Campaign Portrait

By Jack E. White

One of the few Republican beneficiaries of the Iranscam affair has been Kansas Senator Robert Dole, thrust into the role of hot candidate even as his fledgling campaign apparatus goes through birth pangs. This is the third in a series of profiles of the major 1988 contenders.

For Bob Dole, the most ordinary tasks pose extraordinary challenges. Buttoning his shirt, for example. Because there is no feeling in the tip of his left thumb and forefinger, he aligns the buttons by sight and gingerly guides them through the holes; each one can take ten minutes. In public appearances, he clasps a pen in his clawlike right hand to ward off aggressive handshakers who have not noticed his withered arm as they crowd around him, thrusting scraps of paper and clamoring for autographs. He responds patiently -- "I'm not a very good writer" -- and laboriously signs with his left hand, which he learned to write with after coming home to Russell, Kans., a horribly wounded veteran of the war against Nazi Germany. It took three years, seven operations and months in a plaster cast that encased him from neck to waist for him to recover. Compared with that ordeal, says Dole's younger brother Kenny, "running for President will be a piece of cake for Bob."

At 63, Robert Joseph Dole, the small-town Kansan who rose to become Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, is a remarkable survivor not only of war but of politics. Despite losses in two prior bids for national office, he has steadily been rising in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. ! Yet he still faces formidable obstacles in the 1988 presidential campaign. He has been known as an acerbic Washington insider, a pragmatic, conservative man for all sessions during his 18 years in the Senate. Can such a candidate project a vision of the country's future that will satisfy both the distrustful right-wing ideologues he needs to win the Republican nomination and the more moderate voters whose support could sweep him into the White House?

So far, there has been a curious hesitancy about Dole's campaign, raising questions about his managerial skills and decisiveness. A bumbling organizational effort in the 1980 race doomed his run for the nomination before it got off the ground, and this time too he has been slow to establish the kind of political operation that could consolidate his current popularity. He has yet to unveil a timetable for resigning as Senate leader to commit himself full time to the trail or decide what role John Sears, a respected Republican political pro detested by the extreme right, will play in his campaign. In January, after Dole had been quoted as saying he had discussed with his wife Elizabeth the possibility that she would quit her job and join his campaign, she confronted him: "How can you say that," she asked, "when you haven't even decided if you are going to run?" She happens to be Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Transportation, and some political observers suspect that if either member of this power couple becomes President, it may be she.

In part, Dole's hesitation stems from his Midwestern reserve. With his vibrant voice, handsome face and extraordinary energy, he can dominate a large room with an aura of apparent self-confidence, but in one-on-one conversations he is surprisingly guarded. He often uses one-liners to deflect questions he does not want to answer. When he forgoes the quips, his replies are carefully phrased to neutralize any hint of boastfulness. He seldom initiates talk about the broken neck and shattered shoulder he suffered in combat with the Germans in Italy's Po Valley in 1945. But if pressed, he can movingly recollect how his neighbors took up collections that helped pay for his operations. Privately, Dole comes across as somewhat ambivalent about running for President, as though unalloyed ambition were a touch unseemly. As he puts it, "I have drive, but I'm not driven. Destiny's a pretty lofty word for me. I don't know whether I'm destined to do anything. Maybe right now is as far as I'm going to go."

To liven his campaign speeches, Dole rattles off jokes, rapid-fire, like a string of firecrackers. But while he maintains that "I use humor to wake people up," he has often used it to cut them up. In 1974 he barely won re- election to the Senate over Dr. William Roy, a Topeka obstetrician, in one of the nastiest campaigns in Kansas history. Says Roy, who shares Dole's flair for vindictive rhetoric: "He was a slasher and a cutter. You almost felt he cut for the pleasure of cutting." Recalling how Dole ranted about "Democrat wars" when he was Gerald Ford's vice-presidential running mate, some analysts still argue that his hot and highly partisan style may have cost the G.O.P. the White House in 1976.

The criticisms clearly stung. Since 1976 Dole has worked hard to shed the hatchet-man image. "I've done a lot of soul searching," he says. "I think a lot of the criticism was unfounded. I don't dislike people. I'm a very friendly person, not mean or vicious. But you take a look at how you're perceived, and obviously you don't want that perception." Friends agree that since his marriage to Elizabeth, he has mellowed, replacing the hatchet with a stiletto. As often as not these days, he makes himself the butt of his own jokes. Reflecting on the 1976 campaign, he quips, "My assignment was to go for the jugular, and I did -- my own."

With his wit under control, Dole faces the more serious test of outlining the priorities of a Dole Administration. So far, he has provided little more than a legislative shopping list of proposals for dealing with the deficit, trade and other matters. Even supporters suggest that Dole's immersion in the details of legislation has blocked the mental leap to a broad-gauge view of national leadership required of a presidential candidate. Says his political consultant David Keene: "Legislative experience teaches you to be tactical and think on an ad hoc basis. He's got to reach inside himself and talk about what he believes and what he sees for the country." Characteristically, Dole's rejoinder is a quip: "Your vision might be 20/20 today, but a few months from now, you might find that you need contacts."

Focusing his vision will not be easy for Dole because his record is ideologically blurred. He strongly espouses a conservative agenda, ranging from unflinching backing for the contras to support for a constitutional amendment allowing school prayer. But he escapes easy pigeonholing by talking the language of pragmatism: common-sense efforts to deal with serious social problems and the need to show courage by looking at Social Security and other entitlement programs in reducing the deficit. Dole's conservatism is deeply rooted in the tradition of independence in the small-town Midwest: he is too flexible to ignite the anti-Establishment passions that fire up the purists on the Republican right.

This has strained his relationship with the hard-core right-wingers known as "movement conservatives." They have not forgotten that he joined with George McGovern to champion the food-stamp program and led the Senate battle to create a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. They have never forgiven Dole, as Senate Finance chairman, for pushing through a $98.3 billion tax increase in 1982 that was followed by a $50 billion hike in 1984. Those efforts to reduce the federal deficits so incensed supply-side economic advocates that Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich branded Dole "the tax collector for the welfare state." Though lately Dole has been mending fences with the movement conservatives, he often shows his annoyance. Says he: "I think what they want is a cheerleader. It's not enough to be with them on the issues."

As the quintessential Washington insider, Dole of necessity stresses as a virtue his congressional experience (he has been on the Hill ever since he was elected to Congress in 1960, after serving as county attorney in Russell). "I think we've had Carter the outsider, Reagan the outsider," says Dole. "I think, at least I hope, that those of us who've demonstrated a little experience -- that we can make things happen, that we're innovative, that we can bring people together -- may have a little edge." In the wake of Iranscam and the stirrings of renewed concern about social problems, he hopes that voters will find the mix that he offers -- combative conservatism combined with compassion, pragmatism and experience -- a formula for leadership in the post-Reagan era.

In recent speeches, Dole has been testing one theme in particular. The Republicans, he says, must "reassert that we are a sensitive, compassionate, caring party" that can address the problems of the aged, the homeless and the chronically unemployed, but less expensively and with less governmental regulation than Democrats have employed in the past. "I think you can be a conservative," he says, "and still try to address human problems." Because of his own experiences, that is a case Dole can convincingly make.