Alexander Attacks Dole as Conservative Failure : Republicans: Underdog candidate blames Senate leader for GOP reform setbacks. Kansan meanwhile curries support from Dan Quayle.

Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) came under some of the harshest criticism of the GOP presidential campaign Thursday as rival Lamar Alexander accused him of having failed as a conservative leader even as Dole sought to bolster his conservative support by making an ally out of former Vice President Dan Quayle, a hero to many on the right.

Focusing particularly on the newly approved welfare reform bill, Alexander pointedly contrasted Dole’s performance as GOP Senate leader with the achievements of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to whom he awarded an A-plus. “In the Senate that level of leadership has been missing,” Alexander declared in a speech to the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank.

Alexander’s attack highlighted the increasing number of salvos that rival candidates have been aiming at Dole’s performance as the GOP Senate leader. The address by the former Tennessee governor and education secretary, whose candidacy has yet to catch fire, seemed an attempt to bolster his claim to be the outsider candidate by depicting Dole as a prototypical Washington insider with all the sins allegedly inherent in that breed.

Alexander cited the defeat of the balanced-budget amendment and of regulatory reform measures in the first weeks of this congressional session as early “ominous signs” that the Republican revolution ignited by the midterm election was losing steam on Capitol Hill. And Alexander called the welfare bill, which Dole steered to Senate passage earlier this week, “an affront to the ideas that helped our party win so decisively last year.”

To dramatize what he meant, Alexander displayed the initial welfare bill introduced by Dole. “I have been dragging it around New Hampshire with me to demonstrate just how out of touch even Republicans can be. I plan to carry it into the White House with me to remind me what not to do.”

Although the bill is designed to revamp the current much-deplored, multibillion-dollar welfare system by turning more responsibility for the program back to the states, Alexander complained that the legislation would in effect impose new regulatory burdens on state and local government.

“It tells every community in the country how to define work, as if they don’t already know,” he charged. “It keeps much of the Washington welfare bureaucracy intact. This bill looks so much like something Bill Clinton would propose that he is now threatening to sign it.”

Alexander also found room in his talk for a few harsh words about Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, Dole’s best-financed rival in the Republican contest. Alexander noted that Gramm had criticized the bill but said: “His complaint is that the bill doesn’t have enough rules. He wants an ever bigger bill. His proposal sounds to me like something L.B.J. would pass if he were a Republican.”

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Meantime, the new Dole-Quayle relationship consists of Quayle’s taking on the chairmanship of Citizens for America, Dole’s political action committee, from which Dole formally separated himself when he announced his presidential candidacy last April.

The arrangement offers potential advantages to both men. Dole can hope that an association with Quayle will help him pick up some of the affection that many conservatives feel for the former vice president. In a statement issued by Campaign America, Dole called Quayle “a trailblazer for issues and ideas that sparked the Republican revolution of 1994.”

For his part, Quayle, who early this year abandoned his own hopes for a 1996 presidential race, may hope that the new job will provide him an opportunity to keep his name and face familiar on the GOP campaign trail while he waits for his next shot at the presidency.