THE ROUGH POLITICS OF VIRTUE

By NANCY GIBBS

Imagine that you have a thousand miles to walk and someone keeps stealing your shoes. Imagine that you have decided to risk everything to win the woman you love and you keep stumbling over your rival, already kneeling before her, reciting the lines you had carefully rehearsed. Imagine that you are Bob Dole, just a man, trying to get some traction while running for President. And every time you think you have spotted firm, sensible, conservative ground, there is the Democratic President already crouching in ambush. "If this keeps up, Bill Clinton won't have to make speeches anymore," Dole grumbled last week. "All he'll have to do is find out my stand on an issue and say 'Me too.'"

The week Americans learned how fast and how far Bill Clinton would go to get re-elected did not end with his aggressive flanking maneuver on welfare reform or a timely reminder of his opposition to gay marriage. Instead it ended with the Clinton-Gore campaign buying $1.2 million worth of ads that suggested to viewers that the only thing Bob Dole had done lately was "quit." And it climaxed with a bitter exchange over abortion, in which charges and countercharges over piety and principle flew back and forth with a startling ferocity. It became the week to talk about values, but the values most often invoked last week--like civility, decency, personal responsibility--were not much in evidence among their champions.

Most elections do not unfold like Homeric epics; instead they tend to turn on just a handful of moments, four or five instances in which the voters' hunches are confirmed or shattered, normally without warning and sometimes without anyone's realizing it at the time. For Clinton and Dole last week may well prove to be one such moment. Over the course of six days, Clinton defended his fortress in the political center by making headline-grabbing announcements on welfare reform, on the right of states to disavow homosexual unions, and on affirmative action, just when Bob Dole had hoped to showcase his own distinctive politics on some of the same subjects. But in sending so many messages so fast, Clinton managed even amid his tactical successes to raise questions about whether he was returning to the say-anything, do-anything, kleptomaniacal Clinton whom voters viewed skeptically in 1992.

For Dole's part that stern prairie sense of honor, so widely hailed when he stepped down from the Senate two weeks ago, also risks being compromised. Dole has recently seemed so eager to intensify his profile with voters that he has even disavowed his own proposals simply because Clinton accepted them. Five weeks ago, he suggested that he and Clinton should get together to negotiate the budget, then he backed off when the White House accepted. Three weeks ago, he offered separate votes on the minimum wage and the gas tax, and reversed himself as soon as Democrats went along. And last week he was still gathering wedge issues while he might. "I assume there's a pile of them out there somewhere," he told TIME last week. "I don't know where. I assume there are going to be a lot of things cropping up."

Like the Wizard of Oz, both sides are using smoke and bullhorns to scare voters and their little dogs too. "We've got a lot of yelling back and forth over very minor issues," says Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute. "The debate is essentially Bob Dole saying 'Liar' and Bill Clinton saying 'Extremist.'"

It is received wisdom that both candidates must hold the middle to win independent voters in the eight or so swing states. Clinton has been in training for months, and it shows; by last week he held a double-digit lead and was determined, in the words of a senior Clinton adviser, "not to let Dole off the mat." On Saturday Clinton announced his support for a Republican-led Wisconsin welfare plan that Dole had wanted to claim for his own. Clinton had already backed proposals containing many elements of the Wisconsin plan, but correctly figured that he would be seen as stealing Dole's thunder by endorsing it before Dole did. On Tuesday he reasserted his family-values credentials by disclosing that he would sign a federal bill saying that one state can't be forced to honor a same-sex marriage performed in another. On Wednesday he backed a set of rules tightening federal affirmative-action guidelines. But it was Thursday that may prove the most emblematic day yet of Campaign 1996, when all the engines of expedience and virtue collided in a rare moment of political drama.

Long a prisoner of his party's right, Dole mounted his boldest foray yet to the center and was tripped up by Clinton, who, after days of defending the middle, decided to run home and make a stand on his left. Dole suddenly found himself trapped in a debate about abortion on the very day he had hoped to free himself from the excesses of the Gingrich revolution. His goal was to begin winning back a critical piece of the Republican presidential coalition, the economically liberal and socially conservative voters who deserted the Democrats for Reagan in 1980. Mostly white working class, they grew up--or their parents' parents grew up--in the Depression and relied from time to time on such government programs as unemployment and strike benefits.

For weeks now, the Dole operation has been looking for a way to reach them by triangulating between Democrats and the hard-line conservatives in the House G.O.P. So in a speech to Catholic editors last Thursday in Philadelphia, Dole imagined he might swoop down and deftly land behind the man in the White House who recently declared that the era of Big Government is over. "There are things government can do to help those in need," said Dole. "I do not believe in the hard philosophy of sink or swim--the survival of the fittest--because my life is a tribute to people who thought life was bigger and nobler than that. I learned the hard way that while self-reliance is an essential part of the American character, so is that generous spirit that reaches out to those wounded in body and soul."

It was in this personal and political context that Dole declared his support for the idea of letting taxpayers decide how their money should help the poor, by earmarking a portion of their taxes to private and religious charities--something that sounds wonderful but is hell on deficits. "Americans have lost patience with the Great Society," Dole said. "But they have not lost their compassion for the poor and their commitment to the common good."

Coming right out of the 1988 Bush playbook, this could have been a powerful message. But it was quickly upstaged when Dole went on to address the explosive issue of abortion. While inflating the Big Tent ("I understand that reasonable and decent people can disagree on certain points"), he went on to attack Clinton for vetoing a ban on so-called partial-birth abortions, declaring that "President Clinton pushed the limits of decency too far."

And so he flung open the door, and Clinton stormed through it within hours. Until this point, the White House had vowed not to engage Dole directly at all; leave that to aides and underlings and Vice Presidents, the policy went, and let Clinton float above the fray. But that resolution quickly crumbled, in part because some in the White House were spooked by Dole's slight bounce in the polls after his theatrical exit from the Senate and in part because Clinton cannot take a punch without striking back. "If we respond now, we stay in control," said a Clinton adviser last week. "If we do nothing, we become Mondale."

Flushed and angry at a press conference that morning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Clinton lashed back at Dole, saying fiercely, "I am always a little skeptical when politicians piously proclaim their morality." Dole embraced the ban because it was politically popular, Clinton went on, parodying Dole's most famous verbal tic: "I did not want to be bothered by the facts; it's O.K. with me, whatever, if they rip your body to shreds, and you could never have another baby, even though the baby you were carrying couldn't live." Clinton had argued in vetoing the ban in April that it included no exemption to protect a woman's health, only her life. Last week he defended it this way: "I fail to see why his moral position is superior to the one I took." In reply Dole told TIME, "[The] President yesterday, he got a little testy. But I think it involved an act. He knew he'd get the question, and he was primed."

And with that, the candidates laid bare the themes that will underlie all they say and do and propose and reject for the next five months. If there is little real difference in what they say, voters will be left to fathom what they actually believe. And here, after months of almost flawless political performance, is where Clinton may have made his first mistake of the general election campaign. By engaging Dole so early and so directly and on so many fronts over so few days, he risked reviving the image of a President who is not exactly sure and may not care where he stands from day to day.

Clinton has an alibi for his flexibility; as President of All the People, he can even use bipartisanship as a devastating partisan weapon. Strategist Dick Morris had furnished the President with some trusty, mall-tested themes to show that he was a leader and Dole a divider. "Some people live and breathe to divide the American people and keep them in a turmoil all the time," Clinton declared in Milwaukee on Thursday. "I work to calm the American people down, to lift their vision, to unite them and to move them into the future." This way he claims the moral high ground and the strategic middle ground at the same time.

In early May, Wisconsin began petitioning the Department of Health and Human Services for a waiver allowing implementation of the Wisconsin Works welfare experiment, which would abolish all federal guarantees of cash assistance and instead require welfare recipients to work for their benefits. The White House has been following the state's experiment closely; this is the stuff Clinton likes to read in bed. Clinton also knew that the following Tuesday, Dole would be traveling to Wisconsin to deliver his big welfare address. Knowledge of the Republican choreography, a Clinton strategist says, "drove the timing of our response, if not the substance."

Morris urged Clinton to use his Saturday radio address, which has become a kind of toughlove matinee, to come out in favor of the Wisconsin plan before Dole could assail him for opposing it--never mind that Wisconsin hadn't sent in the whole request, and no one had fully reviewed it. In the White House this kind of move has a name: "prebuttal." Because the Wisconsin plan includes substantial spending for child care, health and job training, the White House was able to claim that it is much closer to Clinton's current welfare proposals than to the Republican bill he vetoed last year. By the time Dole showed up on Tuesday, he was left to make his case that the other guy was stealing his lines and didn't mean what he said.

The effect of last week's maneuvering was to leave the candidates only inches apart on welfare: both would require recipients to go to work after two years; both would cut off all benefits after five years for the able-bodied; both would crack down on deadbeat dads. And both would allow states to cut off payments to unwed teenage mothers. So much consensus, however, may be bad for real reform: now that it's no longer a defining issue in the campaign, it probably won't go anywhere anytime soon.

From here on, though, the candidates are moving into ideological territory where finessing becomes harder or where the other just can't follow. For both Clinton and Dole a big minefield is affirmative action. Last week the Administration announced new rules on government contracting that disallow all strict set-aside provisions that require specific numbers for minority contractors. But they still allow "race-conscious" procurement as long as Justice Department studies of each affected industry find credible evidence of discrimination. The rules reflect the "Mend it, don't end it" approach Clinton announced last summer--a fairly gutsy and clear exception to his lunge to the right on social issues. Clinton doesn't want to highlight this uncharacteristic deviation from the center, which is why he chose to announce these rules with quiet word from the Justice Department, not the Saturday radio address he has been using for his social-issue soliloquies.

Dole also has a clear position on affirmative action, albeit a new one: he introduced legislation last year to end all federal racial and gender preferences, after having supported them for two decades. So he too must tread carefully and slowly. First, affirmative action may be the most pointed arrow in his quiver, and he may prefer to save it until later in the contest. But more immediately, Dole knows it would be quite unwise to make an overhaul of affirmative action a campaign issue as long as he clings to even the slimmest prospect of attracting Colin Powell to the Republican ticket. When the issue came up during a recent Dole strategy session, campaign manager Scott Reed quickly shot it down. A Dole adviser who attended said the Dole camp will not discuss affirmative action anytime soon--and maybe not for a long time.

So the next debate facing Dole is what to do about taxes. After drawing nearly all the blood from Bob Dole's political body during their primary bout, Steve Forbes went to Washington last week to join the great Republican transfusion. He was there to help Dole devise an appealing economic message, beyond the vague verbal parsley in his speeches about abolishing the irs and replacing it with "a flatter, fairer, simpler" income tax. Though Republicans know well from experience the appeal of tax reform, Dole runs a risk by adopting the supply-side theories he has long disparaged and swelling a deficit he has fought, often courageously, to contain.

Thus the Dole version of tax cuts is likely to be something closer to supply-side lite. His plan will rely more on the promise that a Republican Congress, working with a sympathetic President, could rein in spending enough to cut taxes way back as well. And that is where Clinton gets his opening: if elected, he will argue, the Republicans will revert to their true nature and make up the shortfalls by gutting Medicare and kicking welfare mothers and children into the street. Republicans are starting to make a similar argument about Clinton and what a second term would mean: he may be saying all the right things, but you'll never know his real intentions until it is too late, when he's back in the White House brandishing a mandate and freed from having to face the voters again.

White House operatives won't admit to the slightest concern that the Morris strategy invites charges about Clinton as medicine showman. They make the case that the President, in his march to the right, has magically recovered his true self--the New Democrat boy Governor who first attracted attention all those years ago, now grown up and gone to gray but still true to his school. Reforming welfare and opposing same-sex marriage, they insist, are core Clinton beliefs, even though he's done precious little to advance the former and has never had much to say about the latter. "Morris has his eye on one thing above all else," a campaign strategist says. "Keep the President steady. Now that he's claimed the center, make sure he sits still, no matter how bumpy the ride gets."

For all the big themes and lofty issues, the whole shooting match had got pretty ugly by the end of the week. In an ad called "Stripes," the G.O.P. attacked the claim by Clinton's lawyer Robert Bennett that the sexual-harassment suit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones should be delayed until after the President leaves office, on the ground that the Commander in Chief may be entitled to the same kind of protections as active-duty personnel. The next day the Democrats offered an ad called "Empty." With a picture of a Senator's cluttered desk, the announcer says, "He told us...he was a doer, not a talker. Then he told us that he was quitting, giving up. Leaving behind the gridlock he helped create--and now all he offers are negative attacks."

For the past two years, American politics has been split along ideological lines. Now, however, both candidates are realizing, once again, that most voters are closer to the center and yearning for sensible middle-ground positions. So the ugliness of the campaign has shifted, remarkably early, from exploiting partisan divisions to the old-fashioned mudslinging that usually marks the final days of the campaign.

--Reported by Michael Duffy and Tamala M. Edwards with Dole, J.F.O. McAllister and Eric Pooley/Washington

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON