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.