NEWS ANALYSIS : Dole Advisors Set Sights on Image Building

Just like Bill Clinton four years ago, Bob Dole has taken the hill--only to find himself at the base of the mountain.

Dole’s string of primary wins has cleared his path to the GOP presidential nomination. But as he shifts his attention to the general election, Dole again faces a sheer climb: Recent polls show him badly trailing President Clinton.

Almost exactly four years ago this week, Clinton was in the same position--with the Democratic nomination within reach but then-President Bush apparently beyond his grasp.

At that point, Clinton’s campaign placed a bet on biography in an effort to heal the wounds left by his drive to the nomination. Through the spring, Clinton and his aides focused on convincing the public he was not a packaged politician with questionable ethics, but a product of the American dream who honored small-town values of faith and individual responsibility.

Dole and his advisors are just beginning to formulate their message for the general election. But they also believe that emphasizing his life story may be one key to catching the incumbent. “I don’t think you can reinvent him,” says one Dole advisor, “but you are going to see him reintroduced.”

That effort is underway. Dole’s powerful personal story of struggle and recovery from shattering wounds in World War II has already become the one foundation in his often disjointed and verb-averse stump speech. On Thursday, while campaigning in Michigan, Dole even visited the site of the Army hospital where he recovered from his wounds.

But Dole’s problems are in some ways more complex than those Clinton faced four years ago. Even Dole’s advisors recognize that they can’t all be solved by imprinting his personal history more forcefully on the public mind.

Indeed, key Republicans are laying plans for a coordinated partywide campaign--involving governors and members of Congress as well as the candidate--that would attempt to enlarge the presidential election from a personal choice between Clinton and Dole into something more like a generic contrast between GOP and Democratic visions of government.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich is privately circulating a “National Strategic Plan for 1996” that calls on the party to run on “a choice between two very different teams, two different sets of values . . . and two different futures.” The memo flatly concludes: “We lose a contest of personalities and pure politics.”

The greatest challenge facing Dole is that many voters don’t see him projecting a vision or agenda to take America into the next century--and it is unlikely he can greatly reduce those doubts by emphasizing events of 50 years ago. Indeed, fewer than one in four people in the voting-age population were even born before the end of the war.

“People respect his story,” says Karlyn Keene Bowman, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “but they want to look forward, not back.”

In a view that many Republicans privately echo, Democratic media consultant Mandy Grunwald says: “There is a threshold question that people demand that presidential candidates can answer: What do you want to do for me and the country. And [Dole] hasn’t answered it.”

By contrast, Clinton’s difficulties four years ago owed less to doubts about his ideas than concerns about his ethics and morality. Many Americans were introduced to Clinton in 1992 through the allegations that he had committed adultery and tried to evade the draft during the Vietnam War.

His principal rivals for the nomination--former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--compounded his problems by effectively painting Clinton as a duplicitous, calculating politician willing to say anything to win. The cumulative effect was devastating: Even as Clinton sealed the nomination in March, large numbers of Americans said in polls that he lacked the honesty and integrity to serve as president.

“God knows people knew Bill Clinton had ideas, tons of them . . . that wasn’t the issue with [voters],” said Grunwald, a key advisor to Clinton in the 1992 campaign. “They had discounted him as a messenger.”

Through a series of appearances that culminated in his speech to the Democratic National Convention in New York, Clinton rehabilitated his image by linking his personal story of rising from a small town in Arkansas (“a place called Hope,” as he put it) to his policy agenda of “putting people first” by investing more in education and training.

Likewise, Dole aides this year consider it a central task to connect his personal story with his agenda for limiting the size and scope of government. “You will see him talking about his background,” said one of the advisors. “The question is how do you connect that with his governmental philosophy?”

So far, Dole hasn’t made that connection very clear. He now frequently says that his arduous recovery from his World War II wounds made him more sensitive to the suffering of others--though he hasn’t explained how that empathy shapes his agenda of reducing government spending and balancing the budget.

Perhaps the closest Dole has come to connecting his personal story and his policies is when he talks about the $1,800 his neighbors in the “hardscrabble” town of Russell, Kan., raised to help him pay for the seven operations he needed after the war. In Dole’s telling, the story becomes a clipped hymn to values of community and self-reliance that Republicans say the growth of government has eroded. “That was what was so great about America,” Dole says.

More broadly, aides say they hope Dole can ultimately make the case that his own rise from adversity--not only from his war wounds but Dust Bowl poverty--proves that ordinary Americans are capable of exceptional deeds when government gets out of the way. Yet it is not clear that excessive government was much of an impediment for Dole; indeed, he has spent virtually his entire career within government.

Other comparisons drawn from the life stories of Clinton and Dole may serve the challenger more effectively. Dole frequently attempts to transmute the doubts about his age into an asset by stressing his “experience.” And in his frequent declaration that he sees his campaign as “one more mission” for his generation, Dole draws on cultural images of stability and self-sacrifice by World War II veterans that contrasts with popular perceptions of baby boomers as mercurial, unreliable and self-absorbed.

Those images are at the core of the contrast with Clinton that Dole has made the most progress in developing. In speeches now, Dole presents himself as a “doer, not a talker”--a construction that attempts to make a virtue of Dole’s taciturnity and a burden of Clinton’s verbal agility.

“I think part of the reason there is a 40% disapproval [rating] for Clinton is that people don’t think you can trust him very much, and that he is slippery,” one senior GOP operative said.

“And Dole is not that way. These are some important contrasts: When people pick a president, they look at that stuff.”

Yet if upright character was all voters demanded in a president, Jimmy Carter and George Bush would have been reelected. Dole’s challenge, almost all observers agree, is to convince Americans that he can translate his personal values into a public agenda that materially improves their lives.

Times staff writers Janet Hook and Sam Fulwood II contributed to this story.

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CAMPAIGN TRAIL

STEVE FORBES

Officially exiting the GOP race, Forbes expressed few regrets over the multimillions of dollars he spent and “wholeheartedly” endorsed Bob Dole.

“I made the best investment any of us can make,” Forbes said at a Washington news conference. “I tried to make my country a better, stronger and finer place.”

In an interview with The Times, Forbes said Dole called him Thursday “and said while we may differ on some details, he thinks the [flat-tax] concept is sound.”

“Like a good leader he was reaching out,” Forbes said.

Asked if Dole’s call for retaining deductions for mortgage interest payments, charitable contributions and state and local taxes precludes his support of a flat tax, Forbes said: “You never get perfection in politics.”

Forbes estimated that he spent between $25 million and $40 million on his campaign. For his investment, Forbes won two primaries and a total of 900,545 votes--about 16% of the votes cast so far.

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BOB DOLE

In welcoming Forbes’ support, Dole kept the flat tax at arm’s length. Forbes’ candidacy “highlighted our party’s commitment to cutting taxes and overhauling our tax system. . . . We haven’t always agreed on the specifics,” Dole said in a statement.

On the stump in Michigan and Ohio, Dole said he was reaching out to “those in the audience who may not be active Republicans . . . Ronald Reagan Democrats.”

Those voters will be crucial to Dole in the general election. They are also important in Tuesday’s primaries in the Midwest, where Democrats and independents can vote in Republican primaries.

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PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

Buchanan has also focused on Democrats, urging them to cross party lines in next week’s primaries and vote for him.

Thursday, campaigning in Michigan and Ohio, he called on Dole to “get behind the idea of a flat tax.” But Buchanan stressed that his plan, unlike Forbes’, would retain the mortgage interest and charitable deductions.

He also kept alive the prospect of an independent candidacy. “If they keep slamming the door in my face and they tell your people you don’t want them, then you’ve got to think about what you’re going to do,” he said.

Compiled from Times’ staff and wire reports