by his campaign headquarters.

And not only is the Kansas lawmaker way ahead in every national survey of Republican voters, he leads Wilson in surveys of Californians and edged Gramm in one recent measure of popularity in Texas.

At the same time, the very size of the field impedes the others from gaining the attention their candidacies need to flourish, and so does the fact that all share the same fundamental conservative beliefs.

Each and every one is down on government, high on family values, strong for tax breaks and fervently committed to making the United States No. 1 in the world. This makes it hard for casual listeners to distinguish among them.

“They were all talking Republican principles,” said Delaware GOP Chairman Basil Battaglia after Gramm and three other contenders, Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove, former State Department official Alan Keyes and Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar, addressed his party’s state convention early this month. “To differentiate them would be pretty hard.”

At a convention in Savannah, Ga., where he cheered lustily for Alexander while wearing a Gramm button, Robert Irvin, a Republican legislative leader in Georgia, said he admired both men. “Their messages aren’t all that different,” he said.

That would be crushing news to strategists for both Alexander and Gramm who have labored hard to create distinctive and sharply contrasting appeals for each of their candidates--Alexander as the Washington outsider dedicated to grass-roots conservatism, Gramm as the Washington champion of conservatism, committed to using all the power of the federal government on behalf of the cause.

The course the spring has taken may be most frustrating to Gramm, the best financed of Dole’s rivals and the one who set the pace early in the year with heavy fund raising and triumphs in a series of state-party straw polls. But then he became enmeshed in an argument over whether he favored efforts by other states to move ahead of New Hampshire on the 1996 primary calendar--a mortal sin in New Hampshire politics. For months, Gramm has been unable to shake loose from that quarrel.

More important, Gramm has found it hard to consolidate the conservative support that was supposed to be his for the taking. One reason for this difficulty is the erstwhile economics professor’s near obsession with fiscal policy, particularly budget balancing, and the consequent downgrading in importance of social issues dear to New Right activists, such as abortion rights and family values.

Thus, when Gramm met last month with conservative leaders who urged him to speak out more forcefully on family values, he retorted: “I’m not a preacher, that’s your job,” according to some of those present, who have spread the tale widely.

Though Gramm recently made two speeches in three days at conservative gatherings designed to assure his listeners that his heart is in the right place on values, he still must compete for conservative support against the impassioned rhetoric of others on the right, most notably, Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator who challenged President George Bush in 1992.

“Gramm’s problem is Buchanan and Buchanan’s problem is Gramm,” said Buchanan, explaining that each stood in the path of the other’s hopes for mounting a strong challenge to Dole.

In similar fashion, Alexander’s thrust to cast himself as the outside-Washington candidate has been blunted by Wilson’s all-but-official entry into the race. It is not just Wilson’s experience in state government that threatens Alexander’s candidacy. The governor also intends to use as a major theme of his campaign the idea of relying on “personal responsibility,” rather than government programs, to deal with social problems, according to pollster Fred Steeper, who is helping out the Wilson campaign.

But that happens to be the same idea Alexander has been stressing since he announced his candidacy last February and declared: “We must take responsibility for the future of our country, by taking responsibility for our own neighborhoods, schools, our families and ourselves.”

Wilson, meanwhile, has abundant problems of his own. His throat surgery has rendered him literally speechless for weeks and has delayed the formal announcement of his campaign until next month at the earliest.

When he regains his voice, Wilson will have to find a way to present himself as a champion of the battle against illegal immigration in the face of the recent disclosure that he had once employed an illegal immigrant in his own household. He must also compete against Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) for the votes of abortion-rights supporters at the same time that he strives to allay the suspicions of conservatives over his past sponsorship of tax hikes.

To add to all their other difficulties, Dole’s pursuers have to contend with the Republican tradition of nominating front-runners--a custom adhered to for most of the post-World War II period.

“One thing we have to face here is the humongous lead that Dole has among Republicans, and the fact that Republicans nominate whoever their front-runner is a year out from the election,” said Steeper, who served in the Bush and Ronald Reagan campaigns before joining the Wilson team.

The last time a Republican front-runner was upset was in 1952, when Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, known as “Mr. Republican,” lost out to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the proximate mid-20th Century equivalent of George Washington, a role none of Dole’s rivals comes close to approaching.

Back in the pack, the other candidates can take comfort in past stories of obscure candidates who have rocketed to the top after catching fire in Iowa or New Hampshire. But those stories all have a catch, as Steeper noted: “These guys who come from asterisks in the polls to getting nominated were all on the Democratic side.”