Early in the morning of Nov. 5, 1995, exactly a year before Election Day, Bob Dole was jetting from South Dakota to accompany the man whose job he sought. As Senate majority leader, Dole had been asked to join a high-level, bipartisan delegation assembled by Bill Clinton to attend the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister assassinated only hours earlier. Dole had barely known Rabin but viewed him as a soul mate nonetheless--a "no-nonsense kind of guy," he told me as we flew toward Washington--someone "who knew how to get things done." Those words, expressing Dole's highest compliment, were the very ones he was already using to distinguish himself from his Republican rivals, but more important, from Clinton. "I'm a doer, not a talker," Dole would say. "The President is a talker who doesn't do."
That was The Difference, Dole repeated endlessly, warming to the shorthand, sound-bite-size formulation he hoped voters would internalize. And at the time Dole was close enough in the polls to believe the prize could be his.
It's hard to recall now, but back then, a year after the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, Clinton seemed likely to join the long list of one-term Presidents. He had become an object of derision, a chubby, drawling, waffling figure of fun. He had already set in place the single policy most responsible for his ultimate re-election--the deficit-reduction measures that gained the infant Administration credibility with the financial markets, which in turn helped the economy purr along. But his attempt to reform the nation's health-care system had split the country and overshadowed everything else, allowing the G.O.P. to portray him successfully as classically liberal and thereby capture Congress.
Clinton good-naturedly said voters had given him a "good country licking," but the short-term impact was far worse. Well into 1995, the President appeared so marginalized politically that he was forced to defend his relevance. After all, he said pathetically, according to the Constitution, "I'm still President." As for the future, his pollster Stan Greenberg summed up the predicament in two words. Clinton, Greenberg wrote in a memo, was "fundamentally mispositioned" as a candidate for 1996.
From these starting points, the two men began inverse journeys. Dole wound through an intricate maze of largely self-inflicted wounds before suffering a humbling defeat; Clinton sensed the national mood, embraced it rigorously and was rewarded with a startling victory. How Clinton came back, how he co-opted the G.O.P.'s most popular prescriptions and repositioned himself as the sensible center's poster child, will be studied (and copied) for decades. Dole's effort will be remembered too--as a case study in how not to run for President. Clinton's stunning reinvention as the people's choice was accomplished virtually uncontested by the candidate of the Republican Party, whose traditional tenets had come to define the majority's core political sentiments in the final decades of the 20th century.
WINNING THE NEWT PRIMARY