(4 of 5)
As a product of Catholic schools, Pat Buchanan has some Lifer proclivities: he can communicate with people who play by the rules and have traditional beliefs at their core. What he really is, however, is a Talent. His stints in government have been brief and confined to the White House staff, a Lifer-free environment. He has spent most of his life as a highly successful small businessman who designs, manufactures and distributes opinions. Buchanan is brilliant at giving voice to the idea that the big, organized forces in society--everybody from big corporations to the United Nations--are a kind of conspiracy against the Talent path. He's able to draw the line not between "government" and "business" but between all established forces, which have brought us everything from layoffs to arms-control agreements, and ordinary people who aren't wired into the system.
All the Republican candidates other than Dole are running as Talents, though most of them are only pretending. Lamar Alexander, whose official campaign persona as the angry outsider is practically see-through, is actually a Mandarin--can you imagine Buchanan ever having been president of a state university, as Alexander was? Steve Forbes is a child of the Episcopacy, having been raised in a manner modeled on the social practices of the British aristocracy in the 19th century: the family seat in the country, the character-building boarding-school education, going to work for Dad. But, having realized that you can't present yourself as a member of the Episcopacy these days, Forbes too has chosen to appear before the world as a Talent, burning with outrage over confiscatory tax rates.
The advantage Dole has is that voters who find him lacking in all these ways will find Clinton even more lacking. As indifferent as Dole is to the horrors of taxation, we all know that Clinton is more indifferent. As much as Dole lacks fiery moral outrage about abortion, Clinton obviously lacks it even more. Both men have devoted their adult life to government, with great skill; Dole probably wants there to be 5% less of it than Clinton does. If you have a Talent's feeling of outrage over the unfairness of the established system, the truth is that a Clinton-Dole race wouldn't offer you much of an outlet, but rationally Dole is probably the more logical choice.
What Clinton has going for him, besides incumbency, is a tremendous ability to project empathy. Dole completely lacks this. It's part of his Lifer-ness that he simply is what he is; any efforts he makes to pretend otherwise inevitably seem tinny and false. Clinton, on the other hand, comes across as a Mandarin to Mandarins, would do better than Dole in coming across as a Talent to Talents, and might even be able to seem more like "one of us" to Lifers if Dole didn't have his heroic military service to backstop himself with his natural constituency.