WHAT DOLE IS DOING WRONG

By NANCY GIBBS

A SNAPSHOT FROM THE WEEK Everything Went Wrong in the Dole campaign. There is the candidate, hours after delivering one of the worst and most important speeches of his life. He is back in Iowa, shaking more hands, mining votes, posing for a photo with local farmers Mark and Jeanine Dirks and their six-month-old boy. The candidate gazes down at the little brown-haired cutie sucking happily on a pacifier. "$500 tax credit," Dole says, and laughs.

People who like and admire Bob Dole see in these moments the essence of their man. He is too decent to pretend to be someone he's not, too circumspect to slobber over someone else's baby, and plenty proud of the concrete things he has done to improve the lives of working families like the Dirkses. The people who aren't so sure they like Bob Dole see once again the National Mortician, brusque, impenetrable, embalmed by Washington, who looks like it hurts to smile.

It was, of course, the latter that millions of Americans saw on Tuesday night in the speech Dole may forever wish he hadn't given. He could have let someone else handle the Republican response to Clinton's State of the Union address. But if he had to do it, his austere outer office was the wrong place; and if he had to do it there, a few minutes after the President was the wrong time; and if he had to do it then and there, sitting by a flag with bad lighting and a worse script was the wrong format for such a wooden speaker.

But so it goes, and now the Dole campaign is fighting free fall with only two weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses. Dole's partisans knew they had a problem when the newspapers arrived, full of coffee-shop interviews and focus groups with voters who found Clinton cheery and Dole sour. An unusually cheerless Elizabeth Dole snapped to a TIME correspondent traveling with her in Keene, New Hampshire, "I sure didn't like what I just read.'' Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire showed the Republican front runner losing ground and Steve Forbes bounding into the No. 2 position. The mood at Dole's campaign headquarters was edgy and defensive, with aides speaking quietly into phones about How Could This Have Happened and loyal allies insisting loudly that the speech had been fine. Dole aides insisted that he erred in style, not substance. "We were speaking to conservative Republican primary voters," said campaign manager Scott Reed. "We admit it. We showed that we were for change, that Clinton is the obstacle and we won't compromise."

The State of the Union address is a hard act to follow. The President got an hour of prime time to lay out his vision in front of a packed joint session of Congress and assorted national heroes; Dole appeared for 10 minutes in an empty office with a TelePrompTer and snarled through a performance that Rush Limbaugh called "lackluster," and others much worse. Clinton was buoyant, shameless, cleverly conciliatory, as he proclaimed the end of Big Government, attacked sleazy Hollywood profiteers, extolled the virtues of the family and a balanced budget. Clinton's speech was so Republican in form and function that Dole could have just welcomed him aboard the G.O.P., joked that House minority leader Dick Gephardt should be giving the response and said good night.

Instead he perched there, bitter, monotonic, denouncing Clinton as "the last public defender of a discredited status quo," the "rear guard of the welfare state." The President spoke of the Age of Possibility; Dole of the Era of Darkness. Clinton spoke to 250 million Americans; Dole to 20,000 Christian conservatives in Iowa. Clinton was inclusive and optimistic; Dole was unforgiving and retro. Clinton was the leader above the fray; Dole was the fray. The only good news was that so many viewers turned off their sets before he came on. "It was," said a Dole adviser who watched in pain, "pathetic."

THOUGH IT WAS NEVER A FAIR fight, Dole never considered ducking it, or asking someone else, like rising-star Governor John Engler, to do the deed. Dole was worried that rival candidates, notably Phil Gramm, would jump on him for backing out of a fight. Instead, they lacerated him for losing it. "We saw [Clinton's] speech, and it was empty rhetoric," declared Gramm on Thursday. "And we saw Bob Dole's response--it was poor empty rhetoric." The Dole camp also considered a change of venue, like giving the response from Dole's home state of Kansas. But that quickly felt a little contrived for a man who has lived in the Watergate building for more than 20 years.

Dole's office did try to arrange with the networks for him to give his address the next day, which would have allowed time for Clinton's applause to die down. But rather than contacting the corporate public relations chiefs of ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN, Dole's Senate staff instead tried the congressional lobbyists--by fax. Negotiations never even got started. The broken play has top Republican operatives shaking their heads in dismay: Can anyone outside of Dole himself get anything done?

The speech itself reflected some civil strife between Dole's Senate team and his campaign crew. His Senate speechwriter had offered a draft that lauded his legislative record and was generally mild in its assaults on the enemy. This was dumped as boring by campaign manager Reed. Campaign communications director Mari Maseng Will's draft was pitched much harder right, tougher on Clinton, aimed at Iowa and New Hampshire. The Senate staffers denounced it as a "full-throated attack" that Dole himself "winced at," they say. The single line that Senate Chief of Staff Sheila Burke and Co. found most over the top: "Ronald Reagan may have come from Hollywood, but his values were shaped in middle America. Bill Clinton may come from Arkansas, but no President has been closer to Hollywood." With Dole in the room, Burke said that kind of talk had no place in a response to the State of the Union.

In the end Dole sanded down the speech himself. "We took out all the harsh stuff," he says. "We took out the stuff about Hollywood. We took out a lot of stuff about Clinton because we wanted to tone it down a lot. We didn't want it to be a legislative speech. We wanted it to be about values in America and where we go from here." On Tuesday Dole floated a draft past Gingrich, who, according to a Dole aide, said, "I wouldn't change a word of it. No one will ever say you don't have a vision again." Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire read it and said there were too many references to God, but none was removed.

When it was over, Dole acknowledged that he suffered by comparison to Clinton. "He's a good speaker, certainly better than me," Dole allowed. "There's nothing worse than trying to speak in an empty room." Still, bright and early the next morning Dole was back on the road in Iowa, where the deeper troubles of his campaign have been evident for weeks. His heavy Washington schedule, in fact, has until last week kept him tied down in the Capitol.

Despite one staff shake-up, Dole's Iowa campaign remains oddly amateurish. His speeches have a hurried, clipped quality. They make him sound more like he is running for majority leader than for President. He promises not to get bogged down in "inside baseball," then proceeds to talk of conference committees and vote counts and acronyms for programs that make more sense in Washington than on the campaign trail.

Barely 12 hours after his speech, Dole found himself in a cramped conference room in the basement of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, police department. It took all the energy he could muster to keep paying attention as the local police chief explained the advantages of bicycle patrols. When Chief William Byrne pulled out one of the department's black bikes and began explaining, in effect, how it worked, Dole looked like he were going to jump out of his skin. His eye twitched, his head tilted spasmodically, he kept tapping his right heel on the floor. He tried to joke: "Couldn't get very far on a bike today," he said, referring to the chill outside. What he really wanted to say, but couldn't, was "Gotta go." That's his favorite expression when he ends a conversation back in Washington, where he has real power. But as much as he wanted to say it in Cedar Rapids, he couldn't. He had to stay and collect, one by one, all the votes he could.

Wednesday was supposed to be "crime day" for the Dole campaign. But after the bike-police stop, Dole rarely mentioned crime again. This was true even when he visited the Iowa State Men's Reformatory in Anamosa. The Victorian structure was impressive and eerie. Dole toured the noisy license-plate factory, where prisoners produce about 5,500 plates a day. Wearing protective glasses, he dutifully shook hands with the inmates, asked questions about what they were doing. The problem is, the prisoners can't vote. So what was Dole doing there? "Want to get a feel of what happens here. It was built in 1872. There are all kinds of offenders here." And that was it. The only thing that made sense about the visit was a red, white and blue license plate hung over a doorway inside that read DOLE 96.

Dole trained almost all his fire on Steve Forbes, demanding he release his tax returns and insisting that Forbes' proposed flat tax would benefit the "super rich"--meaning Forbes--and hurt middle-class Americans. "Take your pencil out, Mr. Forbes, and see how it affects you," Dole challenged. He mocked Forbes for having a helicopter. Noting the report in last week's TIME about Forbes' lending his money to his own campaign, Dole said Forbes holds fund raisers "so his advertisers can pay him back." And whenever he got the chance, Dole spanked the newcomer for trying to "buy the election" with millions of dollars of negative ads, mostly against Dole. It has got so bad, Dole joked, "I may not even vote for myself."

The Forbes attacks on Dole are constant and withering. So Dole and his advisers pore over their nightly tracking polls, which for awhile showed Forbes gaining steadily, then slipping a bit as Dole's counterattack hit home, then rising once again. By Monday night, the eve of the speeches, Dole had dipped from the mid- to high 30s down to 30, but was flattening out there. Forbes, after some ups and downs, appeared to be leveling off at 18%, while Gramm, after a brief charge during which he briefly surpassed Forbes, held around 11%.

Though the Wednesday- and Thursday-night polls did not show the speech doing any major damage with Iowa's conservative caucus voters, Dole aides are still worried. Unless something changes, Dole may not be able to punch through the 30% ceiling in the farm state, which would make it awfully hard to declare victory there. Moreover, if Forbes or Gramm comes close to 20%, or if both do, commentators could yet call this a two- or three-man race heading into New Hampshire. "Thirty is now the goal," said a top Dole official. "If the others pack around 15, we're golden." If not, he added, "it's going to get spun that we didn't have enough and we have got to be ready to go to work fast in New Hampshire."

Dole moved quickly back on the attack, blaming the press for the public response to his speech. "We're sorry if the liberal press doesn't like it. If you don't sing their songs, you don't get good reviews." By Saturday the red-meat passages about Clinton and Hollywood were back in Dole's stump speech in New Hampshire. The campaign plans to call 60,000 Dole supporters in Iowa, hauling back in line any who appear to be straying. They will call any Forbes supporters who oppose abortion, to remind them that Forbes does not oppose all abortions. Then comes the direct-mail avalanche aimed at veterans, Christians and gun enthusiasts. This will be a crucial test. Reed and other Dole aides believe they must drive Forbes back down to the low teens in the polls with tough negative ads. If the tactic works, Dole will be able to close his Iowa campaign on a positive note; if it fails, his team expects to fight mean to the end.

Some potential Dole supporters in Iowa admit they have lost interest. At one point Woodbury County G.O.P. chairman Roger Linn thought of serving as Dole's County chair, but now he is no longer considering him. "Dole did a terrible job during the response," says Linn, who raises soybeans and corn. "He looked like an old man. He reminds me of me. I'm 62, and I let the kids do the work on the farm." Even some who think Dole is being tarnished unfairly admit that TV is too important a medium to dismiss, and it is clearly not Dole's strength. Many supporters feel relieved when they finally see their man in person. After Dole's speech in Anamosa, Joyce Poulter, 70, said, "He was more impressive than he was on television. I had thought he was too old, but he looks younger than I do."

It is becoming a strain on staff members to find some upside to the bad weeks. Here is the silver lining, such as it is, to the State of the Union response: by performing so miserably, Dole has changed the conventional wisdom on the primaries. His air of inevitability is gone, which even his enemies recognize could work to his advantage. "This has lowered the bar for him in Iowa and New Hampshire and possibly South Carolina," says a White House adviser to the President. "The definition of a win will be lower than it was two days ago. And that could help him."

--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Cedar Rapids, Ann Blackman/Keene and Michael Duffy/Washington

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/CEDAR RAPIDS, ANN BLACKMAN/KEENE AND MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON