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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."