Dole Faces New Test on Familiar Campaign Trail

This is the winter of Bob Dole.

After three decades as a Republican leader in Congress, after a series of failed starts for the presidency, he stands this week exposed like never before, frozen in time like the hard white February snow and ice that have gripped Iowa.

This now seems surely his last run for the White House. At 72, he is incongruously a symbol of the Old Guard while at the same time a point man in the conservative revolution that has reawakened Washington. His face is tanned, his smile new and robust. But there is still the old growl, the old impatience--omens that the old Dole still endures.

There is a keen sense about him at the start of yet another presidential election year. There is an urgency, a knowledge that comes with a lifetime in the trenches, watching others win the grand prize he has coveted, only to be left behind to again straighten his tie and play the party loyalist.

“Has my time passed?” he asks of Iowa crowds, often to applause. “No,” he says, answering his own question, “my time has not passed.”

But to win this time, Dole the perennial candidate must repackage himself. He must make himself fit these times, a task not easy given the widely varying perceptions of the electorate.

To some, his long experience makes him the best of the pack of nine Republican candidates. To others, he is simply too old. To some he is a Washington pro. To others he is a back-room compromiser with no executive leadership expected in a president. During the recent budget impasse, he was hailed for staying in Washington to get the government back to work. But others vilified him for ignoring the campaign trail in Iowa.

On three recent days, he flew around Iowa, peering out the window of a chartered Beachcraft King Air turboprop. He viewed a winter landscape reminiscent of his own boyhood, the farms and grain elevators no different than the same rural setting of his home in western Kansas.

On the ground, he campaigned with the vigor of youth, through long grueling days at churches, factories and town halls, shunning an overcoat in 23 below zero windchills. He dismissed with a carefree laugh how it was so cold they could hardly shut the airplane door.

Restoration Campaign

His is a message not of new ideas as much as it is a campaign of restoration for America.

Seizing upon the enthusiasm that has galvanized the new conservatives in Congress, he came here to Spencer, and similarly small towns like Indianola and Storm Lake and Fort Dodge, and preached for American pride as though it were a lost commodity on the winter prairie.

He jabbed his good left arm. He pounded his good left fist. He challenged his audiences to help him cut the federal government in Washington out of the nation’s private lives and to return real power to the states. Repeatedly, he slipped from his pocket a laminated copy of the 10th Amendment, reciting the 28 words that, he says, lie at the heart of what drives him to be president. Powers not spelled out in the Constitution, the amendment declares, “are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.”

In Iowa he will be tested again when the state holds its critical caucus meetings Monday night. Eight years ago, Dole won 37% of the vote here. He and his aides are keenly aware they must at least come close to equaling that mark this time out.

But for Dole, each time he has run in the past, there suddenly has emerged someone else. Where in the past there was Ronald Reagan and George Bush, now comes Steve Forbes.

So at campaign rallies Dole hearkens back to his trusted themes, seizing the podium to the cheers of his supporters and the drum drone of strangely chosen, piped-in jungle-beat music. He speaks of his work in Washington as the Senate majority leader, but also about his war record and the Purple Heart ribbon he wears daily on his suit lapel.

He tells the story of his World War II commemoration visit to Italy, there where he was gravely wounded in the war and there also where he decided two years ago to run for president once again.

Except for a word change here or a pause there, the story is always the same. At The Hotel in Spencer, at a roast beef buffet packed with 300 supporters in the lower lobby and another 100 left crammed in the upstairs bar, he said it this way:

“While I was there I saw a lot of my friends, and we thought about the America of our youth. We thought about the America we’d risked our lives to protect, about our hopes for the generation that would follow us. And I thought about the America we live in today. And I thought about Bob Dole and whether he had any future in it. Or whether I should just go on and retire and do whatever.

“So standing there kind of daydreaming, I thought to myself: Maybe there is one more mission for my generation. One more call to service. So I thought about it. And I talked to my wife, Elizabeth, about it. And it was a very difficult decision.

“And I thought my generation might have something the country needs in a president right now. Someone who knows what made America great. Someone who knows what has been sacrificed to keep us free. And someone who will do all in his power to lead America back to her appropriate and rightful place in the sun.”

Moment to Strike

Those in his traveling entourage recognize that--win or lose--this is at last Dole’s moment to strike. Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a strong supporter in the state, said Dole is being extra careful.

“What really convinces me is that in 1996, and it was my suspicion in 1988, is that with this guy, I’ve never seen him lose his cool or use profanity or consume alcohol or do anything you wouldn’t expect,” Grassley said.

“And I guess what surprises me about that is that when you’re with him day after day as I’ve been in the last three days, if there’s some bad character of a guy, it would surely come out. But that hasn’t happened. I’m telling you, there’s not another Bob Dole out there.”

Is his message getting across?

Yes, said Roland Schmidt, a 26-year-old high school social sciences teacher who drove to the Spencer buffet from Spirit Lake, a town so far north in Iowa that it’s almost Minnesota. “Dole’s always been a favorite up here. He’s the closest one to my views.”

No, said Alura Lullmann of Albert City, who supports candidate Patrick J. Buchanan for his tough anti-abortion stance. She tried to ask Dole five questions on abortion at a Storm Lake rally Sunday afternoon, but he cut her off after the third. She complained about that afterward. “He is not consistent on pro-life. Dole’s not telling the truth.”

Yes, said Ernest Simon, the mayor of little Livermore, Iowa, who came to a Fort Dodge Holiday Inn event Saturday night to thank Dole for his work passing the unfunded-mandate legislation loosening federal requirements on the states. “Let’s give this country back to the states. He’s on track about that.”

For Dole, it seemed at first that everything was going right. Powerful rivals like retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and House Speaker Newt Gingrich opted out of the race. For Dole, it looked like a cakewalk to the nomination in San Diego.

But then Forbes came on strong, seemingly out of nowhere, spending millions to put Dole suddenly on the defensive, enough at this point to make it a race. A barrage of negative advertising is flowing back and forth between the Dole and Forbes camps. And even should Dole outdistance Forbes, there is still the larger question of whether he can outlast President Clinton.

The result has been that Dole often finds himself struggling to define who he is, and who he is not.

Liberals say he is too conservative, and many conservatives say he is not conservative enough. When he stresses his experience and years of service in Congress, his detractors dismiss him as too old. Others dismiss him as used up.

Relegates Decisions

Dole appears to be relegating more of the campaign decisions to his staff this year, as opposed to his ill-fated run in 1988. But left to himself to fashion his image, he sometimes seems somewhat unsure of which Bob Dole to present on the stump.

A man who over the years built his reputation as a deal-making, Washington insider with a cool temperament, he now is trying to warm that persona, to showcase the one-liner, the quip that brings a ballroom laugh and humanizes the man. A lot of the Dole humor is of the homespun variety. But maybe that plays well in Iowa. It seems to.

When he left the Fort Dodge Holiday Inn, apparently unsure of how the campaign stop fared, he shot back over his shoulder: “If anything went wrong, it’s Grassley’s fault.”

Opening his speech in Spencer, he noted that his wife was upstairs greeting supporters in the crowded bar. “She passed one bar in law school,” Dole said. “She hasn’t passed any bars since.”

At the Buena Vista College reception at Storm Lake, he told the story of the Armenian doctor in Chicago who repeatedly operated on him after the war. “But he would never let me pay him,” Dole said. “Seven times. Every time I went to him, he’d charge somebody else who had money. They called it a Veterans Preference back then. I call it the Good Old Days.”

But there is still the flash, the old anger, the impatience.

At the end of a rally at the Davenport River Center, James Etman, a local landscaper, urged Dole to support legislation allowing marijuana use for critically ill patients.

“I’ve got a lot of compassion for sick people,” Dole snapped back, trying to work his way around from Etman and away from the question. “But I won’t support marijuana.”

Art Cullen, editor-reporter of the tiny Storm Lake Times, asked during the audience’s question-and-answer session about Dole’s take on the 1996 farm bill.

Dole immediately spied Cullen’s notebook and sharply turned to others for questions. “You’re with the press,” he derided Cullen. “Let me get to some of the taxpayers first.”

It will not be until Monday night before the nation--and Dole himself--learns if he is on track. Whether the stump speeches and the quips, the long days and the cold days, have paid off.

But he is drawing some of the largest crowds here in Iowa, larger than the other eight candidates. Leaving the Fort Dodge Holiday Inn, three World War II veterans heaved on their coats and headed for their cars, with Dole’s speech still echoing in their thoughts. “It’s cold, cold, cold,” one said.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here in winter,” said another.

“Well,” said the third, “there’ll never be another winter like this.”

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