Dole Making A Mess Of His Campaign

Republicans mutter about Bob Dole being unelectable, Bob Dole losing the presidential vote so badly he wrecks the party and Bob Dole running a confoundingly bad campaign.

That’s all on the record.

So you can imagine how gruesome it gets when big shots whisper what they really think.

“It’s over,” says one. “We have to focus on the House and Senate.”

“Can you picture Bob Dole’s inauguration?” asks another.

“A leopard can’t change his spots,” sighs a third.

Haley Barbour is trying to impose loyalty, but the party’s monolithic front of the 1980s has dissolved into free-lancing - moderate pessimists vs. radical pessimists, pro-choice pessimists vs. no-choice pessimists.

As the Kansas senator displays his parliamentary wizardry devising ingenious forms of congressional gridlock, his party is dumbfounded, hung over from its “Contract with America” high. Dole accuses President Clinton of weak leadership while his own campaign grasps at meaningless little causes such as the gasoline tax.

“There’s anarchy in the house because there’s no parent at the table,” moans a Bush administration veteran.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Dole is so emotionally reserved that he finds selling himself “almost undignified.”

At Gallaudet University for the deaf on Friday, Dole put aside personal remarks about being tested by injury. Instead, he offered a weirdly un-self-aware metaphor: “Someone once said that commencement speakers are like a body at a funeral. You can’t hold the ceremony without one, but nobody expects you to say very much.”

Just as Clinton seems able to govern only by running, so Dole seems able to run only by governing - or trying to govern. These days, his control of the Senate is distracted by his grander dreams.

The prospect of an electoral hanging concentrates Clinton’s mind, but it strangely diffuses Dole’s.

The Senate majority leader is fluent in the arcane language of cloture and second-degree amendments, but he has yet to answer the basic question: What do you believe? (Meanwhile, the question for Clinton, of course, is: Is there anything you don’t believe?)

The incompetence that characterized Clinton’s style of government has vanished before the competence that characterizes Clinton’s style of politics. And the precise opposite is true of Dole.

Time magazine described a call between Dole and top GOP fund-raisers: “Dole plunged into legislative proposals and subclauses. No good, said the donor. What is he for? A long and pained silence followed.”

The moneybags have not stumbled upon a tactical problem but a cognitive one. After four national campaigns, Dole still does not know.

Speaking to Republican women, Dole excitedly reported that he had maneuvered Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., so that he might be forced to filibuster himself. Even Republican women might not wish that on Kennedy.

When Dole asked voters which candidate they would trust to watch their children, it backfired. Perhaps fearing that Dole would force the kids to look at the Sunday TV political talk shows, voters told The Washington Post they preferred the president as guardian, 56 percent to 20 percent.

When Clinton followed up by asking, if you ordered pizza, “who would you trust to choose the topping?” a CNN poll pronounced the president the winner by a similar margin (owing, no doubt, to the certainty that the president would order a large with everything).

Dick Morris says he wants Clinton to run as pope rather than president, promoting school uniforms and discouraging teenage pregnancy and domestic violence and kids’ smoking and watching naughty TV shows.

Republicans know that Clinton’s moral pedestal might be a little shaky, but they are too disorganized to grab the high ground.

“If we don’t seize on same-sex marriages, then we don’t deserve to win,” says the former Bush aide. “Partial-birth abortions were a missed opportunity. We could have made infanticide a household word.”

On Friday, Dole and advisers still were fretting over what to say in a Saturday speech on crime. The Republicans - unclear on crime!

The party seems eager to get through this last hurrah and move on to John Kasich and the next generation.

The protean president has changed so much he now seems to represent change, leaving Bob Dole in the George Bush role of tired incumbent.

xxxx