THE SOUL OF DOLE

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND NANCY GIBBS

Bob Dole says he trusts in the hard way, and well he might, hailing from the garden of pressed sand called western Kansas, where the weather's hard, the water's hard, and anything that comes easy probably isn't worth having. This way, the hard way, says Dole, is the only way he has ever got anything and anywhere in this life. It is how he swallowed his pride as he and his family moved into the basement of his boyhood home so that oilmen could move in above them. How he came home from World War II not alive or dead but in-between, boxed and crated in a plaster cast, shot up in so many places that he was reduced at 21 to a second infancy, learning all over again how to walk, eat, dress himself with clip-on ties and laceless shoes. How he fought his way from county attorney to Senate leader, driving for miles, stopping in front of every swaying porch lamp to beg, "Vote for Dole. Dole, like the pineapple juice." How he has triumphed in spite of his epithets: hatchet man, Nixon's water boy, tax collector for the welfare state, the Senator from Archer Daniels Midland, the Old Man. And, finally, how he believes he will wrench the presidency away from an opponent whose relative youth and ease and liquid empathy conspire to make Dole look old and stiff and all alone.

So even if Bob Dole were 20 points ahead of Bill Clinton this week (instead of the other way around), he probably wouldn't believe the polls or, if he did, wouldn't put much faith in them anyway. He knows less about living than about coming back from the dead. As the sky falls and his allies fret and his party balks and the polls sink, he alone remains calm. He takes pride in the very habits that people around him are desperate to change. And he's not afraid of the dark, because he has been here before.

His critics and rivals have already composed his requiem, claiming from the start that he was the symbol of the G.O.P.'s blind faith in primogeniture, a front runner who cannot win; that he's a mid-20th century man at the lip of the 21st century; that there is no room for a relic in a church that worships youth; that one can't be tongue-tied and taciturn in the age of confession. Sometimes the hard way builds muscles, sows compassion, tests courage. But sometimes the hard way is just the wrong way.

The high and low points of Dole's campaign to date are nearly impossible to explain without some archaeology into the soil he sprang from and the paths he traveled to get here. We all have the defects of our qualities. In Dole's case, the very traits that help account for his successes--the cutting wit, the stubborn independence, the refusal to ask for help even when stakes are highest--also produced the more horrible moments of this campaign, when he seemed to be running for some other office in some other century on some other planet. Ultimately, says one of his primary rivals, "Dole's campaign is a reflection of Dole."

"I HAVE COME BACK FROM THE DEAD"

This man wouldn't be running for President if he could have settled for anything less. But all his plans for a normal life died young. He calls April 14, 1945, "the day that changed my life." It's likely that the experience of near fatal injury and nearly impossible recovery would have affected 50 different people in 50 different ways. For Dole, who had grown up in a family and a town that prized perseverance, the injury acted mainly as a magnifier. He became himself, only more so.

"As a young man in a small town," Dole said when he announced his candidacy last summer, "my parents taught me to put my trust in God, not government, and never confuse the two." Self-reliance was bred in the bone. His family, his neighbors, his whole thirsty town of Russell, Kansas, lived one day at a time through the 1930s, when little would grow, when the dust filmed the windows and smothered the crops, when some farmers slaughtered their cattle and then killed themselves rather than face the shame of bankruptcy. They knew about making do with what they had and not complaining about it. "There are doers, and there are stewers," his father used to say. Dole was asked once what his mother would think of him now, of his triumph in winning his party's nomination. "She would probably say it is no big deal," he replied. "Well, not as important as getting dinner ready, I know that."

The road out would be a steep, narrow one, marched single file, but that suited him just fine. Dole was always a soloist, the one with whom the girls in his high school said they'd most like to be marooned on a desert island. He was a natural basketball player who preferred running track, a sport that allowed him to depend on himself and train all alone. At this he was not a natural--he willed himself to become a top half-miler in the state. But still he played basketball, the team sport, because that was the route that might get him a scholarship to college, and from college maybe to med school, where he could train for a profession that would guarantee him security wherever he went.

The most fateful decision Bob Dole ever made, like so many that would follow, he made all alone. He found himself on an April day on a hillside in Italy, trying to lead a platoon that was pinned down by German gunners and surrounded by land mines called Bouncing Betties. When Dole saw his radioman go down, he crawled out of his foxhole to retrieve him; the soldier he was trying to save was already dead, and by the time the firing stopped, Dole very nearly was too.

Dole has occasionally talked about how the signal event in his life--not so much the injury itself as the effort to overcome it-- made him more sensitive and dependent on other people. It is a bond that is still at work when he fights to help the disabled and disfranchised, defending food stamps and voting rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act. When he went to campaign in Indianapolis, Indiana, earlier this summer, he made a detour to attend the graduation party of a young girl who had been partially paralyzed in a car wreck. While other people end conversations with "So long, take care, see you soon," Dole's sign-off is a mantra against despair: "Don't give up. Don't give up."

But what is just as clear is the way the injury also cut him off and left him all alone. He came home paralyzed in a body cast, a fastidious man who felt filthy, itching all over, like garbage. He asked his mother to keep people away from the hospital; he couldn't bear to be seen this way. His friends went on to college, got on with their lives; his little brother Kenny settled down and got married. Their lives unreeled; his unraveled. Twice during his three years in and out of hospitals he very nearly died. When he came down with pneumonia, the doctors had no other hope than a brand-new drug that had killed or blinded the first two patients they tried it on. By the time he was lurching toward recovery, he had been to places very few people go.

Among the greatest debts he owes, Dole has often suggested, was to the doctor who rebuilt him. Dr. Hampar Kelikian operated three times on Dole, taking muscle sheathing from his left leg and using it to reattach his right arm, which is 2 1/2 inches shorter than the left. But perhaps more important than the limbs he repaired were the illusions he shattered. He convinced Dole that he was never going to play basketball again, would never have enough feeling in his hands to be a surgeon. Dole needed to make a new plan, use what he had left. The doctor was the one who told him to use his brain instead, go to law school. You'll never be 100%, Kelikian said. But you'll be 110% of whatever is left.

If the fact that he survived was a tribute to his doctors, the fact that he recovered was a tribute to himself. He had dropped from 194 lbs. to 122 lbs.; he couldn't stand to look in the mirror. A friend designed the weights and pulleys that would strengthen his mangled arms. Hour after hour Dole worked out on the weights; his mother would watch him sweat and hear him howl, and maybe she knew the only thing worse than what he was putting himself through was the image he held of the alternative, in which he saw himself on a corner on Russell's main street, in a wheelchair, selling pencils. That vision may have been enough to sour him on visions altogether.

By the time Dole was well enough to leave the hospital, marry an occupational therapist named Phyllis Holden and go back to school in the fall of 1949, he had become such a fighter that he could do nothing halfway. He hauled a government-issue tape recorder the size of a breadbox to class every day, then stayed up half the night listening to lectures and scratching tight, telegraphic notes with his left hand. He learned to hear everything, memorize all he heard and boil it down to powdered thought. When Phyllis suggested he ease up a bit, he recalls, every grade didn't have to be an A, he said, "I don't know how to study for a C or B's worth."

He has looked for this quality in others, ever since he went to Washington and began to build his career--looked more for resilience and grit than genius and ease. A former top aide says Dole's staff was always harder working than it was excellent, just like Dole himself. What he lost or lacked in raw political talent he more than made up for in effort. No one clocked more miles building the G.O.P. during Nixon's first term; before his hopeless 1980 presidential campaign, Dole demanded that his tiny Senate staff draft floor statements on every conceivable issue; in the 16 years that followed, when other Senators went home at night and fled Washington on weekends, Dole squeezed in two or three receptions an evening and then jetted off to other Senators' states for fund raisers.

Ultimately, this is what brought him the nomination on his third try. He wasn't the most natural candidate; Lamar Alexander could work a crowd like a talk-show host; Pat Buchanan could raise roofs; Steve Forbes could define a clear message. Dole couldn't do any of those things. But he could just gut it out, endorsement by endorsement, town after town, until he became inevitable--and even then he very nearly died several times. "We're going to win this, and we're going to win this the old-fashioned way," he says. "We're going to earn it."

"HE DOES NOT WANT HELP"

Dole's life has been such a solitary struggle for so long that you can almost forgive him for mistaking this campaign for yet one more purely personal challenge. He gives himself away in unnecessary denials. "It's about your children, it's about your future, it's not about my future," he says. Listen closely, and it becomes clear that it's not about the future at all, and it's all about him. At the point in his speech where he is most passionate about what is at stake in this election, his language is self-referential. "I've given up something to do this, I'm not just asking for more," as though his relinquishing the Senate role he loved so much was the only way he could think of to show that this is Really Important Business. Yet those who know Dole best insist that he is one of the least egotistical politicians they have ever encountered, one who refers to himself in the third person; who is always quick to position others in the front row for the camera; who gives away top billing on pending legislation, like the Kempthorne-Dole Unfunded Mandate Reform bill.

He may not be driven by ego, but he is driven by autobiography. The values and moments that Dole invokes are all anchored in a happier and better or harder and more ennobling time, in the exploratory scratches of the frontier or the soothing certainties of his movie idol John Wayne. "It is as if we went to sleep in one America and woke up in another," he said in his response to Clinton's State of the Union address. "But," he promised, "we know the way back...We know what made America great. All we need now is the resolve to lead our country back to her place in the sun."

His past is always his prologue, and at times he seems almost intent upon reinforcing his remoteness. He goes to a high school in Ohio and starts off telling the kids about World War II. Last month in Billings, Montana, he joked that he had been coming to the state since before its 48-year-old Governor had even been born. And on his birthday, for which his wife Elizabeth gave him a CD player, he said he couldn't wait to cue up some Johnny Mathis albums. Even in Washington, his neighborhood is a sound stage: he lives in the Watergate, spends Sundays going to church, appearing on talk shows and taking Elizabeth to brunch. He has no grandchildren to divert him and few hobbies beyond watching C-SPAN or old movies. He vacations in Florida at a condominium complex where he pals around with David Brinkley and Robert Strauss and Dwayne Andreas--men taking the same break from the same loop.

That may make them Dole's friends, but it does not make them his intimates. Even his closest associates admit that they don't feel close; they are at times aware of being pushed away. If you bear Dole's scars, says a Republican Senator who has watched him for 25 years, "you don't let anybody know. You carry a pen. You always wear the dark blue suit and white shirt. You do all these things that say, 'I'm normal. I'm the same as everyone else.' The effect of that hurt is it says, 'Don't get close to me. I have come back from the dead.' You keep adding and adding to that armor over 30, 40, 50 years, it becomes a barrier to decision making, a barrier to intimacy. It becomes a barrier to everything. Piercing that armor is very, very difficult. I don't know anyone who has done it. He has no close circle of friends. And in this place, friends are vital." When he was auditioning Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge for the most important partnership in the world, Ridge nailed the compulsory exercises. "Ridge was good," said a Dole aide. "He left Dole alone."

Even his language is solitary: Dole gets ribbed for his speaking style, the guttural growls, the verbal wheat germ ("anti-dumping; level the playing field; Super Three; may not mean a lot to you, but it's important"), the unpopulated syntax ("Have to look into that. See what happens in committee. Gotta go"). Dole speaks a language all his own. It's Indo-Midwestern, rooted in a place where there's no extra credit for extra words, where humor is often truth's only reliable vehicle. Dole's vernacular of nods, grunts, snickers and shrugs can be as baffling to outsiders as the Navajo code talkers were to the Japanese military. He rarely praised his staff members, even when he liked them; several left the leader's office frustrated and convinced he didn't, only to be surprised later when they got a call out of the Reagan or Bush White House from someone saying Dole insisted they be considered for a job. Some Senators still haven't mastered the signals. Florida's Connie Mack recalls that after pitching Dole on a series of economic issues earlier this year, he left the meeting dejected, certain Dole had been unimpressed. But his partner, Utah's Bob Bennett, said, "No, don't worry, that went fine." "How do you know?" Mack asked. "Did you see his eye twitch?" replied Bennett. "That means he liked it."

An aide explains it this way: "Dole is like a benign God. Everything is noted. Does he say anything? No. Does he forget anything? Never." It is easier to tell when his mind wanders off, or when he really hates an idea and flashes the palm of his hand, a scarlet sign that he's had it. But the stuff that sticks? They only know it when they hear him later parrot some remark they had made--onstage in front of 500 people. "You never hear back," says lobbyist Tom Korologos, a longtime friend. "I've sent him memos, I've sent him suggestions. When I see him use it three weeks later, I've smiled to myself and said, 'Well, I'll be damned.' There's a lot of 'Well, I'll be damned' with Dole."

He would not hustle or woo or ask for a favor; none of 20 Republican Senators with whom he worked for years could recall an instance in which Dole muscled them for votes or even pressured them more than very gently. In fact, he is far too proud to ask for aid of any kind. "He does not want help," said Utah's Orrin Hatch, "because he's had to overcome the fact that for a while, he couldn't do anything for himself. Now he still can't write or brush his teeth without pain, and it would kill any of us. But he was never going to be dependent on anyone else or have anyone think he was dependent on anyone."

Nearly every Senator who has traveled with him overseas has tried to help him on with his winter coat, only to be rebuked. One recalls waiting patiently before a press conference while Dole struggled for three minutes with a button on his suit. The Senator urged a Dole aide to speed things up. "Could you help him with that?" The aide refused: "Do you think for a minute he'd let me?" All the while, Dole stood nearby in earshot, working and working the button. Long minutes passed. Finally, he closed it. "Ready to roll." A former aide recalls accompanying Dole to an appearance on Face the Nation, only to discover that his boss had got lost in the studio. After mounting a search, he found Dole standing alone in front of a heavy set of closed double doors that he could neither open by himself nor ask for help with. Dole looked up and just said, "Got some doors here."

But the beauty of Dole's life is that he found the perfect place for a solitary man who wants to help other people but is allergic to being helped himself. Next to the Supreme Court, the Senate is the most private realm of public life, a closed club with rituals and codes and rules about how to dress and what to call one another and where to sit and what to say. It is a place where two doorkeepers stand like griffins by nearly every door, where the interns in the cloakroom will unwrap his Snickers bar for him, where everyone is so civil and cordial they just pitch in unbidden. When Dole ran for majority leader in 1985, his friends watched in horror as he frittered away week after week making speeches instead of locking up votes. John Danforth of Missouri, Bob Packwood of Oregon and John Warner of Virginia finally had to pull Dole aside and read him the riot act. "You need to ask people for their votes," Warner implored. "You need to be getting commitments." But having said that, they went and did it for him anyway. Over the years, on vote after vote, his Senate colleagues were left to intuit what he wanted and go out of their way to provide it. "Dole is the type of person who lets you know he needs you without saying so," Hatch says. "You know how difficult it is. So you naturally want to go and help him."

"THERE'S NO ONE IN THE CIRCLE WITH HIM"

When Dole lost the use of his right hand, it was as though his body set about the business of compensation, like the blind man who depends more on his hearing. "It's almost as if the affliction of the wound, which limits his writing ability, improves his ability to implant it in his head," Warner says. The muscles formed in his memory, in his ability to juggle half a dozen ideas or agendas or details with an ease that left his colleagues gasping. "I'd have something important to tell him," recalls Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, "and so I'd go up to him and say, 'I've got to talk. While I was giving him a one minute, [Arizona Senator John] McCain would walk by and say something, and [Massachusetts Senator Ted] Kennedy would walk by, and three or four other guys too, and I'd think, hell, he didn't get it. So I'd wait a couple hours, next day, and I'd think he's forgotten, and he'd say, 'I heard all that.' That's an amazing trait." All that processing power left little air space for reflection or curiosity or wild-eyed reverie. He thrived in a place where big dreams tended to die in the details and grand vision was best left to the think tanks and the bully pulpiteers in the White House.

If his colleagues found him personally aloof, they also knew no one worked harder to ease their lives, rescheduling votes around fund raisers, personal trips, the school play. Dole liked to hold court in the cloakroom, ear to the ground, counting votes, making wisecracks. Larry Pressler, an occasionally clueless South Dakotan, was a favorite target. Dole once came down to the Senate well during a vote and said out loud, so everyone could hear, "Don't know which way to go on this one. How did Pressler vote?" Even the clerks would start to laugh. But then it would be Dole who would do nine events in South Dakota for Pressler in a single day later that summer. And when Dole was publicly warned by right-wing groups not to make an endorsement in Virginia's ugly Senate primary last spring, incumbent Warner went to his old friend and said, "Don't risk coming. The presidency is far more important than I am." Warner recalls that Dole just smiled, saying as he walked away, "I'll be there."

Within the shelter of the Senate, the independence has brought Dole his finest moments. Most of Dole's Republican colleagues howled last year when he signaled his support for Clinton's decision to send troops to Bosnia. But when he went even further and decided to lead the fight for Clinton, they nearly revolted. At a private meeting, the G.O.P. Senators argued the mission was dangerous for the G.I.s and political folly for Republicans. Dole listened quietly while the assault continued for an hour, and though he would win over only 28 Republicans in the end, Dole was unfazed, even heartened, by the steep uphill fight. "Yup," he said to a mystified McCain as the two men left the meeting. "We're making progress." He knew the yelling had been cathartic.

Likewise it was Dole who watched silently last fall while the Republican field marshal Newt Gingrich marched his troops to the cliff of a government shutdown and over it. Dole went along, partly because he believed in stapling Clinton to the bargaining table and partly to keep his right wing happy. But by mid-December, Dole was talking to people in Iowa and New Hampshire nearly every day, and he could see that this was silly. Paying people not to come to work? Not paying people to come to work?

Longtime chief of staff Sheila Burke, who shared Dole's skepticism, recalls informing her boss on New Year's Day that another government shutdown was imminent. Dole turned to her, furious, "Did it ever occur to anybody that there are people out there who live paycheck to paycheck?" Dole spun away, saying to no one in particular, "This is the last time." And it was. On Jan. 2 he walked onto the Senate floor in the morning and just ended it. He didn't tell anyone. Didn't call anyone in the leadership. Didn't use any of the mechanisms available to postpone a vote. Just ended it. Nearly everyone in his party was furious. But Dole didn't care.

Perhaps the hardest political decision was to leave that whole world behind. The first push came in April, just after lunch, in a conference call with members of Team 100, the Republican National Committee's top rainmakers. What had been billed as a pep rally devolved into awkward group therapy when Dole, trying to explain what he stood for, was interrupted by a Southern financier who derided the Senator's answers as pitiful and insufficient. When Dole went on in characteristically confusing argot about various legislative proposals and maneuvers, the donor broke in again and said Dole either had to do a better job of explaining what he was for and what he was against or he would lose the election. What several participants later described as a long and pained silence followed. "It was horrible," said one. "Just horrible."

An hour later, Dole met with Mark Helprin, the novelist who had already been hired to work on the convention speech. Helprin suggested that one way for Dole to revive his campaign would be to quit not just the Senate leadership but the Senate itself. Dole said he had been thinking about it. The next day he broke the news to his campaign manager, Scott Reed, who jumped at the idea. But even after they began plotting, Dole didn't tell his wife for a week--perhaps anticipating she would resist. But if it was a good idea, it could have been much, much better. For it is hard to see in retrospect how getting out of the Senate actually helped Dole, other than giving him a good applause line. Dole's departure from the Senate changed the stakes and struck the set but did not answer the question that he faced once he clinched the nomination: What did he want to do as President?

"I DON'T HAVE ANY RISKY IDEAS"

Lawmaking may be a business done best in private, but campaigning is a public game, a long, garish parade of public personality. And so the heuristic approach Dole perfected in the Senate hobbled him on the campaign trail. He seemed to want to transmit to voters all those values and virtues that served him so well as majority leader, and the result was often painful to watch. In an age of contempt for insiders he refused to apologize for bargaining skills. "You're not 'cutting deals,'" he insisted, "you're trying to get something done."

It became a hymn refrain in every speech, when he promised opportunity scholarships or estate-tax reductions or a balanced budget: "We're going to get it done; we're going to make it stick." Over and over throughout the primaries, he would listen to Forbes invoke visions of the demolition of the IRS or Buchanan call for term limits on federal judges. And Dole would respond by saying, in a tone of proud reassurance, "I don't have any risky ideas." Which just highlighted the impression that he didn't have any ideas at all. Instead he had procedures. "Let's send it to committee," he said of the flat-tax idea. "Let's have hearings." He was speaking his first language at these moments. "He instinctively believes in reaching across the aisle," says Burke. "He is reluctant to look at extremes."

When he tried to cast himself into a true-believing, fire-breathing conservative standard bearer, the clothes just didn't fit. The more purely ideological the message, the less sincere he sounded delivering it. It was hard to believe his denunciations of affirmative action when he had supported civil rights since the '60s. It didn't help his credibility to attack Hollywood moguls for making movies that he hadn't taken the time to go see. His sudden embrace of $548 billion in tax cuts last week sounded craven coming from someone who had fought against deficits and snarled at supply-side theory for more than a decade. Ohio Governor George Voinovich once declared that "I'm staying with him because I believe that he doesn't believe all that crap his handlers have been having him say."

On the other hand, when Dole tries to find the sensible center, he has made a hash of it too. Campaign manager Reed and Dole actually had a careful strategy all laid out when they tried to soften the G.O.P.'s hard-line abortion stance. But a series of leaks and rebukes prompted Dole to dilute his own effort. Likewise a small tantrum by Gingrich was enough to stop Dole from moving toward the center on the assault-weapons ban. His repeated reversals left all sides suspicious of both his convictions and his judgment.

All of which raises the other great wonder about Dole: How has someone who has managed to survive 36 years in Washington come this far in presidential politics without a tight circle of advisers around him with the stature to tell him what to do, when to straighten up, when to stick to the script no matter what? Maintaining a strict posture on his message and delicately balancing competing agendas are the essential first and second positions of presidential ballet. And it is vital to have a merciless coach or two. Ronald Reagan had them. So did George Bush. And as his campaign gathers speed, so does Bill Clinton.

Dole, however, does not, and he isn't likely to go recruiting now. "All of us have submitted vision speeches," says a Republican Senator, one of many who hoped to equip Dole with some bright flags to mark the boundaries of his beliefs so voters would know where to find him. "All of us wonder what happened to them."

"HE'S NOT A WINDUP DOLL"

It is hard for Dole's allies to change destructive behavior when it reflects the instincts of which he's proudest. He not only likes talking to reporters, he wants to answer their questions honestly. It's why Dole says things like, "We're trying to get good pictures. Don't worry very much about what I say." He doesn't fake well; Dole has consistently been reluctant to use a TelePrompTer, which lets him pretend to riff when he's actually reading a speech. Nor will he take advantage of symbolism that he finds sacred, like posing for campaign shots at the Iwo Jima Memorial. He won't even wear casual clothes when a photo op requires it. "This is serious business," he told his media adviser on a cold winter morning in Iowa, refusing to wear a checked work shirt. "People are choosing a President." Dole is a guy who doesn't like to be touched; he certainly can't be handled. "The best way to kill something," says a senior campaign aide, "is make sure Dole reads it in the newspapers first."

And so Reed & Co. nudge Dole where they can, and where they can't, they just work around him. Reed placed Dole's office at the center of three long hallways on the 10th floor of campaign headquarters so the candidate can begin each day taking a long circuit, stopping in at each office, asking his trademark "What's cooking? What's going on? What's up?" Because Dole had kept so much in his head as a Senator and was so resistant to planning, Reed brought in Donald Rumsfeld in June to establish a logical paper flow through the campaign office and to tee up coming speeches and policy choices--a virtual decision-making process created to alter Dole's I'll-do-it-all-myself universe. This has improved some things, such as speeches, but older Dole associates roll their eyes and whisper that it's a pipe dream. "It's a good system for Rummy," laughed a Republican Senator. "That doesn't mean it will work for Dole." By July, Reed could just laugh after Dole surprised everyone and announced pro-choice Congresswoman Susan Molinari as the convention keynote speaker on Larry King Live. Reed knew Dole was probably going to choose her but wasn't sure. And the campaign had to scramble during the program to help track her down by beeper and get her on the phone to King before the show ended.

Former Dole communications director Mari Maseng Will has watched this pattern with both concern and respect. "He's not a windup doll. That's why he's not like the other politicians. The perfect candidate is a windup doll. It has linear thinking, it's one-dimensional. He's not that way. He is who he is. That has great appeal at a time when people don't like politicians. But you have to design a strategy to take advantage of his strengths."

Dole himself makes this challenge nearly impossible. Even last week he was showing just how deeply his stubborn streak could hurt him, a wound all the more painful for being self-inflicted. If he were privately flexible but publicly steadfast, a Ronald Reagan model, his rebellious instincts could work to his advantage. Were he able to project an image of stern, steady principle, an unwillingness to play political games and be managed by handlers, voters might find it a refreshing contrast to the normal politics of pandering. But instead Dole spent last week abandoning years of deficit hawkishness in order to fling tax cuts like confetti, and executing yet another round of reversals on the abortion plank of the G.O.P. platform.

And at the same time, for all the public capitulation, his private behavior was far more rigid. When word leaked of his plans to announce his running mate on Saturday, he immediately began "pushing back," says an aide, fighting the timing and setting and in the end jeopardizing whatever bounce he would get from his choice. He was determined that the decision be his alone, whatever the cost.

For all the turmoil inside his campaign and out, Dole remains almost calm. He doesn't scare; as McCain said, he has been threatened by professionals. Mari Will recalls the 1980 campaign, when Dole won less than 1% of the New Hampshire primary vote. "We're at an event with five staffers and two relatives--our whole campaign--and each of us is walking around holding up two signs because it looks like there are twice as many of us that way. And we're in a panic, complete emotional meltdown, because we're worried we're going to lose so badly. And that was when he was the calmest and most gentle with everyone."

In fact, when things look easy, he almost seems to look for ways to make them harder, move to where he's more comfortable. Instead of spending his summer telling voters why he wants to be President, he lit bonfires over abortion, tobacco, assault weapons, barked at American icons like Katie Couric and Dr. C. Everett Koop, and advocated reopening Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House one day after a bomb went off in Atlanta. He has stuck with a vow of silence to keep from getting in trouble, uncharacteristically refusing to answer reporters' campaign-trail questions at a time when even he admits most voters don't know a thing about him. And on Thursday he has to give the speech of his life because his campaign to this point has been one of the weakest political enterprises in memory.

One way of running for President is to find out where voters are and just go there. Voters are comfortable with Clinton in part because he is not asking anything of them; he's too busy reflecting their every impulse. Dole will never be as convincing as a panderer, and in his speeches and gestures on the stump he seems to suggest that this political shortcoming is a personal strength. Dole is asking voters to trust that he's a leader with strong principles even as he does little to demonstrate those qualities. "I want to win for the right reason," he says. "I want to win because the people of America had confidence in Bob Dole. Because they understood leadership." It is a lot to ask of voters who have plenty of other things to worry about. But to Dole, if it isn't hard, it probably isn't worth doing.

--With reporting by Tamala M. Edwards with Dole

With reporting by TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE