Dole Sews Up GOP Nomination With Midwest Victories

Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas clinched the Republican nomination Tuesday with victories in four Midwest primaries, finally claiming the prize he first sought 16 years ago and making him almost surely the last of the World War II generation to vie for the White House.

Before Dole could savor his victories, however, billionaire entrepreneur Ross Perot resurfaced Tuesday, saying for the first time that he would run for president again if members of his Reform Party ask him to, which would complicate Dole’s general-election prospects.

In early returns and in projections based on samples of voters leaving the polls, Dole was the clear leader in all four states voting Tuesday: Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

“Nothing is going to stop it now,” Dole enthused. But he declined to formally pronounce himself the nominee just yet, preferring to at least nominally maintain that the outcome is in doubt until California’s vote next week.

“We think it’s California here we come. Next Tuesday, for certain, it’s in the bank,” the 72-year-old senator said.

Dole spent the primary day in Washington, tending to his job as Senate majority leader. His main GOP foe, Patrick J. Buchanan, moved on to California in advance of its March 26 winner-take-all primary.

From the beginning of the 1996 race for the White House, Republican and Democratic strategists assumed that no matter what the results of the primaries, the autumn campaign would include Perot’s Reform Party and probably Perot himself.

But until now, Perot has been coy about his intentions, and, for him, uncommonly quiet. On Tuesday, he spoke out.

“Let’s assume the dust clears and that’s what the members of this party want. Then certainly I would give it everything I have, because probably there’s not a luckier person alive in this country today,” Perot said during an interview on a San Antonio radio station.

At the same time Tuesday, the Reform Party worked to put Perot’s name on the November ballot in Texas and Florida, among other states. Already, the party has qualified for a spot on the November ballot in California and four other states.

Perot can run as an independent, as he did in 1992, whether or not his new party is on a state’s ballot. Having the party on the ballot, however, would provide him some additional electoral leverage.

Dole said he would try to talk Perot out of running.

Asked what he would do about Perot, Dole said in a CNN interview: “We confront him before he gets in. We say, ‘Ross, we are the reform party. Take a look at your checklist, take a look at what we’re trying to do in the Republican Party. I think every issue that you raise, we have had or will have had a vote on.’

“I would say, ‘Ross, what else do you want?’ ”

In 1992, after his on-and-off candidacy, Perot won 19% of the vote with his own brand of entrepreneurial populism. This time, perhaps because of Perot’s erratic performance four years ago, he would begin as a greater underdog.

A nationwide Gallup Poll released Monday showed Perot favored by 16% of the electorate, with Dole at 36% and Clinton leading at 46%. In California, a Times Poll showed that Perot would draw 15%, behind Clinton at 52% and Dole at 30%. Many Republicans fear that Perot could draw disproportionately from voters who would otherwise lean to the GOP, although The Times Poll indicated that at least in California, he would draw roughly equally from both sides.

Some of those potential Perot voters now support Buchanan, who opened his campaign in California Tuesday, conceding that something extraordinary would have to happen for him to win here.

“Maybe we can pull off a miracle in California,” he told supporters. At a press conference outside the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles, Buchanan attacked federal judges who invalidated voter-approved Proposition 187’s restrictions on social services for illegal immigrants. He called the judges “little dictators in black robes” and urged a federal statute that would impose Proposition 187-like restrictions nationwide.

Dole is not scheduled to arrive in the state until Friday. He plans to spend the weekend campaigning in California before heading to Seattle Sunday night.

On Tuesday, a jovial Dole relaxed in his role as leader of the Senate.

“It’s nice to be back up here again,” Dole said as he convened a Capitol Hill news conference to criticize the latest budget proposal from Clinton.

Dole said he spoke via telephone with Clinton earlier in the day, telling the president that Congress would soon give final approval to the line-item veto, which both Clinton and Dole support.

“We mutually agreed to make the effective date 1997,” Dole said, referring to when the presidential power to veto individual spending items would take effect. “And one of us will get to use the line-item veto.”

For now, Dole said, he plans to save his campaigning for the weekends. “I’m going to be a full-time senator.” Which, in his case, might be indistinguishable from a presidential candidate as he pushes a legislative agenda sure to bring him into direct conflict with the White House. That agenda includes another try for welfare reform, tax breaks for families with children, regulatory rollbacks and a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

“We’ve tried, he’s vetoed it,” Dole said.

Tuesday evening, hundreds of Dole supporters gathered at a Washington victory party in a ballroom at the Omni Shoreham hotel, where the stage was draped in a red-white-and-blue banner reading “Bob Dole Hero of the Heartland.”

Interviews with voters as they left polling booths in the four Midwest states continued to show unease about Dole’s vision for America and an unbridgeable gap in the GOP over abortion.

According to an exit poll conducted by Voter News Service, a consortium of four television networks and the Associated Press, nearly 3 out of 5 Wisconsin voters said Dole had no new ideas to bring to the campaign. In Illinois, the split was 50-50 on the question of new ideas.

On abortion, Michigan GOP voters were split about evenly on whether the GOP platform should call for a ban on abortion. In Ohio, 2 in 5 voters said they wanted Dole to pick an antiabortion running mate, while 1 in 5 said they wanted a vice presidential nominee who supports abortion rights.

Before Tuesday’s Midwest primaries, Dole had won 22 states’ GOP primary elections and caucuses in five frantic weeks of campaigning--among the most bruising for the party in 20 years.

Buchanan, in an even more frenzied effort, was victorious in only two early contests. Publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who dropped out of the campaign last week, also won two elections in the opening days of the 1996 nominating contest.

Since March 2, however, Dole’s lock on the nomination has grown increasingly firm. And his energy shifted to reassembling and energizing the part-rebellious, part-tentative GOP coalition for the November general election against Bill Clinton.

Dole’s ally in the cause, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, never one for understatement, rallied the GOP with a warning that Nov. 5 “is going to be one of the most decisive days in American history.”

Among other things, the general election will be a contest of generations. Clinton is the first president of the Vietnam War era. Dole, a small-town Midwesterner who spent four years recovering from wounds he received in Italy in 1945, would be the eighth man from a remarkable generation that has dominated the presidency like none other in modern times: a line of World War II veterans that included Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

La Ganga reported from Washington and Balzar from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Stephen Braun in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., also contributed to this story.

* DOLE TOUTS WELFARE THEME: In Midwest campaign, senator sounds call of reform. A11

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