NEWS ANALYSIS : Unchained, Dole Must Now Link Up With Voters

With his announced resignation Wednesday from a congressional career that has consumed nearly half of his 72 years, Bob Dole moved dramatically to demand a second look from voters unenthusiastic about his presidential campaign. But having attracted a blinding media spotlight, he faces the challenge of filling it with a message that these voters will find compelling.

“This is going to cause everyone to look anew at Bob Dole and that is good,” says Republican political consultant David M. Carmen. “The other half of that equation is that he has to be ready to be looked at, because you can only quit the Senate once. What he says in the next few days is critical.”

Dole’s decision to devote full time to his presidential drive was universally applauded by GOP leaders--almost all of whom viewed it as a shot of adrenaline for a campaign lately shrouded in gloom. Particularly encouraging, many said, was Dole’s spare and affecting resignation speech--a sign that he may have begun to recognize that the grammar of a presidential campaign and a legislative markup are different things.

But many around Dole acknowledge he still has much work to do--not only in closing a large gap in the polls between him and President Clinton, but in imprinting his own stamp on a party now defined primarily by a Republican Congress whose public approval ratings have plummeted over the past six months.

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Even as Dole announced his physical separation from the Congress, the television picture of his speech underscored his continuing political connection with the institution: As he spoke, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was closest to his side on a stage crowded with Republican legislators. That visual image underscored how difficult it will be for Dole to establish an identity independent from Gingrich and other GOP lawmakers--especially at a time when the White House is making every effort to lash them together as the “Gingrich-Dole Congress.”

“Right now, Dole is defined by his relationship to Newt,” says Democratic media consultant Mandy Grunwald. “And he is not going to get elected that way. . . . I don’t think quitting the Senate changes that in any way.”

Republicans across the board welcomed the Dole announcement as a golden opportunity to refocus the campaign after weeks of sagging poll results and dispiriting legislative struggles with Senate Democrats. “It gets Dole out of the sausage factory and into the supermarket,” says GOP media consultant Mike Murphy, who recently signed on to advise the campaign.

Over the past several weeks, as Dole spent his days ensnarled in his bewildering parliamentary fights with Senate Democrats, a widening circle of Republicans had grown increasingly uneasy with the campaign’s direction. When, for instance, the Senate majority leader met with GOP governors Tuesday, “there was a general sense that if Dole and his staff did not make a bold move soon and make a real commitment to running for president, there was going to be a problem,” said a senior aide to one governor.

Quieting that questioning of Dole’s commitment may be the announcement’s most important immediate impact. Some Republicans worried that by remaining in the Senate, Dole was failing a basic test: convincing Americans that he truly burned for the White House.

That concern came home to Steve Merksamer, a Sacramento-based strategist advising the Dole campaign, when his mother recently called him to say that the candidate seemed so anxious to get back in the Senate that he didn’t really appear to want to change jobs. “Part of the way Americans determine whether a person is fit for the presidency is the extent to which they conclude he is determined enough and tough enough to do what he needs to do to get there,” says Merksamer.

In his remarks Wednesday, Dole directly addressed those doubts, declaring that with his resignation he was now “giving all and risking all” to win the White House. With that, says Iowa Republican Party Chairman Brian Kennedy, the typically cautious Dole has sent the invigorating message “that there is no going back.”

Dole’s decision offers an array of more tangible benefits to his campaign. In any presidential quest, time, even more than money, is the most precious commodity. “Time is the only thing you cannot get more of,” says Haley Barbour, the Republican National Committee chairman. Dole’s attempt to hold down two jobs left his campaign virtually competing for scraps: While serving in the Senate, Dole was limited to campaigning almost entirely on weekends.

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Now, with his full attention available, the campaign has scheduled Dole to appear in 17 cities through early July, with a trip to California scheduled for later this month, one senior official said. Each week, the official said, Dole will attempt to focus on one subject--critiquing Clinton’s record and offering his own agenda. To keep down the costs for Dole’s cash-starved campaign, many of his trips will be to Republican Party events, which will allow state parties and the Republican National Committee to pick up part of the tab, aides said.

Party professionals say all of these considerations should bolster Dole’s efforts. But they leave unanswered the larger question of whether he can more successfully define a campaign agenda and message that unifies the GOP base, raises doubts about Clinton and converts swing voters who now side with the president in his struggles against the Republican Congress.

“I don’t think [Dole’s] problem is his location,” says Grunwald, in an assessment even some Republicans share. “His problem is his message.”

With an eye on the GOP’s conservative core voters, Dole closely bound himself to Gingrich and the congressional Republican agenda during the primaries. Now his campaign faces the reality that, according to a recent Times poll, barely more than a third of Americans approve of the program being pushed by GOP congressional leaders.

Dole on Wednesday subtly but firmly moved to separate himself from the institution where he has spent the past 35 years. Dole insisted “the view that Congress has been my life” is mistaken; instead, he said, “America has been my life.” In the weeks ahead, he promised “to look to America” and the “wise counsel of its people.”

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But it remains unclear whether Dole can flesh out and expand the implications of that rhetoric; indeed, much of Dole’s argument inherently binds him closer to Congress. At the core of his case against Clinton has been the contention that the president, by vetoing the central pieces of the Republican congressional agenda, blocked the change that voters demanded in 1994.

Politically, the problem in that argument is most Americans now say in polls that Clinton was right to veto those bills. In the weeks ahead, Dole aides hope to overcome that hurdle by articulating a campaign agenda that moves beyond the specific legislative proposals the GOP has offered to redirect attention toward underlying Republican principles of smaller government and less taxes.

Simultaneously, they intend to argue that in a second term, Clinton would revert from his current moderate stance back into the pattern of his first two years, when he repeatedly sought to expand government’s reach.

With the distractions of the Senate’s daily legislative jousting removed, the next few weeks could go a long way toward answering whether such arguments will be strong enough to reduce Clinton’s lead--which stretches to 20 percentage points in some polls.

“Now the real test has begun,” says Merksamer. “Dole is getting stripped down and ready to fight. We’re in the ring; now we have to see what we can do.”