Dole Replaces Iowa Campaign Manager : Politics: Move to enlist activist Darrell Kearney’s help follows the senator’s tie in straw poll. Action is aimed at stemming his slide in survey standings.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, slipping in new polls and suddenly running scared in his race for the Republican presidential nomination, has dumped his Iowa campaign manager as he prepares for a flurry of new activity on the hustings.

While polls indicate Dole remains a strong front-runner in the GOP race, the campaign shake-up announced Friday echoes the kind of organizational problems that hobbled his previous runs for his party’s presidential nod in 1980 and 1988 and still spook some of his advisers.

Dole, who has increasingly courted the party’s right wing in his drive for the nomination, named Darrell Kearney, a conservative activist, to replace professional organizer Steve Gibbs as Iowa manager.

The Kansas senator had played down the importance of last month’s Iowa straw poll that resulted in a disappointing tie for first with Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. But Kearney told reporters the poll was “a wake-up call for Dole’s supporters, who thought we were so far ahead they didn’t need to bother to vote.”

Kearney, who aided then-Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) in Iowa in the 1988 presidential race, said the Dole campaign now will take nothing for granted.

A longtime Dole adviser said that before the Aug. 19 straw poll, the senator had not regarded the contest as very significant. But after news accounts portrayed the results as an embarrassing setback for him, he was furious with campaign aides who he felt had let him down.

“I knew somebody’s head would roll,” the adviser said Friday after learning that Gibbs had been replaced and would become director of field operations in Iowa.

Immediately after the straw poll, Dole strategist Tom Synhorst was dispatched from the campaign’s Kansas City office to take overall control of the Iowa operation.

*

Nelson Warfield, Dole’s campaign spokesman, said the straw vote was “an organizational test and it showed we should make a couple of changes and we have. We brought on Kearney because he’s one of Dole’s closest political advisers and will be able to focus the campaign resources better.”

Pointing out that Dole retains a strong lead in trial heats for the GOP nomination, Warfield said: “We’ve got the conservative message that will win this thing.”

Various nationwide surveys that once showed Dole polling more than 50% in the trial heats now show him dropping below 40%, but still leading his nearest challenger--Gramm--by about 3 to 1.

The Dole campaign, apparently bent on showing its operations are going full blast, sent out a blizzard of press releases Friday, ballyhooing a Dole appearance Sunday in Darlington, S.C.; two newly scheduled stops in Iowa and a speech to the American Legion convention in Indianapolis, all on Labor Day; a speech in Chicago on Tuesday, and an endorsement of Dole’s candidacy by the president of the New Hampshire Senate.

Meanwhile, a Newsweek poll indicates Dole, who two months ago held a nine-percentage-point lead over President Clinton, today trails him by two points, 47% to 45%. A Gallup survey released two days ago showed Clinton leading, 49% to 46%. And a poll released Friday showed Dole narrowly trailing Clinton in a key Southern battleground. The poll, conducted for the Shreveport (La.) Times showed Clinton leading Dole in Louisiana by 46% to 44%--a surprise given Clinton’s low standing in the South.

The Newsweek poll released Friday indicates that if Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were the GOP nominee, he would defeat Clinton, 51% to 41%.

But Powell’s standing as an independent in a three-way race with Clinton and Dole has slipped significantly over the past year. Today, the poll indicates, Powell would be a distant third, with 21% of the vote, compared to Clinton’s 36% and Dole’s 33%. A year ago, a Newsweek poll showed that Powell as an independent candidate would get 30% of the vote.

*

A Dole-Powell ticket, an increasingly hot topic in Republican circles, would lead the Clinton-Al Gore ticket, 51% to 44%. And even with businessman Ross Perot running as an independent and siphoning off 14% of the votes, the Dole-Powell team would lead Clinton-Gore, 43% to 38%.

Dole has met privately with Powell at least twice and has said that if nominated, he would seriously consider asking Powell to be his running mate.

A longtime Powell friend, who was a senior official in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, said he believes Powell would accept that role.

“The real question,” said Powell’s friend, who has also known Dole for many years, “is whether Dole would ask Powell to be on his ticket before the Republican convention to help him win the nomination. Dole might just do that if he sees he’s in trouble, but I think he would rather win the nomination on his own.”

Dole will necessarily be distracted from his presidential campaign when he returns to Washington next week as Congress reconvenes after a short summer break and he acts as Senate Republican leader in the continuing struggle over the budget, welfare reform and other contentious issues.

Earlier some of his advisers had suggested that because of such distractions he might give up the leadership post as the first key contest in the nomination process--the Iowa caucus on Feb. 12--nears. But Dole, who garners headlines and television time by virtue of that role, has given no sign he will relinquish it.