WHY BOB DOLE IS STUCK IN A RUT

By NANCY GIBBS; MICHAEL DUFFY

Until Hurricane Fran beat him to it, Bob Dole had planned to spend last Friday campaigning in New Jersey, trying hard to make a dent in another crucial swing state. The master of clanging symbols, who once toured the Old Man ale plant in New Hampshire, was scheduled to appear at the Switlik Parachute Co. in Trenton, a factory that makes lifeboats, life jackets and parachutes. "Let me get this straight," said a top campaign official after the trip was scrubbed. "We're going to a factory that makes products for people who are drowning or crashing? Thank God for the hurricane."

At this point Bob Dole could use an act of God, because he is running out of time. A private poll by the Republican National Committee last week found that in the 19 biggest states not only is Dole trailing badly, but also his support is lower than Clinton's negative rating, meaning that even voters who can't stand the President can't bring themselves to support his opponent. Unemployment last week hit a seven-year low, people's confidence in the economy hit an eight-year high, and for the first time, a majority of voters credited Clinton for his handling of it. The air attacks on Iraq shoved Dole off the front pages and might have reminded voters that he had met with Saddam before the Gulf War and concluded that "there might be a chance to bring this guy around." If Dole's candidacy is to be anything more than a formality, he needs to bring himself around, and quickly.

And, at last, he tried to do so. All summer long, as his party allies snorted and pawed over a double-digit gap in the polls, Dole remained serene in his conviction that voters wouldn't start paying attention to politics until the traditional Labor Day launch of the general election. The nominee had told nearly every audience for months that he would burst upon the scene in September after a successful convention, with a popular vice-presidential candidate and a clear economic message. Best of all, he said, his cash-starved campaign would be revived by $62 million in federal funds to pay for television commercials explaining why he, and not Clinton, should be President for the next four years. Dole's top strategist, Don Sipple, had been eager to launch the offensive, but he told friends in August, "The Big Dog isn't ready."

With only two months to go before Election Day, Dole was finally ready--and the first thing he did was can Sipple. But this wasn't the "Old Dole," who is known for dumping aides when he hits a rough patch. Instead it was campaign manager Scott Reed, who had plotted for weeks to replace Sipple and retrieve control of the campaign's message machinery.

Enlisted in March after Dole fired his previous pollster and top strategist, Sipple and his sidekick, Mike Murphy, spent months planning ads, testing themes with focus groups, studying ad markets, trying out ideas. They worked down the hall from Reed at a company called New Century Media, a wholly separate operation whose sole client was Dole for President. The arrangement hid a basic disagreement that would eventually cause a problem: Who was in charge of message--the admen or the campaign managers?

Though no strategist, Reed assumed he would have control. But so did Sipple and Murphy, who have run dozens of statewide races and are used to calling the shots. Reed came to believe that Sipple was better at selling a message than conceiving it; Sipple and Murphy grew tired of running every decision, every ad, past Reed and others down the hall, who they claimed fussed and fretted and wouldn't move fast enough. They worried that Reed & Co. had never run a winning campaign. So after a while, they just stopped coordinating. The two arms of the campaign began to work separately.

But the fight over who controlled the message masked a sharper debate over what Dole's message should be. Sipple & Co. wanted a clean shot: tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Reed argued that Sipple should sell a broader vision, the whole picnic of budget balancing and tax cuts and spending proposals that Dole laid out before the convention. Dole himself wanted to do the hard thing, offer not just the tax cuts but the specific plans to pay for them. When the ad finally aired, tax cuts were third on the list after spending cuts and a balanced budget, and Sipple got blamed for producing a spot with no clear focus or edge.

Still, Sipple was surprised when Reed called him in last Wednesday and told him the campaign was bringing in reinforcements and Republican strategist Paul Manafort would be fully in charge. Sipple and Murphy chose to quit rather than lose a stripe. Reed has turned to a new team of admakers--Alex Castellanos, Chris Mottola and Greg Stevens--to make $45 million worth of ads between now and November. "The news this week," says Wayne Berman, Jack Kemp's campaign director, "is that Dick Morris is not replaceable but Don Sipple is."

If the action behind the scenes borrowed from chaos theory, Dole's performance on the stump has not been much better. He spent the week doing town meetings before kindly audiences handpicked by local Republican leaders. "Listening to America," the campaign called it, without a trace of irony. The questions were such softballs that even Dole joked about the crowd's "objectivity."

Meanwhile, Dole hasn't had a real press conference in months. And there's a good reason: on the rare occasions when he gets loose, he gets in trouble. As with his ads, he can't seem to keep straight which is his first priority: tax cutting or deficit cutting. He recently described the economy as being "in the tank," although each new piece of economic data suggests otherwise. The lack of discipline reached the point where policy czar Donald Rumsfeld, a former Nixon aide, urged Reed to put a stronger handler--plus four personal secretaries--on the plane with Dole, just the way Nixon used to travel. Reed asked Margaret Tutwiler, a longtime top aide to former Secretary of State James Baker, to take over the fuselage team. "If Margaret Tutwiler is supposed to be the adult supervisor on the plane," said a top Dole aide, "she'd better bring a parachute with her and wear it at all times."

At the same time, campaign sources told TIME, Kemp has begun to chafe about the campaign's progress. He complained privately last week, for the second time, about being sent to rich white suburbs instead of working-class neighborhoods. He began to quietly urge several top Republicans to call Reed and Dole to suggest that the two nominees campaign together more. Kemp believes that double billing on the road would brighten the ticket's public image and help keep Dole on the tax-cut message.

Dole knows firsthand how forgiving--and unforgiving--polls can be. The first week of September 1976, he and Gerald Ford trailed Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale by 15 points. Last week a TIME/CNN poll put Dole 14 points down in a three-way race with Clinton and Ross Perot. By Election Day 1976, Ford and Dole had pulled to within 1 point of the Democrats. That was a miraculous comeback--and this one will have to be even better.

--With reporting by John F. Dickerson with Kemp and Tamala M. Edwards with Dole

For continuous campaign coverage, see the TIME/CNN Website at allpolitics.com

With reporting by JOHN F. DICKERSON WITH KEMP AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE