The Shadow President

By Laurence I. Barrett/Washington

In Washington games of good cop-bad cop, Bob Dole often plays the heavy. But last week a different Dole was on display. While some of his Republican colleagues were busy blasting Bill Clinton's domestic agenda to pieces, the Senate minority leader gave every appearance of struggling to put things back together again. On health care, Dole asked, "Why aren't we sitting together? Why don't we make a list of all the things we agree on?" Later, when an angry Clinton blamed G.O.P. partisanship for sinking the crime bill, Dole declared that "playing the blame game won't get us anywhere" and faxed a letter of ostensible compromise to the President as he flew on Air Force One. Who is this statesman-like, conciliatory character in the body of Dole?

As chief of the opposition in Congress, he is instinctively pugnacious and frequently savages the Administration when it suits him. But a likely presidential candidate cannot appear blindly partisan on all issues. Ask Dole if he wants to run for President, and he answers with typical drollery, "Every country ought to have one." He coyly points out that he's making some preparations -- just in case. But ask Dole if he really wants to be President, and the whimsy fades. "It's something that I think I could do, that I'd be willing to do, that I'd hoped to do," he told TIME. Yet all that, he added immediately, "doesn't get you there."

Dole certainly works as if he wants to get there. He has put his supporters on alert for a national campaign. Most weekends he travels on behalf of G.O.P. candidates, raising money for them while raising his own banner among influential party centurions. He has high hopes that in this year's elections, Republicans will gain several Senate seats. " 'Seven More in '94' is our slogan," he chirps. Winning those seats would give him a promotion: to majority leader. That would make Dole even more the Republican shadow president.

In running for the real job, his first primary-like test is his performance in leading his party's charge against the health-care plan devised by majority leader George Mitchell and endorsed by the President. While ideologues on the right wanted to oppose any expansive health-care legislation, Dole fretted about being tarred as an obstructionist. But with Democrats in turmoil on the issue and the Clintons' proposal junked, Dole gained more freedom to make peace with his colleagues.

While he originally endorsed a scheme by Republican liberal John Chafee, the minority leader now sees that plan as bad politics because it would require individuals to provide their own coverage. Instead, Dole has crafted his own health-care plan, a spare model based on changes in insurance practices and subsidies for the working poor. Forty of the Senate's 44 Republicans promptly signed on; party conservatives praised him for rescuing the G.O.P. health-care initiative. As he campaigns for G.O.P. candidates, Dole promises voters that if nothing passes in 1994 and if they send more Republicans to Congress, "we'll give you a good bill next year that doesn't put bureaucrats between you and your doctor."

On the road, Dole comes across as a much happier warrior than in the grim corridors of the Capitol. "My mother-in-law," he observes wryly, "tells me that I should smile more." He has good reason now. Though Dole turned 71 last month, chance has provided another pass at the prize he first sought in 1980. After he lost the nomination to George Bush in 1988, Dole recalls, he ! concluded that it "was probably the end. It seemed to me that that was my best shot." But serving as Senate G.O.P. leader under a Democratic President has allowed him to regain stature and visibility as his party's top gun.

But run for President? Dole candidly acknowledges that even if he decided not to seek the presidency, it would be advantageous for him to carry on the tease. For one thing, it helps as he campaigns and raises money for this year's crop of G.O.P. candidates. "People will turn out to see what this guy ((who might run in 1996)) is like."

The minority leader has been known to muse on what a Dole Cabinet might be like. But he will not say whether he will run -- not now anyway. He knows there are reasons for not running. Many Republicans believe '96 should be the time for generational change. Dole's potential rivals for the nomination are all considerably younger. Furthermore, the party's right wing -- despite Dole's current success in the health-care fight -- remains chary of him. "I'm not the darling of everyone on the right," he says. So he makes occasional concessions. Despite original misgivings, he endorsed Oliver North's Senate candidacy in Virginia, the result of a convention dominated by ultraconservatives. John Warner, Virginia's G.O.P. Senator and a Dole ally, has disavowed North and is backing a rival.

Most of Dole's political pals believe that, in the end, he will make the run for the White House -- probably for the reason cited by Wyoming's Alan Simpson, the G.O.P. deputy leader in the Senate. Says Simpson: "I think he'll do it -- very much in the spirit of competition. He's a lover of politics as a contact sport." And Dole is ever ready with the teaser. "I do a lot of traveling," he likes to say. "I've been to California, New Hampshire, Ohio, New Hampshire, Iowa, New Hampshire."

With reporting by Julie Johnson/Washington