He could see it so clearly: Bill Clinton was vulnerable.

But as surely as Bob Dole could see it, he could not convey his vision to the country.

History will show that Americans on Tuesday elected a president most think is dishonest. It also will record that Bob Dole failed to lead them another way.

He saw the campaign, the presidency, the country itself, through very different eyes. His was a vision rooted in a different time, when the country honored military and public service and it mattered more what you did than how you talked about it.

For months, as the country harbored doubts about Clinton’s character, even his honesty, Dole refused to press his case.

He squandered months with brief forays out into the country, racing through public appearances as though they were an inconvenience, frequently rushing back to Washington for dinner.

He turned to the kind of tax cut that worked decades ago but which fell flat in a country grown cynical. Awkwardly and uncomfortably, he talked about his crippling war injury. Hamstrung by fears of his own reputation for harshness, Dole pasted on a smile during his first debate with Clinton and professed to like him, refusing to question his character.

Finally, in the waning days of the campaign, Dole forcefully attacked.

Exit polls Tuesday showed that Americans did indeed share Dole’s doubts about the president. But by the time Dole raised the topic, nearly three out of four voters had made up their minds.

As Dole’s attacks failed to turn the race around, he grew frustrated.

“I wonder what people are thinking about, or if they’re thinking at all,” he said one day in Pensacola, Fla.

He turned on the news media, he turned on the voters. But in the end, it was Dole who was flawed.

He won his party’s nomination, finally, on the third try, largely because he outlasted all the other members of his World War II generation, because he had risen to the pinnacle of the party in the Senate, and because Republicans nominate those who have earned the top spot through time and service.

But he was a product of a party and a government hierarchy in Washington; he was not a man of the people, not a man of the country. It was almost sad that, after 45 years in politics, after 16 years running for the presidency, Dole had to wonder aloud what Americans thought.

He was a man suited to the legislative machinery of the Senate, not the grand vision and oratorical stage of the presidency. He ran a poor campaign, allied himself too closely with congressional conservatives, squandered weeks defending tobacco, gave rambling and uninspiring speeches.

And he ran at a time when the incumbent could boast of peace and prosperity.

As Dole pondered in 1994 whether to run a third time, he received a bit of advice from former President Richard Nixon.

“You have to run as far as you can to the right because that’s where 40% of the people who decide the nomination are,” Nixon said in a letter shortly before he died. “And to get elected, you have to run as fast as you can back to the middle because only about 4% of the nation’s voters are on the extreme right wing.”

Dole dutifully obeyed the first half. But he never was able to get back to middle.

As Dole looked to the center where the general election would be won, he found Clinton standing there.

After the ‘94 election, Clinton, too, had moved to the right, endorsing a balanced budget, calling for tax cuts and welfare reform.

So Dole, who already had contorted himself into a hard-core conservative, had to stay to the right of Clinton. After establishing a long record as a deficit hawk suspicious of tax cuts, he proposed a massive tax cut plan that few believed. Indeed, less than one-third of voters thought he could simultaneously cut taxes and cut the deficit, according to exit polls taken Tuesday.

He looked more and more like an empty vessel, a man willing to adopt whatever position his pollsters and advisers told him would work.

Talking to Republican activists in Philadelphia last year, he promised he would be “another Ronald Reagan if that’s what you want.”

But Reagan was a consummate actor, the Great Communicator.

Dole, to put it mildly, was neither.

He could barely speak in sentences on the campaign trail, often trailing off and ending a sentence with the catchall word, “whatever.” He had almost no feel for his audience, regaling a living room full of New Hampshire housewives about federal regulations for Subchapter S corporations, or a gymnasium filled with Denver middle-school students about how much each would get from his proposed tax credit for people with children.

And sometimes he let the audience in on the fact it was all a political act.

Like the time he suggested that parents would prefer to trust their children with him than with Clinton. Asked why he thought so, Dole shrugged and said that was what a focus group told him.

Or the time he spoke out against affirmative action and illegal immigration in San Jose, Calif. Asked about the issues afterward, Dole bluntly acknowledged that “they’re wedge issues,” the kind of issues raised by campaigns not for principle but to divide the opposition.

In the end, the one wedge issue that might have worked for Dole was the president himself.

As time passes, Dole will fade away. The questions he belatedly raised about the president’s honesty probably will linger.