In GOP Race, Dole’s Best Friends Were His Enemies

When the so-called V-8 group, the high command of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, met on a cold, raw day last December in their Capitol Hill headquarters, the mood was uncommonly tense and anxious.

For most of that year, Dole had been riding high in the polls, raking in big-money contributions and racking up big-name endorsements. But as the year ended, the Republican congressional majority--Dole’s power base in the party--had been battered in the battle over the budget. And out on the hustings, Dole was being pounded by a flood tide of negative television attack ads sponsored by a new rival in the GOP race, publisher Steve Forbes.

Dole’s aides--”V” for victory and “8” for the number in the group--pondered how to respond. “What they wanted to say was that Dole was fighting for a balanced budget, fighting for tax cuts,” recalled Don Sipple, at the time a recent addition to the strategy group. “Well, he may have been fighting for those things, but he was losing the battle.”

In a quandary, Dole’s top advisors ultimately approved a hodgepodge of commercials that did little either to repair the damage done by Forbes’ onslaught or to provide a convincing rationale for Dole’s candidacy. Within weeks of that December meeting, the inconceivable happened--Dole lost the New Hampshire primary--the low point of what Dole’s pollster at the time, Bill McInturff, later described as “eight weeks of terror.”

Then, suddenly, the turmoil ended. A mere 10 days after New Hampshire gave a victory to Patrick J. Buchanan, Dole won the March 2 primary in South Carolina. He did not lose again and on Tuesday clinched the GOP nomination by winning primaries in four big Midwest states.

But Dole’s impressive series of victories may obscure more than it reveals about the complexities underlying the Republican presidential campaign, and national politics in general.

Indeed, a review of the primary season points up one major conclusion: The key victories for Dole actually came in contests that he himself did not win--in Louisiana, for example, where Buchanan eliminated Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), and in New Hampshire, where Dole came in second but succeeded in blocking former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander. The result was to set up a contest of Dole against Buchanan--one in which Dole could triumph without ever answering the question that troubled his advisors back in the dark days of December: Just what reasons should he offer Americans to choose him as their president?

As Dole first began to get his presidential bid underway last year, David Keene, who had been one of the senator’s chief strategists when he ran for the White House in 1988, offered this assessment: “The Republican leadership wants Dole to succeed,” he said. “They feel it’s his turn. What he has to do is make sure their worst fears about him would not be realized. Their worst fears are that someday he says something that destroys his whole candidacy and that he can’t come up with some kind of message.”

As it turned out, Dole managed to live up to only part of that bargain--and that was enough. All through the campaign, despite frequent provocation, he kept his temper in check, no small achievement. That, the weaknesses of his opponents and the oddities of this year’s highly compressed campaign schedule appear to have sufficed for victory.

Of all his rivals who were originally in the field, Dole let it be known to his staff early on that he viewed only Gramm as a serious threat. Gramm had earned a reputation as a prodigious fund-raiser. He also had a natural base in the South and West, a potentially powerful appeal to the party’s conservative core and, most striking of all, a consuming desire for the office.

So intense was Gramm’s ambition, in fact, that Dole saw it as an impediment for the Texan, obscuring his judgment and exacerbating the abrasiveness of his personality. “I think Phil wants it too much,” Dole confided to an advisor early in the competition.

Gramm made his problems worse by generating high expectations with a self-confidence so relentless it verged on arrogance.

“I’ve got a tip for you to help your career,” he suggested to a reporter early last fall. “Predict my nomination.”

But once past the big talk, and the big money, which his campaign spent almost as fast as it came in, Gramm had trouble establishing a distinct identity. He had set out to corner the market on conservatives. But many social conservatives were drawn instead to Buchanan’s “more passionate advocacy,” said Charles Black, Gramm’s chief strategist.

As for the economic conservatives, “Gramm was too much like Dole” in the view of the average voter, Black conceded. “There were differences, but they were nuances and not clear differences.”

And then there was Gramm’s own overbearing demeanor. In January, on a visit to Robie’s general store, a campaign landmark in the town of Hooksett, N.H., Gramm agreed to a game of checkers with 77-year-old Dorothy Robie, the proprietor. TV cameras rolled and onlookers crowded around for a better look at this charming vignette in front of the store’s potbellied stove.

It did not last long. On the second move Gramm double-jumped his opponent. Ten minutes later, the senator walked off triumphant, as pleased as if he had just vanquished one of his presidential rivals.

“Senator, you beat her,” Gramm’s shocked New Hampshire coordinator, James Courtovich, pointed out as the campaign bus pulled away. “If someone wants to play checkers with me, I’m going to play checkers,” Gramm replied.

Soon, however, it was Gramm’s turn to be jumped. His opponent was Buchanan, who, following a tactical instinct that had been honed at the feet of a political master, Richard Nixon, seized on Louisiana as the venue in which he could cripple Gramm’s campaign.

Out of deference to GOP officials in Iowa, who objected to Louisiana’s holding its caucuses before their own, most of the candidates had passed up Louisiana. But Gramm saw an easy chance to post an early victory in a state next door to his own Texas. Unfortunately, he then had left his Louisiana operation to fend for itself while he concentrated his resources elsewhere. “This helps us enormously,” said Angela “Bay” Buchanan, Buchanan’s sister and chief strategist, as the former conservative commentator plunged full-tilt into Louisiana, where his message melding economic populism with social conservatism carried the day.

The loss in Louisiana for all practical intent finished Gramm and sent a tremor of relief through the Dole campaign, whose leaders were by then congratulating themselves on having beaten back the threat from Forbes with a barrage of counterattack commercials.

Not until the Iowa results came in, showing Buchanan in second place, only three points behind Dole, did his strategists comprehend the potential of Buchanan’s threat.

Their immediate response was to launch attack ads at Buchanan, branding him an extremist. But some on the Dole board of strategy complained that they were firing at the wrong target. The real threat to Dole, these advisors contended, was not from Buchanan, whose support was intense but limited, but from Alexander, who was acceptable to most groups in the party.

Two days after Iowa voted, Dole’s chief strategist, Bill Lacey, who was later dismissed, announced a conclusion he had reached based partly from talking to journalists: “Dole can afford to lose to Buchanan in New Hampshire,” Lacey said. “But he can’t afford a loss to Alexander.”

Dole’s big television guns turned around and took dead aim at Alexander. The ads accused Alexander of being “more liberal than you think,” and a big taxer, based on his two-term record as governor. Before the attacks, polls showed that most New Hampshire Republicans thought Alexander to be a conservative. Afterward, by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in polls, Alexander was deemed a “moderate liberal.”

That assault, and Alexander’s own inherent difficulty in providing focus and definition for his candidacy, may well have saved Dole’s political life. As it was, though Dole was still under siege, his candidacy had at last found a focus of sorts--saving the party from Buchanan and “extremism.”

Alexander still hoped to continue. But “we didn’t understand the level of fear that the Buchanan candidacy created in mainstream Republican leaders,” said Tom Rath, a senior advisor to Alexander. “They felt that his success would be damaging to their position as ranking Republicans. And they also thought it would mean electoral disaster.”

Equally disappointed was Forbes, who soon revived his candidacy by winning in Delaware on the Saturday after New Hampshire, and then in Arizona on the following Tuesday. “What was a surprise at the end was how the Republican establishment circled their wagons around Dole,” mainly because “they had a fear of Buchanan,” Forbes told The Times.

And Buchanan, as his own supporters later conceded, forfeited a rich opportunity to broaden his appeal. Particularly in Arizona, where he headed after New Hampshire, Buchanan’s harsh rhetoric and aggressive demeanor seemed to play right into the hands of his enemies, as when he waved a shotgun over his head and declared: “These aren’t just for shooting ducks.”

“He got sort of bombastic,” acknowledged his Louisiana media consultant, Roy Fletcher. Buchanan’s spokesman, Greg Mueller, suggested that the candidate would have been better served by stressing his kinder, gentler themes, which Buchanan had labeled as “the conservatism of the heart.”

Sure enough, Dole’s second-place finish in Arizona behind Forbes became another of the defeats that helped seal his victory. The primary was a turning point, said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former Gramm supporter who is now Dole’s campaign chairman. “It changed the entire dynamic of the campaign,” he said, by demonstrating that Buchanan could be stopped.

That result ushered in an unbroken string of victories for Dole that began with South Carolina a few days later and is expected to continue next week in California.

Whether Dole is strong enough to win the White House remains to be seen. But in coaching the candidate before his last campaign debate in South Carolina, McCain offered some advice which can at least serve as a starting point. “Smile, relax, remember you have an agenda,” he told Dole. “And then beat up on Clinton.”