Dole, Forbes Pick Up Backers for N.Y. Battle

Sen. Bob Dole and Steve Forbes battled for big-name endorsements and Patrick J. Buchanan rallied himself and his crusaders as the race for the GOP nomination Wednesday sped toward its final phase.

A day of rapid events saw these developments in the race:

* With the nomination now within reach, Dole swooped into Texas to accept the embrace of the man who denied him the prize eight years ago: former President Bush. Along the way, Dole gathered up support from Bush’s two politician sons, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Jeb Bush, the GOP’s 1994 gubernatorial nominee in Florida.

* Buchanan vowed to stay in the race but conceded Dole’s nomination “seems inevitable.”

“We are going to fight until hell freezes over, and then we’re going to fight on the ice,” he thundered to supporters in Tampa, Fla.

* Forbes surprised the GOP establishment, and maybe even himself, by belatedly securing the endorsement of Jack Kemp, champion of the supply-side economics that Forbes has espoused.

* Polls for the second consecutive day showed Dole with a commanding lead in New York before today’s primary, which could well be the last real fight of the nomination season. Forbes and Buchanan were virtually tied for a distant second in the polls.

* Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, his claim of electability soundly disproved, dropped out of the GOP contest as did hapless Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana. Both gave their support to Dole.

In Houston, Dole met for 20 minutes with the elder Bush. While he came away without an official endorsement, there was little doubt about his support. Bush lavishly praised Dole as “a real leader, a great friend and great credentials for president of the United States.”

“I couldn’t have written the script any better,” Dole said afterward. “These kind of non-endorsements are very helpful.”

Bush’s praise for Dole was the high bid in a day that amounted to a transcontinental duel with Forbes for endorsements.

Kemp, who was Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development and was himself a presidential hopeful, ended weeks of speculation about his intentions by endorsing Forbes at a hastily called press conference in Albany, N.Y. Only the day before, Kemp had declined to issue an endorsement when Forbes sought one during a campaign visit to Buffalo, which Kemp used to represent in Congress. But even while issuing his endorsement, Kemp insisted that he was “not here to campaign against Bob Dole.”

Kemp’s Decision

Kemp described his decision as an emotional battle between conflicting personal concerns. In the end, he said, his belief in a flat tax, the cornerstone of Forbes’ campaign, drove him to speak out.

Forbes is a “candidate of inclusion, optimism, the 21st century,” Kemp said. He added that he would “absolutely” support Dole if he won the nomination but called the endorsement “my way of saying how important these issues are.”

Dole shrugged off Kemp’s decision: “Jack and Steve Forbes are friends, and we’ll see what impact it has in New York.” Indeed, both Forbes and Kemp downplayed the importance of the announcement.

In the meantime, the increasingly confident front-runner proceeded to round up his Bush family trifecta in advance of the Florida and Texas primaries next Tuesday.

In the gray damp of a humid Texas morning, Dole, surrounded by a thicket of Bushes, still appeared buoyant from the Tuesday sweep that has brought him to the brink of the nomination that eluded him in 1980 and 1988.

At a morning ceremony outside the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Dole suggested that Buchanan and Forbes may want to reconsider their campaigns after Thursday.

“There are three of us in the race, and [New York] will be a good test,” Dole said. “I hope if they do poorly, they will decide it’s time . . . to close ranks and start the effort to defeat Bill Clinton.”

At their meeting in Houston, the senior George Bush offered Dole a chair that he used as president. As Dole settled into it, the former president declared: “Darn right it fits well. Most appropriate too.”

For many years, Bush and Dole held each other at a wary distance. Their relationship was shaped not only by political rivalry but also by an unstated class resentment that Dole, who was reared in Dust Bowl Kansas, felt for Bush, a senator’s son who was chauffeured to school during the Depression.

Dole-Bush History

In 1988, Dole and Bush dueled bitterly for the Republican nomination, with Dole at one point memorably declaring in a television interview that Bush “should stop lying about my record.” But they worked closely together during Bush’s presidency, and Dole has taken criticism from several of his rivals this year for supporting the tax increase that Bush signed in 1991.

At Wednesday’s ceremony at the Texas Governor’s Mansion, there was a faint hint of tension between Dole and Gov. Bush over U.S. relations with Mexico.

In late February, Dole, who has been seeking to rebut Buchanan’s charges that he has been too easy on Mexico, wrote Clinton urging him to declare Mexico out of compliance with U.S. drug laws. Clinton declined to do that.

Gov. Bush did not criticize Dole directly for his suggestion, but he pointedly called for a lowering in the volume of attacks on the Mexican government.

“I think he [Dole] understands full well that in order to solve the common problems we have along our border that we’d better be dealing in a spirit of friendship, not animosity,” Bush said.

In the meantime, animosity, not friendship, remained the order of the day in GOP circles here as voters prepared for the state’s primary.

For Forbes, this state could be his Waterloo. And as the voting approached, the verdict on his campaign to date, including the Kemp endorsement, was too little and too late.

“I think it helps a little with the news coverage today,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, the leading independent polling organization in New York.

“But momentum is momentum,” he added, pointing to Dole’s big win two days ago. Not that Dole actually needed an eight-state romp to feel secure about New York. Miringoff’s survey last week showed Dole with a 49%-21% lead over Buchanan, with Forbes in third place at 17%. A tracking poll for the New York Post released Tuesday showed similar margins.

Among rank-and-file Republicans, enthusiasm for Dole may be wide, but it is also mild.

“I thought he was nice and warm,” said Frank McLaughlin, a phone company lobbyist who heard the senator address a business group in Manhattan earlier in the week.

Asked if Dole had spelled out his goals for the country, McLaughlin said: “In 20 minutes you don’t expect that.”

Nonetheless, neither of his rivals seem, to have mustered the sort of effort that would be needed to overcome Dole’s several advantages here.

Forbes’ $1-million media buy, for example, is large but not enough to make a dent in Dole’s lead, said Jay Townsend, a New York consultant working for the Buchanan campaign.

“It’s late in the game to be playing in New York,” he added, suggesting that Forbes would have needed to reach deeper into his personal fortune to pay for the advertising necessary to have a chance against Dole.

Logistics Trouble

In addition, Forbes’ efforts here, as elsewhere, have suffered from organizational confusion. For example, Robert Mark Penna, the state coordinator, opened an office in Albany a few weeks ago, closed it, then reopened it this week.

“Our strongest single resource is people,” said Penna. But to work for Forbes, volunteers have to risk retribution from the regular party organization, which has made clear its preference for Dole.

In addition, under the state’s election procedures, voters cast ballots directly for individual convention delegates, and many of Dole’s delegate candidates are household names in their districts: members of Congress, city councils and the state Legislature. The Forbes and Buchanan delegates, by contrast, are mostly relative unknowns.

Buchanan has an additional handicap in New York. A good many of his potential supporters are registered in either New York’s Conservative Party or its Right to Life Party and thus cannot vote in the Republican primary.

He is short of resources as well.

“We have really passionately dedicated volunteers,” said Christine Sacchi, Buchanan’s Staten Island coordinator. Still, when volunteers run out of campaign literature, they must pay for more printing themselves.

Dropping Out

Meanwhile, the agony of falling behind, struggling and losing ended Wednesday for Alexander and Lugar.

In Nashville, Alexander ate his highly spiced words as gracefully as he could.

“For the last year, I have gone across this country describing my vision of America’s future and asking this question: ‘Is Sen. Dole the man the Republicans want carrying our banner against Bill Clinton?’ What I’ve discovered is that for most Republicans, the answer to that is yes.

“Sen. Dole is a man of character,” Alexander said. “He’s a man of integrity. I’m proud to call him my friend, and I’ll be proud to have him as president of the United States.”

In Washington, Lugar wrapped up what was one of the most luckless but also decent campaigns of 1996. He never fell back to attack others and always stayed with the contrarian ideas which he believed important.

“After a remarkable day of voting in 10 states yesterday, the apparent nominee is a man for whom I have great admiration--Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas,” said Lugar. “I look forward to his presidency.”

Alexander vowed to focus his attention on helping Dole beat Clinton and discounted his own criticism of Dole as a man without ideas who would surely lose in November.

“It turned out I was wrong about that,” he said.

Brownstein reported from Houston and Shogan from New York. Times staff writers Bob Sipchen in Albany, N.Y., Elizabeth Shogren in Orlando, Fla., Mark Lacey in Nashville, Tenn., and John Balzar in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

* CLOSE CONTEST: A new Times Orange County Poll finds Dole virtually tied with President Clinton. A3

* RELATED STORIES: A5, A10