POLITICS : Worried Dole Campaign, GOP to Accelerate Attack on Clinton : Senate majority leader’s low poll standing prompts move. Aides also seek reduced role in daily congressional business.

Anxiety over Sen. Bob Dole’s weak position in the polls is prompting his campaign and the Republican National Committee to accelerate their efforts to articulate the GOP case against President Clinton, party and campaign sources say.

Spurred by recent national surveys showing the president holding a double-digit advantage over the Senate majority leader, the RNC plans to target Clinton in a major nationwide advertising campaign set to start in the next few weeks, committee officials say.

Likewise, the Dole campaign--frustrated over its inability to project a clear message from the Senate floor--is looking for ways to reduce the candidate’s involvement in the congressional day-to-day business. Instead, campaign officials are laying plans for Dole to give more speeches that attempt to widen an ideological divide with Clinton, such as the address the Kansas senator delivered last Friday attacking the president’s judicial appointments as too liberal.

“We need to get our message out sooner rather than later,” says Fred Steeper, a pollster advising the Dole campaign. “And plans are underway to do that.”

For months, despite polls showing Clinton in the lead, many Republican strategists insisted the incumbent was a fatally wounded opponent who, in the end, was certain to succumb. But these new maneuvers reflect a growing restiveness in GOP circles about the party’s prospects not only in the presidential campaign but the fall’s congressional elections.

William Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, gave public voice to these private grumblings when he dramatically wrote off Dole’s chances in this week’s issue. “Bob Dole is likely to lose the presidential race to Bill Clinton,” wrote Kristol. “He may lose badly.”

Dole, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, dismissed the remarks from Kristol, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle. But, with national surveys showing Clinton leading Dole by as much as 18 percentage points, Kristol is hardly the only member of what the Dole campaign calls “the sky is falling crowd.”

On Monday, in fact, former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, a conservative leader, publicly criticized Dole’s campaign as ineffectual and fretted that the GOP may “get walloped” in the presidential election.

“The Republican establishment is very down,” says one senior party strategist. “The impact of [the] polls . . . is starting to build. I predict we will be in a frothing panic by next week.”

GOP pollster Steeper says Clinton’s relatively high disapproval ratings in the same polls showing him with big leads over Dole--and the significant majority of voters who continue to say that they believe the country is on the wrong track--show that the president remains “vulnerable.”

But the Dole camp increasingly agrees with critics like Kristol on one point: the urgency of denting Clinton’s lead. Contrary to the traditional analysis that says most Americans focus on presidential campaigns only in the fall, Dole strategists now share the conviction that they cannot afford to allow the president’s generally positive assessments to harden into the summer. “Elections are basically won or lost in this time frame,” said one Dole advisor.

While few Republicans yet go as far as Kristol in writing off Dole, three distinct considerations are prompting substantial teeth-gnashing in GOP circles.

One is the polls themselves. Major media organizations have conducted 33 national surveys on the presidential race this year, and Clinton has led Dole in all of them, according to a compilation in the PoliticsUSA Internet site. Eighteen of the 23 surveys taken since mid-January have shown Clinton with at least a double-digit advantage over Dole; a national Los Angeles Times poll last week put Clinton ahead of Dole 55% to 37%.

Also, recent statewide polls in such battlegrounds as Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey show Clinton holding large advantages over Dole. Nor is the picture any brighter in GOP strongholds; according to new polls in Arizona and Alabama, Dole is running no better than even with the president in both states.

Dole’s strategy of using his Senate leadership role to lay the groundwork for overcoming Clinton has become the second principal source of anxiety. Bennett called on Dole to resign as majority leader, saying his Senate position was “a trap.” Even inside Dole’s campaign office, concern is growing that his plan of conducting his campaign primarily from the Senate floor has proven a “morass”--entangling him in damaging battles over the minimum wage, health care and the assault weapons ban.

“The idea of trying to be president from the Senate floor reinforces all of Dole’s deal-making imagery rather than laying out a clear case against Clinton,” said the senior GOP strategist.

Indeed, some of Dole’s key campaign aides increasingly question how Dole’s daily jousts with Democrats in the Senate advance his overall cause. They invest much more priority in a series of speeches they now plan for Dole to deliver every two or three weeks through the summer.

As in last Friday’s address on judicial appointments, the overriding goal in these coming speeches--whose future topics will include the economy and welfare--is to puncture Clinton’s efforts to portray himself as a sensible centrist. “We have got to push Clinton back in his liberal box,” said one senior GOP operative.

Republicans plan to intensify that effort with a significant media campaign later this spring. The concern about the direction of the race has outweighed the arguments by some GOP strategists that the party should husband its resources until the fall. “You are going to see us going up pretty good with advertising in the coming weeks,” said one party official.

The RNC’s decision to intensify its advertising effort reflects the third major source of anxiety in Republican circles: the fear that the current Democratic advantages will grow steadily more difficult to dislodge if the GOP cannot erode them soon.

Actually, on this question Republicans divide into diametrical camps. The optimists view the GOP’s current difficulties as temporary and explained largely by a barrage of Democratic advertising in key states and the wounds left by the struggle for the party’s presidential nomination. These analysts predict that the gap in both the presidential and congressional campaigns will inexorably close as the conservative base consolidates in the months ahead.

“Four years ago at this time, Clinton was an unknown and he went on to be elected president,” argues Rep. Bill Paxon of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “The national polls and [congressional] numbers and the presidential race and all these other things will take care of itself.”

But such assessments are dismissed as Panglossian by a second camp of Republicans, who reject the assumption that political gravity will inevitably bend the electorate to the right. “There is much too much Republican complacency,” says Kristol. “The conventional wisdom among Republicans is that Dole may lose but the race will certainly tighten. But that may be wrong. The race may just settle in at a 10- or 12-point gap and just sit there.”

Kevin Phillips, the iconoclastic political analyst and former GOP strategist, holds a similar view. Like other analysts, Phillips notes that recent presidents whose job approval ratings were above 50% and rising in the spring of their fourth years--Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984--all went on to handily win reelection. By contrast, George Bush in 1992 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 had both seen their approval ratings sink down to around 40% by this point in their presidency.

Since last fall, Clinton’s approval rating has consistently topped 50% for the first time in his tenure; in the most recent Times poll, his rating stood at 55% approval, 40% disapproval--almost exactly the same rating recorded at this point by Reagan, who won reelection in a landslide.

“There is still time for something to happen to screw it up for Clinton,” says Phillips. “But, on the other hand, as you start heading toward May you are at the point where if a president was going to flash weakness they were generally flashing it already.”