(6 of 8)
Where he was in late February was in trouble. Talk of a brokered convention surfaced as party elders wrung their hands. But Dole's team had astutely built a fire wall in South Carolina. Prudently preparing for the danger they didn't expect but were in fact facing after New Hampshire, they had earlier recruited the players, like former Governor Caroll Campbell, who would on March 2 deliver the Southern state everyone deemed critical to capturing the entire region. After South Carolina, the rest of the primary march was anticlimactic. Grand plans were hatched for the months before the August convention. The nominee-presumptive would preside over national-issues forums to demonstrate seriousness of purpose. A running mate and some likely Cabinet choices would be selected, a shadow government to telegraph what an Administration of adults--as opposed to baby boomers--would look like. But Dole, broke and exhausted, had the stomach for none of it. And so he watched from the sidelines with scarcely an answering volley as the Clinton machine--flush with funds because no other Democrat had risen to challenge the President in the primaries--filled the airwaves with a massive ad strategy that would define the coming general-election campaign: Let Dole have the White House, the Democrats argued, and Newt will be running the country; let us keep it, and Clinton will brake the Gingrich revolution's excesses. Thus were the stakes raised and the race set thematically--a perceptual field stacked hopelessly against Dole. It was the clever definitional stroke from which he would never recover.
It wasn't all a straight line to oblivion. As with his earlier speech bashing Hollywood, Dole got a lift when he resigned from the Senate in June and then again in August from a smoothly run G.O.P. convention. His selection of the energetically gifted Jack Kemp, whom Dole had reviled for years, was widely praised. But Dole's verbal and tactical missteps took their toll, confirming the electorate's fast-hardening negative verdict: Clinton was far from the heroic ideal, but Dole simply wasn't up to the job. Facing the hostility of many women voters, Dole tried modifying his antiabortion stance. He called for a "declaration of tolerance" in the G.O.P. platform's pro-life plank. "That's non-negotiable," he said, but quickly caved in to the party's hard-line antiabortion forces. Dole appeared unsure of what he believed and, even worse, seemed powerless to achieve what he wanted even when he knew what it was. To win over the party's most conservative activists--and it is they who largely controlled the nomination process--Dole bent himself out of shape. As a moderate, mainstream Republican in the mold of his hero, Dwight Eisenhower, Dole never became comfortable with his own campaign's core themes and strategy, the tactics and messages designed by his professional handlers that he felt obliged to follow. "I'd been beaten before, and you have to learn from the people who beat you," Dole explained. "So I got those folks and took their advice." And in the process he negated his authenticity--which was really the difference between him and Clinton.
THE ENDGAME