LOTS MORE MR. NICE GUY

By KAREN TUMULTY WASHINGTON

So this is how it feels to be the front runner. This is what it was like for Ronald Reagan in 1980, when Bob Dole was so far back in the pack that he barely rated mention. This is what it was like for George Bush in 1988, when Dole's disaster-prone campaign amounted to little more than a speed bump on Bush's path to the White House.

It has taken Dole two decades of trying to get to this position. Long before the fanfare of the first primary, Dole is already drawing sizable crowds in New Hampshire, the burial ground of his presidential hopes in the past. His campaign's list of eager volunteers there has topped 22,000-more than triple the number he was able to recruit during the entire New Hampshire campaign in 1988. With every poll showing him swamping the lesser known in the New Hampshire race, Dole alone among the likely G.O.P. contenders had the luxury of being able to skip the first debate.

Seven years ago, almost no one--including Dole himself--thought that he would ever have another shot at the White House. He had failed twice. The 1988 election sent him into the darkest period of his political career. Then came a bout with prostate cancer-an old man's disease and a reminder that not even the superman who took Nazi fire would live forever. Meanwhile, there was the incessant yapping that he had to endure from combative young pups in his own party, who saw Dole as an artifact of that embarrassing era when Republicans had been willing to compromise principle in order to govern.

Dole faces an intoxicating possibility that he wouldn't have dared dream in those black days: his time may finally have come. "It just seems to me-and this may be all in the ash can-but it seems to me that it's easier this time. It just seems different," he told TIME. "It may not turn out that way, but it seems like it's sort of falling in place."

The landscape around him has been transformed. George Bush never got to serve a second term; the Democrat who succeeded him became impossibly vulnerable. Then lightning struck in the form of the momentous 1994 election that returned Dole to his old job as majority leader, with his own party running Congress for the first time in 40 years.

Is Dole's age a liability? At 71, he looks at least 10 years younger and follows a schedule that would exhaust someone half his age. In a national TIME/CNN poll last week of 426 registered Republicans, 82% of those surveyed said they don't think Dole is too old to run for President next year. And if Dole remains in good health, his age might work in his favor as an antidote to the occasional adolescent quality of Clinton. In Dole, says his friend Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, "the American people will see what they are thirsting for. It's called leadership."

Dole insists he has undergone a personal transformation as well, a softening of his notorious prickliness. Still uncomfortable discussing his feelings, he struggles to explain: "I'm more, I don't know what the word is, relaxed, or serene, at peace, or whatever the word is. I don't go to bed every night and think, 'I've got to get this done. I've got to be successful.' " He talks more openly about the pain and the disability that linger from his war injury, how he cannot look at himself in the mirror in the morning until after he has put on his T shirt, how he must reach for a hook to button his shirt.

"Maybe he's mellowed or let his guard down a little more," says his wife Elizabeth, who is expected to quit her post soon as Red Cross president to join the campaign in a yet to be determined role. "He's tender and loving. That's the man I fell in love with, but I think, somehow, he's willing to let more of that show through now."

On the stump, Dole seems more relaxed than before, more focused with his message of smaller government. The quintessential Washington insider is running on a promise of returning power to the people, through their state and local governments. In the breast pocket of his perpetually crisp white shirts, he keeps an index card on which is printed the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states all powers not expressly granted the Federal Government. But what really distinguishes him from the rest of the field, Dole told an audience in Nashua, is that "I've been tested in many ways, and I do believe I've been able to provide leadership."

But leadership can be a difficult commodity to sell, particularly if it is a substitute for vision or a euphemism for the consummate pragmatism that has alienated many of the conservative faithful. "Senator Straddle," Bush called him. Still, Dole can show breathtaking resolve when he believes he is right. Of all the battles that he has fought in the Senate, the one that he is proudest of is one he ultimately lost. In 1985 he pulled together a one-vote majority in the Senate to pass a tough budget that included a freeze on Social Security cost of living increases. Had that plan gone through, today's deficit would be significantly smaller. But in the end, Ronald Reagan lacked the nerve to touch the most sacred entitlement. Partly as a result of the budget vote, the G.O.P. lost its Senate majority in the 1986 election.

Dole's major concern is being outflanked. To succeed as majority leader, he will have to forge compromises, but in his rhetoric on issues like affirmative action, Dole maintains a sharp conservative edge. "What he's quite obviously trying to do is stop Phil Gramm from carving out huge differences from Dole on the right," says David Mason, of the Heritage Foundation. And while Gramm can operate on the Senate sidelines, Dole must continually prove himself as a leader. On that score, he suffered a major defeat last week, when he failed to come up with the last vote needed to pass the balanced-budget amendment.

Many Republicans are skeptical that Dole can pull it all off. "It's his nomination to lose--and he probably will," said Stuart Rothenberg, an independent political analyst. Perhaps the biggest question is how well Dole will be able to maintain that new inner peace. Just weeks after pledging in the 1988 campaign to become "a new Bob Dole," the candidate could not restrain himself from telling a New Hampshire heckler to "go back into your cave." So it is understandable that some are not convinced by Dole's latest declarations that he is ready to be "warm, cuddly, fuzzy." Said Gregory Carson, a New Hampshire state legislator: "In 1988 he got very unelectable very quickly. Otherwise, I'd hop right on the Dole bandwagon." Then again, it may not matter. After all, Dole is running in a political environment in which it is only slightly shocking for a Congressman on the House floor to call the President a traitor.

Dole talks like someone who is a long way from retirement. "You've got to like this business, and I like politics," he told TIME. "Dan Quayle had me right when he said, 'When Bob Dole has a day off, he goes to a fund raiser.' " The Doles have never been much for the capital's social scene. They still live in the two-bedroom Watergate apartment that was Dole's bachelor pad after his divorce from his first wife Phyllis. Most evenings, they have their dinner on TV trays as they watch rented videos or an old-movie channel.

Markedly out of step with Newt Gingrich's headlong march to the future, Dole's campaign evokes a more heroic era. Dole first started giving new thought to running during last summer's D-day anniversary celebrations, where other veterans greeted him as a hero, bringing their children and grandchildren to meet him. Until then, he had agreed with the idea that Bill Clinton's election marked a new generation. Now, he believes he has been given another chance: "Maybe there is one more mission. Maybe there is one more call to serve."