(7 of 7)
That's partly why the real winner last week may well have been Dole. In hindsight, his strategy looks exquisitely wise. He was the one who first agreed to end the shutdown, despite howls from the House and charges of treason from campaign rivals like Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan. By Friday, when the House reversed course, Dole not only looked statesmanlike; he had also diminished Gingrich as a rival on his right and distanced himself from his party's extremists. At the same time, he had acquired a weapon to carry through the rest of the campaign against Clinton. Everywhere he goes for the next 10 months, he can make the case that he is the only one actually capable of balancing a budget.
The polls already reward what some Republican campaign veterans are calling Dole's "triangulation" strategy. A cbs News survey early last week showed Dole's job-approval rating had risen to 63%, up 11 points from December, while Clinton's was flat at 50% and Gingrich's was up 4 points but still a dismal 33%. It was, of all people, Sonny Bono who had the best explanation of the Speaker's folly. "I always respected his ability to be an artful dodger," said the freshman lawmaker. "He has an instinctive ability to make you believe things are going one way when they're going another. But on that score, I think he got fooled by the President. He just had never dealt with someone with his kind of ability before." As for the freshmen, maybe they had it coming. "A lot of us became zealots," said Bono. "We got a lot of ink, and coming from show biz, I know that a funny thing about ink is you start buying your own publicity. Some members miscalculated and thought it was their own power, when in fact it was given to them. And today was a day of discovery on the part of some freshmen. This is a new reality."
--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Nina Burleigh, James Carney, Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty/Washington