What a Difference Two Years Make for Dole, GOP Message : Congress’ unpopularity inhibits Republican from invoking party’s ’94 campaign theme.

For a moment, it seemed that the presidential campaign had stepped into a time warp when Rep. David Camp (R-Mich.) introduced Bob Dole at a brief campaign rally in this small eastern Michigan town.

Republicans in Congress, Camp declared, need a Republican “in the White House to finish the job you asked us to do” in giving the GOP control of Capitol Hill in 1994.

Camp’s words were striking because they are heard so rarely from Dole, or other Republicans, as the 1996 presidential election shambles into its last days.

It was another story when Dole declared his candidacy in April 1995, just three days after the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives completed action on its “contract with America.” In his announcement speech, Dole flatly portrayed the 1996 campaign as a continuation of the debate of 1994: “We need a president who . . . will lead the fight for the fundamental change America chose last November.”

At that point, not only Dole strategists but advisors to virtually all the 1996 Republican contenders expected to frame this race largely as a referendum on Clinton’s role in resisting the agenda of the Republican Congress. “This was sort of the message at the beginning of the campaign from all of the Republicans,” said Stephen Moore, director of fiscal-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

But, as many GOP strategists privately acknowledge, that argument lost its luster when most of the public sided with Clinton during last year’s battle of the budget. “It was supposed to be ‘Promises made, promises kept, but now we have to finish the job [by electing a Republican president],’ ” said one Republican strategist familiar with the Dole camp’s thinking. “But times are different now than they were 18 months ago.”

Ever since Dole campaign advisors concluded that they could not make the 1996 campaign an extension of 1994, they have scrambled to find another argument on which to center his candidacy--but they have never entirely filled the hole.

At various points, Dole has indicted the economy, or Clinton’s performance on drugs and crime, or the ethical record of the administration; most days now, he indicts all three. But in a time of peace and general satisfaction with the economy, none of these arguments has yet been powerful enough to dent Clinton’s lead--nor to dispel the shadow the budget confrontation cast over the GOP.

“In many ways,” said senior White House advisor George Stephanopoulos, “not much has changed in the race since the Republicans shut down the government twice.”

Indeed, polling leaves little doubt that last winter’s battle between Clinton and the GOP over the federal budget, which saw the GOP congressional leadership twice shut down the government as they tried to force Clinton to sign their seven-year budget plan, was a turning point in public perceptions of the president.

Until the confrontation with the Republican Congress, Clinton’s job-approval rating frequently sank beneath the life-or-death 50% mark. But in almost every survey taken since the showdown, a majority of the public has given Clinton positive notices. Likewise, in surveys through 1995, Dole often ran even or slightly ahead of Clinton. But with polls showing most of the public blaming the shutdowns on Republicans, Clinton moved into a double-digit lead he has not relinquished since.

As Republicans are quick to point out, despite Clinton’s lead, the policy debate this year is still being fought within boundaries largely shaped by the Republican Congress.

Compared to 1992, Clinton’s 1996 agenda envisions a much more modest expansion of government and much deeper cuts in existing programs. In fact, many conservatives maintain that Clinton’s fortunes revived only because he bowed to the public suspicion of government by proposing his own tax cuts and balanced-budget plan and, later, by signing legislation to end the federal guarantee of welfare for the poor.

“By signaling that he, too, believes that the era of big government is over, Clinton is trying to sound Republican and blur that distinction on the role of government,” said Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.), a leader among young congressional conservatives. “If he wins the election, he’ll be probably the only president in history who is elected by campaigning on the other guy’s platform.”

That formulation overstates Clinton’s reliance on Republican ideas: Although he has moved sharply toward the GOP on balancing the budget, welfare reform and some social issues, his campaign appeal is built equally on resisting specific GOP efforts to trim programs like Medicare, education or environmental regulation. Clinton, in effect, gained the upper hand in the budget debate by promising to implement the smaller-government goals voters sought in 1994, but in a more moderate manner than the congressional GOP.

Once Clinton seized the advantage in the budget fight, both Dole and congressional Republicans were compelled to gradually recalibrate their strategies, with consequences still visible in the campaign’s last days.

As 1996 went on, Dole increasingly emphasized his separation from Congress, resigning from the Senate in June, providing virtually no spotlight on congressional leaders at the Republican convention in August (nor mentioning his three decades there in his acceptance speech) and selecting in Jack Kemp a running mate who had criticized some of the congressional leadership’s priorities.

Meanwhile, after Dole’s departure, congressional Republicans softened their confrontational stance and, with an eye toward accumulating accomplishments, struck a series of deals with Clinton on such issues as welfare, immigration, health care reform, the 1997 appropriations bills and the minimum wage.

In the wake of those agreements, Congress’ approval rating has turned back up in recent weeks, increasing the GOP’s chances of holding Congress. But those deals also solidified Clinton’s lead over Dole and made it even more difficult for the challenger to portray the president as the impediment to conservative change.

Though he no longer attempts to frame the election as an extension of 1994, Dole continues to hammer away at the core small-government themes--the trinity of lower taxes, less spending and reduced regulation--that powered the Republican landslide that year and remain the most powerful ideological force in the party.

“Our message is really quite simple; it’s not rocket science,” Dole told an enthusiastic crowd of several thousand supporters at a late-afternoon rally in Westerville, Ohio, last week. “The message is, the government is too big and it spends too much of your money.”

But while polls continue to show persistent skepticism about the federal government, the events of 1995 appear to have at least temporarily clouded the appeal of those arguments as well.

In 1994, anti-government arguments were so powerful because they played out against the backdrop of public antagonism toward Clinton’s efforts to expand Washington’s control over the health care system, argues Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. This year, Mellman maintains, the backdrop is the Republican congressional efforts to slow the growth of spending in popular programs like Medicare.

“It doesn’t have the same powerful effect that it did when people were thinking about big-government Democratic programs,” he said.

Stephanopoulos and other Democrats caution that the apparent abatement of public anger toward Washington “could return immediately” if Clinton and congressional Democrats were to tilt back to the left and reopen the spending spigots in a second term.

If Clinton wins reelection, that’s exactly what Republicans are banking on: Many GOP leaders believe that the institutional pressures in the Democratic Party would make it impossible for a reelected Clinton to stay on the course of squeezing federal spending and devolving power from Washington.

“If he’s reelected, he either reverts to being a Democrat, or he has a civil war in his party,” Abraham predicted.