Campaign ’96 / REPUBLICANS : Hometown Cheers a Long-Distance Runner as He Nears His Goal : Dole basks in his winner’s role as he comes home to Russell, Kan., at the end of a sweet primary season.

He has returned in pain, in need, in hope, but never, until now, in a blaze of success.

On Monday, Sen. Bob Dole braved icy winds and freezing temperatures to come home to Russell as a different kind of hero, to sweep into this tiny town--his touchstone, his yardstick--as the Republican nominee for president, after 16 years of aching for the top prize that his party can bestow.

It was the final step in a months-long process of warming up this cool man, of showing the world, as he himself puts it while trudging along the road to the White House, “that I wasn’t born in this blue suit.”

The trip to Russell, with its walk down Main Street, was also the peak of a full-fledged push to cast the presidential race as a test of character and honesty, integrity and sacrifice--all those things Dole says he learned out here in the flatlands of Kansas while growing up poor in the heart of the Depression, all those things he says that President Clinton simply does not know.

“It is my deepest belief that the coming generations deserve an America like the nation we have known,” an emotional Dole told the thousands of Kansans crammed into the gymnasium of Russell High, the farmers and the cheerleaders, the nurses and the young unemployed. “And it is my deepest fear that this administration is squandering an inheritance it does not value--undermining values it does not even understand.”

But ultimately, he said, his trip home Monday at the triumphant end of the primary season was all about redemption. Russell “is home, and I’ve announced [a run for president] there in 1980, 1988,” he said in an airborne interview. “We were there in 1995. The other two times, the first time it never took off. And the second time, it fizzled after takeoff. This time, we’re all the way up in the air.

“I think they were about ready to give up on me out there,” he said of Russell’s residents on the eve of his homecoming. “That’s the thing. It will be a redeeming trip.”

Dole’s hoped-for redemption began at the moment his motorcade crossed the county line Monday, slicing through a landscape scraped so flat and empty that grain elevators loom like skyscrapers. The Chicken House restaurant was closed this day, but the A&W; was open, on its marquee a slightly unsteady “Dole ’96.”

When the buses pulled into the Russell High parking lot for the victory rally and barbecue, the first thing to hit was the smell of hot dogs. The second was a chant audible from out-of-doors: “We want Dole! We want Dole!”

Inside, an interpreter flashed the shouted slogans in American Sign Language, as drums beat a loud tattoo, pompoms flashed and banners waved: “Bob Dole, My Man, If He Can’t Do It, Nobody Can!” Amos Morris Gymnasium was packed. The streets were empty. The man who would be president had come home to say thank you:

By most accounts, I now have enough delegates to be the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

Cheers from the crowd.

And tomorrow I’ll win enough to remove any doubts. So at this moment, I wanted to be home. To come to this place.

Tears from the candidate.

And see all of my friends and all the people that I owe so much.

They shaped his values and taught him compassion and prayed for him when he was shot on that terrible day in 1945, two days after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. All his life, he told the crowd, he has tried to repay those gifts.

“And all my life I have tried to defend and serve the America I learned to love in this town,” he said. “What you learn in your hometown is very important. It’s how you conduct yourself, how you try to provide leadership, how you try to make a difference. And I know some debts can never be repaid. But I have come to Russell to acknowledge mine.”

School nurse Carole Hall was more than happy to say, “You’re welcome” to the hometown hero. She admires the Senate majority leader because he cares about agriculture, because he has persevered through times of torment, but mostly because of his military background and his support of a strong defense.

“My husband was shot down in Vietnam,” she said, as hundreds of balloons were unleashed in the gym. “It makes me angry that we have someone in the White House who couldn’t care less.”

While the warmer Dole on view Monday has been slowly unveiled over the last few months, his frontal attack on Clinton’s character was launched in earnest over the weekend, about halfway through his West Coast swing. In a packing house outside of agricultural Fresno, the candidate exhorted a crowd Saturday to “take a look at Bob Dole’s record. Who do you trust? Who do you trust?”

The poverty of the Depression, the sacrifice of World War II, Dole’s grievous wounding in the mountains of Italy and arduous rehabilitation back in the States all built character, said Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) as he introduced Dole at a Sunday night rally in affluent Bellevue, Wash.

“But that poverty and that war experience and that rehabilitation also built a capacity for compassion and for caring that, coupled with character, made a president of the United States in waiting,” Gorton said.

The last three days of hard campaigning, capped with the wild welcome home, were political myth-making at its best, lacing pictures onto a candidate’s words, swathing him in all the symbols of the little town where he was born.

Since Dole hit the campaign trail 11 months ago, he has dribbled out the landmarks of his 72-year journey to the presidential nomination, and on Monday it looked like he visited them all.

“My father was a good, hard-working man,” Dole says at every opportunity. “He wore his overalls to work every day for 42 years and was proud of it. My mother sold sewing machines and vacuum cleaners . . . . We grew up living in a basement apartment, rented out the upstairs to make ends meet.”

There it was Monday morning, same as ever, perched at the corner of Maple and 11th streets, the family home, now practically a shrine, where the device still hangs that Dole used to build the torn muscles of his wounded right arm.

He trudged down brick-paved Main Street, a road he says is still so quiet that “after 5 o’clock you can shoot a cannonball down there and it wouldn’t disturb much.”

He stopped at what used to be the drug store where he was a soda jerk. Dawson’s, it was called, and after he was wounded in the war, his friends set up a cigar box there to collect money for his hospital bills.

Dawson’s this day is Customs by Julie, an interior design shop that opened up just 10 days ago. “How’s business?” the candidate asks the proprietor. “This helps,” she says, and she’s not joking.

While Bob reminisces, his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, shops. “Don’t you think this is wonderful?” she says, waving a swatch of wallpaper for the bathroom of their apartment at Washington’s Watergate Hotel. “I’ve been looking for this for so long . . . . It’s paper from where he worked, and it has wheat on it.”