Senate Showdowns Create Leadership Test for Dole : Politics: Majority leader’s handling of controversial issues could propel or torpedo his presidential campaign.

With a raft of politically charged issues thudding onto his desk in these final weeks of the congressional session, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) faces a daunting test of leadership that could greatly burnish or seriously tarnish his chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination.

Faced with the task of shepherding tax cuts, welfare reform, a huge overhaul of Medicare and the rest of the GOP agenda through the often-balky Senate, Dole has an opportunity to showcase the leadership skills--the much-touted ability to “get things done”--that he has made the centerpiece of his claim to the presidency.

“It all comes down to what happens in the Senate,” said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), New England chairman of the Dole campaign. “He wins the election here on the Senate floor.”

He could also lose it, as Dole himself seems to acknowledge. “This is a defining moment for the party,” Dole said Wednesday as he headed into the Senate chamber. “If I do my job . . . I think we look like we could provide leadership. If we don’t do it, I certainly don’t benefit. There’s always a risk.”

The test comes at an already crucial time for Dole, as some of the luster is wearing off his front-runner status in the GOP presidential race. While Dole continues to have considerably more money than his rivals, many Republicans are openly grousing about the lack of enthusiasm for the GOP field.

On Wednesday, even conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh seemed to be reflecting that feeling. Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell would beat President Clinton if Powell ran as a Republican and had a conservative running mate, Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated radio program. But if Powell did not run, he added, “then Bill Clinton may waltz back into office.”

Dole allies dismiss the doubters. “Every one of our challengers is basing his campaign on the dream that Bob Dole stumbles,” said Nelson Warfield, spokesman for the Dole campaign. “Their fantasy is that a failure in the Senate would somehow undermine his claim of leadership. It’s a false hope.”

“If he can produce things like welfare reform, Medicare reform and a balanced budget, he delivers on the Republican agenda,” Gregg said. That accomplishment would “take all the ground out from under” other GOP contenders.

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Others, however, say the next few weeks offer Dole far more opportunities to fail than to succeed. “If the Senate really does turn out to be a graveyard for much of the Republican agenda, Dole pays a very heavy price,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. “But if things go OK in the Senate, I’m not sure Dole gets a lot of credit. He’s seen as a good majority leader who makes [House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s] agenda happen.

“It may, ironically, remind a lot of those Republican voters that this isn’t Dole’s agenda in the first place. He’s best at implementing others’ agenda rather than providing vision and initiative,” said Kristol, who is not enthusiastic about Dole’s candidacy.

As Congress plows into the year-end legislative thicket--a dozen appropriations bills and an omnibus budget bill that contains Medicare revisions, welfare reform, tax cuts and scores of other changes in time-honored federal entitlements--Dole is likely to be the chief bushwhacker. That’s a role at which he has excelled during his 34-year career in Congress: the agile deal-maker, the inside player with a keen eye for opportunities to compromise. Those are the skills that helped him lead the Senate Finance Committee for two years in the mid-1980s and helped propel him into the job of Senate Republican leader in 1986.

Dole’s detractors argue that deal-making skills are not what it takes to make a great President. They view Dole as insufficiently committed to tax cuts and other conservative principles that helped sweep Republicans to power in 1994.

Much of Dole’s campaign so far has been geared to emphasizing his leadership skills and polishing his image as a right-wing stalwart--defender of tax cuts, scourge of gun control, critic of affirmative action and the like. But occasionally, the pragmatic, split-the-difference side of Dole shines through as it did at a recent forum of presidential candidates in Iowa. A member of the audience asked Dole whether he’d be happier with a $50-billion cut in taxes or a $50-billion cut in the federal budget deficit. Abruptly, the meeting room, packed with anti-tax conservatives, fell silent.

“I’d take 25 of each,” cracked Dole, prompting waves of laughter.

But he abruptly shifted to a serious tone--and to a script that was more likely to please forum sponsors like the National Taxpayer Union: “I guess I would go with the tax cuts, and let the money go back to the people. . . . Though I’d certainly not want to forgo the spending reductions.”

More recently, many Republicans thought Dole had slipped back into his old ways when he suggested the Senate might not pass the full $245-billion package of tax cuts sought in the GOP budget-balancing plan. Party conservatives swatted down the suggestion, as Gingrich and Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) let loose with war whoops against compromise.

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“I didn’t get on the Finance Committee to cut deals with Bill Clinton and the Democrats or, for that matter, with Bob Dole,” said Gramm, a rival presidential candidate who has become Dole’s in-house nemesis. “I went on the Finance Committee to cut spending and to cut taxes.”

It was hardly the first time Gramm has tried to portray Dole as a drag on the GOP revolution on Capitol Hill. Suggesting that Dole has been “compromising away the mandate of the 1994 election,” Gramm said in September: “Bob Dole is not standing up for the ‘contract with America’ in the Senate.”

Much of the contract--the GOP manifesto of the 1994 campaign--died or slowed to a crawl in the Senate after whisking through the more conservative, rambunctious House. The proposed balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution was killed by one vote. Regulatory reform stalled in the face of Democratic opposition. Legal reforms were watered down. Anti-crime legislation never surfaced.

To be sure, Dole faces higher hurdles than House leaders in enacting bills, because Democrats in the Senate have far greater power than their House counterparts to block and delay bills through the filibuster and other tactics. “The contract is doing very well in the Senate against long odds,” Warfield said. A key question is whether GOP primary voters will appreciate the niceties of Senate filibuster rules or whether they will blame Dole for coming up empty-handed on many issues.

Dole supporters are confident he will deliver on the big ones, as he did in September on welfare reform. Dole brokered deals with both the conservative and liberal wings of the Republican Party and brought along support of a sizable number of Democrats to win a decisive bipartisan endorsement of the far-reaching measure.

But even such triumphs offer fodder for his rivals on the campaign trail.

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Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, for example, complained that the welfare bill doesn’t go far enough to lift regulatory burdens on state and local governments, and called the measure “an affront to the ideas that helped our party win so decisively last year.”

In the end, Dole’s performance on the campaign trail may matter far more than anything he does under the Capitol dome. “I like to do talk shows,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Gramm supporter, “and I have yet to have someone call in and say: ‘Bob Dole is not leading the Senate.’ ”

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Times staff writer Jonathan Peterson contributed to this story.