Clinton Seizes the Middle Ground as Dole Struggles

During the past year, President Clinton has sidled smoothly toward the political center, with a stream of proposals designed to appeal to moderate, middle-class voters.

From school uniforms to college-tuition tax breaks to a plea to reduce sex and violence on television, Clinton has been offering something for everyone in the broad middle of the American electorate. And while his Republican opponents have jeered at him for stealing their ideas, his popularity with the public, as measured by public opinion polls, has steadily risen from its low point after the 1994 congressional election.

In the last few weeks, Clinton’s likely Republican rival, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, has been attempting the same maneuver. But in his case, the moves have been anything but smooth.

On affirmative action, abortion and, most recently, gun control, Dole has dismayed his own staff and party activists by muddling his message, angering the conservative base of his party while seeming to confuse the electorate.

“Clinton has seized the center with great skill and little principle, and Dole has done it with neither,” said Kevin Phillips, a political analyst and former strategist for the GOP. “His moves to the center have been erratic, they come in spasms. It’s verging on the pathetic.”

What accounts for the difference between the two? Phillips and other analysts list a series of factors. Some are peculiar to Dole’s background and personality. Others arise from the realities of the modern Republican Party. Still others involve simple accidents of timing and fortuity.

Dole apparently has been trying to follow the advice of his political idol and mentor, Richard Nixon, who advised him to run to the right in the primaries and shift back to the center for the general election.

But after 35 years on Capitol Hill, where he was an acknowledged master of the parliamentary process and the cloakroom deal, Dole seems to be having difficulty translating his skills into the larger stage of electoral politics, where the grand gesture and an aura of sincerity are the coin of the realm.

For all the vital issues facing the nation, oratorical skills can be a make-or-break commodity on the campaign trail.

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“At least since the [Franklin D.] Roosevelt era, the presidency has been a rhetorical office,” said historian Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. “If you can’t hit the right notes, you’re probably not going to make it. Even if you do win the office, you’re probably not going to have much success.”

Dole seems personally incapable of the verbal seduction that Clinton practices on the stump. It’s not a useful tool in the corridors of Congress, where effectiveness and loyalty are far more prized.

Moreover, he seems to have had difficulty adjusting to the scrutiny of the campaign trail, where every word a candidate utters can echo endlessly in the media. “In the Senate, he said things off the top of his head all the time. But it didn’t seem to matter as much; people didn’t always listen,” said a former senior Senate aide to Dole. “Now it’s as if he still doesn’t think people are going to pay attention . . . . “

On issue after issue, Dole’s attempts to change position have left enough ambiguity to allow competing groups to continue pressing their case--generating a controversy in the process.

By contrast, Clinton has adopted new positions--such as support for a balanced federal budget and repudiation of his own early tax policies--with a rhetorical finesse that has helped cement his commanding poll lead over Dole.

Clinton has made some costly verbal blunders, such as a speech at a Houston fund-raising dinner last fall in which, referring to taxes, he said: “I think I raised them too much.” Mostly, however, he has avoided the sorts of traps into which Dole has stumbled.

A second difference between the two men involves simply the quirks of timing.

Clinton accomplished most of his moves to the center in 1995, when the election was still more than a year away. Dole, by contrast, is attempting to make a complicated transition with the election less than four months away--making every move seem that much more “political.”

An even more serious factor involves the dynamics of their two parties.

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Dole is the likely candidate of a party with a powerful, ideologically committed conservative wing.

“For Dole, the Republican right is a real problem. He has to exert his mastery over them while at the same time appealing to more moderate voters,” said political scientist Ross Baker of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

And so when Dole abandoned his support for an effort to repeal the existing ban on certain assault weapons, he did so gingerly, to avoid upsetting activists who are opposed to gun control. That left a trail of confusion, with Dole’s own aides telling reporters that he meant to make a significant change even as the National Rifle Assn. professed to detect no change at all.

Similarly, Dole’s call for a “declaration of tolerance” on the abortion issue in the party platform led to a swirl of confusion, particularly with his conflicting statements on where in the platform such a declaration should appear.

The resulting intraparty flap all but obscured the fact that Dole remains a staunch opponent of abortion, except for cases involving rape, incest or the life of the woman.

By contrast, the left wing of the Democratic Party has been quiescent--chastened by the party’s massive defeat in 1994 and united with Clinton by fear of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his agenda.

“The president isn’t under the same kind of pressure that Bob Dole is. The liberal wing of the [Democratic] party has been pretty much domesticated by Bill Clinton, they’ve become affable lap dogs,” Baker said.

With dismay and contempt, Republican strategists grudgingly concede Baker’s point while adding their own interpretation of the phenomenon.

“Maybe our people are just more willing to disagree in public,” Sheila Burke, Dole’s former Senate chief of staff, said with a laugh that was tinged with chagrin.

“Our view of Clinton’s moves to [the] center is that it’s cynicism--with the complicity of members of his own party who are willing to forswear having a voice on these issues simply for the power of having the White House,” said a senior Dole campaign official.

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“There’s no question that there’s a conspiracy of silence in the Democratic Party--built upon the desire to retain the presidency, which, for many Democrats, has become worth the price of silence.” he added.

Still, he and other top Dole confidants acknowledged that the GOP candidate needs to improve his speaking style, sharpen his message and be disciplined enough to bite his tongue when necessary--a tall order, they conceded.

“With him, what you see is what you get,” one aide said.

Clinton, with a dozen years in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and 3 1/2 in the White House, is expert at the stagecraft of executive office and is working from a carefully drafted reelection script.

Thus he appears every week--sometimes twice a week--with a new family-friendly proposal aimed straight at the heart of suburbia.

College-tuition tax breaks. More money for police. Incentives for home ownership. Measures to crack down on truancy. An anti-tobacco campaign.

All are of a piece: To use the heft of his office to “box out” Dole--in basketball terms, to keep him out of the area under the basket where the high-percentage shots are made.

Dole, by contrast, resists the advice of advisors who try to “handle” him, and operates with a secrecy that often keeps even his campaign aides in the dark about his plans.

Dole tends to operate more by impulse than according to long-range plans, Baker noted. On Capitol Hill, that sort of flexibility can be a plus. On the campaign trail, it has given his efforts to broaden his constituency a ragged, chaotic quality.

“He’s not a strategic thinker; he’s very much a tactician,” Baker said. “This is a campaign by quip, it’s impromptu, everything is improvised.”