Dole Revs Up Campaign in Bid to Cement Lead

For once, the nacho-munching, ale-swigging yuppies at Bats and Balls, Atlanta’s hottest sports bar, were not focused on the giant TV screens or the local action. Volunteers in Sen. Bob Dole’s campaign, their attention was commanded by Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Dole’s national chairman, as he urged them to maximum effort in Tuesday’s Georgia primary.

McCain and the numerous other headline-grabbing surrogates who are swarming this state in the closing hours of the campaign here are part of the massive effort by Dole’s strategists to capitalize on their candidate’s success in South Carolina by coming as close as possible to sweeping all 241 of the delegates available in Tuesday’s nine contests. Doing that, they hope, could give their candidate an insurmountable lead in the race for the Republican nomination.

Among the many battlegrounds Tuesday, Georgia is particularly notable because Dole can smell the tantalizing prospect of marginalizing two of his chief rivals: Patrick J. Buchanan and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, both of whom are feeling tremendous pressure to win.

Though Dole has admittedly shown little ability to inspire the electorate, his campaign is pursuing the political equivalent of the football strategy attributed to the late Ohio State coach, Woody Hayes: three yards and a cloud of dust.

“We got campaigns going in every state that votes this week,” said senior Dole advisor Dave Carney. “These other guys don’t. They are just not prepared to compete with us.”

As Buchanan conceded to reporters, “We’ve got to have a victory and we’ve got to have one soon.

“If Dole continues to win, a sense of inevitability will develop.”

As for Alexander, he has poured much of his remaining resources into the state, counting particularly on voters in northern Georgia, which abuts Tennessee. While vowing that his campaign will continue regardless of the results here, he conceded to reporters after a rally in Atlanta’s Cobb County suburbs that “sooner or later, I need to begin to do what any candidate does in a presidential race: I need to begin to win.”

On Sunday night, Alexander, Buchanan and publisher Steve Forbes gathered in Atlanta for a debate. Dole decided to skip it. Also-ran candidate Alan Keyes was detained by police outside the studio of WSB-TV when he and a group of followers staged a noisy protest over his exclusion from the debate. He was not charged, and was later dropped off at a nearby parking lot, police said.

Dole’s hopes for the nomination were boosted further Sunday with a blowout victory in Puerto Rico’s GOP primary, where he grabbed all 14 delegates. With 97% of the ballots counted, Dole had won 97.6% of the vote. The Senate majority leader, whose support for Puerto Rican statehood brought him the aid of local officials, won more than 200,000 votes in the commonwealth while no other candidate took more than 2,000.

At a campaign appearance in Gaithersburg, Md., Dole was clearly enjoying his newfound good fortune.

Remember Bill Clinton, “the comeback kid” in 1992? On Sunday, Dole looked into the crowd and pointed to a placard. It read: “Bob Dole, the comeback adult.”

“I like this one,” Dole said, grinning.

He also said that after Tuesday some of his rivals would have reason to decide “it’s time to go.”

Buchanan, meanwhile, spent most of the morning defending himself against charges of extremism--and repeating some of the inflammatory rhetoric that has led opponents to give him that label.

Buchanan accused Dole of fomenting the criticism of him. During an appearance on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, he said Dole is running “a hollow, shabby campaign by calling an old friend an extremist.”

During the NBC program, host Tim Russert showed a film clip from a week earlier in which conservative columnist William Safire said that if anti-Semitism could be judged on a scale that had Hitler as a 10, Buchanan would rank 4 or 5.

“I think that’s really a slander,” a tight-faced Buchanan responded. “A mass murderer of Jewish people, the greatest anti-Semite in history. . . . I think the comparison is not only invalid, it is outrageous.”

Asked about his past remark that Congress is “Israeli-occupied territory,” Buchanan said that “at times Congress has behaved in exactly that way.”

He said that Congress members would say “off the record that they are terrified” about challenging the Israeli lobby, and he repeated his characterization of Jewish commentators, including Safire, as being part of “the amen corner of the Israeli Defense Ministry.”

Asked about the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., whom he has criticized, Buchanan said King had a “flawed character.”

Asked whether blacks and Jews would vote for him, Buchanan said he thought he could attract blacks with his conservative religious message and his protests against loss of jobs to foreign countries. But, “given the hostility that’s coming out from some members of the Jewish community, I think it’s going to be difficult.”

Forbes, who spent Sunday morning in New York, called on Buchanan to “profoundly apologize” for statements that he characterized as “clearly” anti-Semitic.

“There is no way” Buchanan can get the GOP nomination “unless he apologizes for and disavows some of the statements he has made in the past, especially about Israel,” Forbes said during an interview on WNBC-TV in New York. “The only way he can get on the presidential ballot in November is if he bolts from the Republican Party.”

Despite the spectacle of his two main rivals sniping at each other, Dole’s circle remains uneasy about the end result. Members acknowledge Dole’s heavy Washington-insider baggage and lackluster presence remain handicaps in a race where surprise has been the norm, and they do not dismiss the power of Buchanan’s populist appeal or the weight of Steve Forbes’ millions.

Still, in a sense, the Dole campaign has been ready for this particular election day--the first of several successive Tuesdays on which several big states cast ballots simultaneously--ever since Dole launched his third bid for the presidency.

Mass competition means that Dole can now fully exploit the organizational edge he holds over all his rivals and the superiority in funds he has enjoyed over all except Forbes.

In the earlier contests, fought in relatively small states one at a time, Dole’s advantages were not decisive because his rivals had the luxury of time to concentrate their own resources. Now, with the contest spread across so many states, their resources are spread thin.

In South Carolina, where Dole won his big victory Tuesday, he spent about $200,000 on television, nearly three times as much as Buchanan, his closest competitor. Similarly, here in Georgia, Buchanan is expected to spend less than half of the $200,000 Dole will put into television.

That won’t matter much to Sadie Fields, Buchanan’s state director, and the Georgia campaign’s only full-time employee. The Buchanan headquarters in Cobb County has neither a television set nor a radio; the only office equipment on hand was brought in by Fields from her own home. Dole has three full-time staffers and a consultant laboring on his behalf in Atlanta.

“They have a lot more money,” Fields said of front-runner Dole’s operation. “But when you have support at the grass roots, people will sacrifice for their candidates their time and energy.”

Still, “when you and the other guy in a campaign are not somewhere close to equality in what you are spending, it gets pretty tough,” said Roy Fletcher, the Louisiana-based media consultant who helped engineer Buchanan’s upset victory over Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas in that state’s caucuses.

As for Forbes, while he has all the money he needs, his expenditures have been far more limited than at first.

More fundamentally, Forbes seems to lack a coherent blueprint for how and where to use his resources. In this state, with Alexander’s once-promising candidacy lagging badly, Forbes’ own appeal to moderate voters was once thought to have considerable potential. But he did not begin television advertising until Saturday and did not campaign at all until Sunday night’s debate.

In contrast, Dole’s strategists seem to have a very clear idea of what they are doing, particularly with their use of surrogates such as McCain to fire up their own supporters and dominate the media.

On this last weekend before the vote, while McCain addressed the Dole volunteers, Dole’s high command dispatched Mississippi’s Thad Cochran, a power on the Senate Agriculture Committee, along with Farm Belt Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa to meet with peanut growers and processors near Macon.

“Wherever they go, surrogates dominate the news,” contended Carney, Dole’s aide. “Lamar Alexander has one person campaigning for him: himself. We have 15. He’ll be in one media market. We’ll be in 15 or 16.”

Times staff writers Gebe Martinez in Maryland and Bob Sipchen and Eric Harrison in Atlanta contributed to this story.

* FORBES ON CALIFORNIA TV: Millionaire Steve Forbes plans TV campaign in California. A3