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While calls went out to reporters all over town, Sperling ran up and down the stairs to the fax machine, sending out his memo and Panetta's statement. Drained and winded, he and his team had managed to contact all the people they wanted to by about 6:20. The response reached some reporters just as they were first hearing about the Dole proposal that sparked it. That night and the next day, many of the stories contained more about the response than about the original proposal. That is what counts as a big win.
The Dole camp is not nearly so well positioned to move fast and strike hard. While Berman has been collecting material on Dole for a year, the Dole campaign has only one researcher on staff--it fired its other one a few weeks ago--and now must rely on a Republican National Committee search operation that Dole officials say, in their most generous tones, could be much better. Much of the research on Clinton, says a top Dole official, is either inaccessible or does not exist. That doesn't help a team whose members often complain that they are not sure what the candidate will be doing or saying on any given day.
And because they begrudge nearly everything about Clinton, the Dole campaign has stubbornly refused to organize a communications war room modeled on the Little Rock wonder. After a weeks-long manhunt for a communications wizard, it looks like the job will go to a puckish novelist and an unlikely candidate: Fannie Mae communications chief John Buckley, nephew of William F. Buckley Jr. As Jack Kemp's press secretary during the 1980s, young Buckley made it his daily business to nettle Bob Dole.
Gingrich and party chief Haley Barbour are so edgy that they have talked about creating some kind of partywide structure to coordinate message, research and communications between the House, the Senate, the campaign and the party. They know the failures are costing the G.O.P. dearly. One official says top party fund raisers who produced $50,000 in the 1992 election cycle are currently ponying up as little as $5,000. Moneymen who once could produce $2 million in soft money now say they are too busy with other things. "That's troublesome," said a top party official. "That has people very scared."
It got so bad last week that Republicans weren't only looking for answers, they were looking for scapegoats. Top party officials wonder privately whether Scott Reed can rally his team during halftime; but the same officials acknowledge that Reed alone enjoys Dole's trust and that not even Reed can change Dole's ways.
There is plenty of irony in this on both sides. Even as White House aides celebrated their tactical victory in the scuffle over the gas tax, Clinton admitted he would consider repealing it. The rapid-response game is working so well for him that he can afford to concede Dole the substantive points and still come out ahead politically. Which means that even if Dole can lay out an agenda that voters might crave, it won't matter if he can't get it to the table while it's still hot.
--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Michael Duffy/Washington