It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This year, in his fourth and final run for national office, Dole was going to be the avuncular statesman, the adult in a playpen of baby boomers, the newest and best Bob Dole.
But in his life nothing is ever easy. At 72, experience is both an asset and a burden. R has taught Dole what not to do, what mistakes to avoid. But it gives him a deep sense of foreboding, and a temper that can ignite at any time. With Forbes absorbing most of the attention–and punishment–in Des Moines, Dole managed to keep calm. Barely. Phil Gramm, who has spent most of the last few months on the campaign trail, came closest to getting under his skin. Gramm asked Dole if he was holding secret budget talks with President Clinton. “Tell you next time you’re in town,” Dole said with a snide smile.
Dole’s memory is a catalog of disasters, real and imagined: He believes that he and Gerald Ford lost in 1970 because the Republican National Committee failed to spend $2 million it had in the bank. Twenty years later the thought still galls him. So when they prepare his daily campaign news summary, aides list fund-raising news at the top. This time, Dole has raised prodigious amounts: $24 million at last count. He couldn’t care less that a new Center for Public Integrity report cataloged a cozy history of contributions from the likes of the Gallo family and Archer Daniels Midland.
In 1980 and 1988, Dole micromanaged chaotic presidential campaigns staffed by longtime friends. In ‘96, he seems willing to leave his paid pros to their own devices. The top officials – fortysomethings who know how to operate in the Party Ronald Reagan Built–persuaded a reluctant Dole to go after Forbes. “We showed him the appropriate data,” one aide said coolly. That included a new poll, released Sunday, showing Forbes ahead of Dole among likely primary voters in Delaware.
Though this campaign is technically the best he’s ever nm, ghosts still haunt Dole. One is his past failure to cultivate the grass roots. Another is his dread that others will outflank him on the right-as Reagan did in ‘80 and Bush in ‘88. This time, Gramm and Pat Buchanan are trying to play that role. But in an eerie way, the sum of all Dole’s fears is Forbes. Like Reagan, Forbes is a supply-sider-a school of economics Dole despises, but that remains appealing to voters. Like Bush, Forbes is a wealthy preppy from the East (only with far more money).
Dole felt he had no choice but to counterattack. Forbes has spent millions on his own nasty ads and is now second to Dole in some national polls. But Dole and and his fellow candidates came to Des Moines to raise doubts about the publishing magnate. His flat tax would end the home-mortgage interest deduction, they noted. Buchanan called him a polo populist. On camera, Forbes looked stiff. Yet when he entered the pressroom after the debate, he seemed to exult in his new status as GOP target-in-chief. “My message is taking root,” he said, smiling in that frozen way of his.
Even if Forbes fades, the biggest risk to Dole is still himself: the sardonic senator waiting to emerge in times of stress. At a stop in Alabama, Dole tweaked Forbes for his inexperience. “If I needed an operation, I’d at least like someone who’d done one,” Dole said. But Forbes was ready with an answer in Des Moines. “What we’ve seen is the political equivalent of medical malpractice,” he said. “That’s what we’ve had the last 30 years.” For Dole, here’s a haunting thought: Forbes’s reply was the kind the senator himself might make.
