Dole May Have Waited Too Long To Get Tough Town-Hall Debate Is Probably The Wrong Place To Slam Clinton

Bob Dole has gone to great lengths all year to disavow perceptions that he is a scowling hatchet man. Now, as he prepares for his final debate with President Clinton on Wednesday night, the hatchet man is starting to come out.

“Should I get tougher on Clinton?” Dole yells out at rallies these days. “You won’t get mad at me if I get a little tougher?” The crowds go wild.

But getting tougher has its problems.

With millions of voters watching, the debate is Dole’s last best shot to raise doubts about Clinton, contrast the two men’s characters and puncture the president’s double-digit lead in the polls.

But the talk-show format of Wednesday’s debate in San Diego, with a town-hall audience of unscripted, undecided voters popping questions, is the worst possible forum in which to go negative.

“They’ll start booing,” said Robert Holsworth, director of the Center for Public Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University who studied a similar presidential debate in 1992 in Richmond, Va. “Someone in the audience could become a hero simply by asking him, ‘Why are you continuing to throw mud when we’re tired of it?”’

It was a lesson George Bush learned the hard way in 1992. Bush was prepared to lambaste Clinton’s character. But two of the first questions cut him off at the knees.

“The amount of time the candidates have spent in this campaign trashing their opponents’ character is depressingly large,” said one questioner. “Can we focus on the issues and not the personalities and the mud?” asked the next questioner. “Could we cross our hearts?”

“Whenever a personal attack was made, the meter just plummeted,” said Holsworth, who monitored voters’ reactions with debate meters. “Dole’s way behind and is probably going to take some risks, but going negative would be extraordinarily risky.”

Still, Dole strategists and supporters want Dole to draw blood at the debate. And Dole himself has begun to raise questions in the past week about the Clinton administration’s “slipping and sliding” ethical lapses.

He’s raised questions about Whitewater, the botched Arkansas land deal that has resulted in the convictions of Clinton friends and former colleagues. Campaigning in Kansas on Monday, Dole pressed Clinton not to pardon any of them.

He’s also begun hitting the Clinton administration for keeping “900 FBI files” of Republicans who worked in the Bush White House. And at the last debate in Hartford, Conn., Dole had Billy Dale, the former head of the White House travel office who was fired in the so-called Travelgate scandal, sit in the front row.

Dole and his GOP surrogates are also hammering Clinton on campaign contributions from the Indonesian Lippo conglomerate.

Republicans insist these ethical questions are legitimate to raise in the debate. But they know Dole could be taking a big risk. He could reinforce some perceptions that he is mean, especially since his running mate, Jack Kemp, said such attacks were “beneath” him.

“Having a high number of senior officials resign in disgrace, the improper use of the FBI, bad management of the White House, these have always been considered appropriate topics for debate,” said William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard who worked in the Bush administration. “Dole has allowed the Clinton administration and the press to characterize the choice as being mean and negative or high-minded and ineffectual. That’s not a fair characterization, but it’s hard at the last moment to alter it.”

With only three weeks before the election and Dole stuck in the polls, he has to raise character and ethical questions, strategists say. He has to do something.

“This is the last best opportunity he has to really present the evidence that we need a change in this country,” said GOP pollster Neil Newhouse, who has worked for the Dole campaign. “He risks dropping further in the polls. He risks voters voting against him and disliking him. But we have taken all our best shots on the economy and other areas, and we’re a dozen points down.

“We have to assume this other stuff hasn’t worked,” Newhouse continued. “What’s the worst that could happen if we raise (ethical) issues and it doesn’t work? We still lose?”

Dole began hitting those themes Monday, challenging the president to explain campaign contributions from an Indonesian conglomerate that helped deliver millions of dollars to the Democratic Party.

Dole asked Clinton to respond directly and immediately to five questions about the Indonesian affair, which he said “raise questions about campaign contributions … influencing U.S. foreign policy.”

“We think the American people are entitled to the facts. No more slipping and sliding, Mr. President, just answer the questions, thank you,” Dole told reporters here after a noontime rally.

The Clinton campaign dismissed Dole’s challenge as “desperation politics.”

“We’re in the closing weeks of the campaign, and they’re getting very desperate,” said White House press secretary Mike McCurry.

Dole’s campaign manager, Scott Reed, provided reporters with Dole’s five questions involving Clinton, Democratic fund-raisers and Indonesia’s Lippo Group, a Jakarta-based banking, insurance and real estate firm.

The administration had committed “potentially criminal actions in squeezing money out of the Indonesian Lippo conglomerate,” Reed charged in a prepared statement, and given “new meaning to the term ‘Lippo-suction.”

What their criminal actions might be was unclear; there’s no limit on contributions to political parties by legal U.S. residents or U.S. subsidiaries of overseas businesses.