Dole Confronts Steep Climb on Campaign Trail

SAN DIEGO —  With his party energized and his own hopes soaring, Bob Dole now confronts the hard reality of overtaking a president still buoyed by positive public ratings of both his job performance and the economy.

Political strategists in both parties agree that Republicans managed their convention here almost as well as possible--muting disagreement, moderating the party’s image, humanizing their nominee and laying down several strong, clear themes for the general election.

But even after that impressive, precision-scripted performance, Dole still trails President Clinton by double-digit margins in two surveys taken just before his acceptance speech Thursday night. And now the Democrats, as they move toward their convention next week in Chicago, are planning their own offensive to both bolster Clinton and reopen some of the wounds that Republicans worked so diligently to close last week.

“The Republicans did what they had to do: crack that very stable 20-point lead” that Clinton had held for months, said David Moore, managing editor of the Gallup Poll. “But Clinton’s still in a very strong position going into the election.”

The final political verdict on the Republican convention isn’t fully in because voter reaction to Dole’s acceptance speech Thursday night hasn’t yet been adequately measured.

But unless that speech draws an unusually strong response--either positive or negative--the convention’s result is likely to be mixed, with evidence suggesting that it made progress on some problems Dole faced while leaving others unresolved.

Overall, the two surveys that measured sentiment up until Dole’s speech showed that the GOP nominee had cut Clinton’s pre-convention advantage roughly in half from the 17- to 20-percentage-point gap he faced before selecting Jack Kemp as his running mate last weekend.

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A Gallup survey showed Clinton holding an 11-percentage-point advantage over Dole, while an ABC News survey showed Clinton with a 9-point lead in a three-way race including Ross Perot, who won the nomination of the Reform Party at its convention in Pennsylvania.

The Gallup survey suggested that essentially all of Dole’s gain came around his selection of Kemp, with the Republican nominee remaining essentially mired in place during the first three nights of the convention.

Though Dole officials said their own internal polling showed the race even closer, these public numbers tracked with the findings of the Clinton campaign’s private polling, sources said. If history is any guide, Dole should gain several more percentage points from reaction to his acceptance speech.

But what bounces up usually comes down: The Democrats can also expect the traditional boost in the polls from their convention. Eager to regain the momentum, the White House has already scheduled a busy 10 days for Clinton leading up to his convention acceptance speech on Aug. 29.

On Monday, Clinton is scheduled to participate with Vice President Al Gore in the reconstruction of a burned church in Tennessee. Later in the week, he is expected to sign measures raising the minimum wage and ensuring the portability of health insurance. He may also sign the historic rewrite of the welfare system.

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The following week, the president will wind through swing states such as Kentucky, Michigan and Ohio on a train ride to the convention; along the way, White House officials say, Clinton--who has produced a seemingly endless flow of executive orders and legislative proposals during the past six months--will release one new policy initiative each day.

Officials say Clinton is preparing a forward-looking acceptance speech that will offer his vision “of the America he wants to leave [behind] by the year 2000”--the end of his second term if he wins one. While cautioning that it could still change, those working on the speech say that it now contains no mention of Dole and that it blends a broad vision with an assortment of specific policy proposals.

Though Clinton will mostly restate proposals he’s made in recent months, officials promise some new initiatives as well, perhaps including tax incentives for job creation in the inner city.

Beyond the narrowing of the overall gap with Clinton, the most important things Dole did at the GOP convention were to lift the veil of gloom hovering over Republicans and to provide a sharper definition for a candidacy that has often appeared enshrouded in fog.

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With his speech Thursday night, Dole laid out three clear lines of argument against Clinton: He presented himself as the man who could invigorate the economy with an across-the-board cut in income tax rates; as a leader Americans could trust in the White House; and as someone who would himself trust Americans by rolling back government to give them greater freedom and choice in their own lives.

Around the entire package, he constructed a striking generational contrast, suggesting that his long years of experience made him better suited to lead America than Clinton and baby boom White House aides “who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned. . . .”

With Dole’s treasury revitalized by an infusion of about $62 million in public money now that he has claimed the nomination, Americans are bound to hear much more about all of these themes between now and November, campaign aides say.

“Many themes of the general election can be found in the speeches that were given by Dole and Kemp,” said John Buckley, the Dole campaign’s communications director. In particular, he added, “the central issue in the campaign will be Dole and Kemp saying they trust the American people, and [that] they are the exemplars of economic growth.”

Using those themes, Republicans believe that they have succeeded in one of their central goals for this week: reopening a philosophical divide with Clinton, whose dogged determination to hold the center has frustrated Republican efforts to portray him as a liberal.

“We need people to make a decision believing that they are choosing between two fundamentally different visions of America,” said Mark Merritt, the communications director for the Republican convention.

Still, the Republican convention left unresolved some of the party’s principal problems. One is the erosion in public support for the GOP Congress. Convention planners virtually threw a blanket over the Congress; the event featured more speakers with disabilities than members of the House GOP leadership. In his acceptance speech, Dole never mentioned the Republican Congress that he led into battle against Clinton.

To Democrats, all this represents a conscious effort to disassociate Dole from the tumultuous record of a GOP Congress that saw its public-approval ratings hit the skids during the past year. But the Clinton campaign is intent on locking the Republican nominee back in that embrace. During the convention, the campaign began airing in battleground states a new ad dramatizing a frequent Clinton argument: that without him in the Oval Office, House Speaker Newt Gingrich [whose convention appearance Tuesday tested poorly in GOP monitoring of voter reactions] would be given a free rein to write the nation’s laws.

Another of the problems is that Dole’s gains through the convention week were relatively narrow in scope. He closed the poll gap with Clinton by cannibalizing support from Perot--who fell to single digits in the Gallup survey--and winning back a significant number of moderate Republicans who had earlier indicated they might support the president.

But at least in polling up until his speech, Dole had less success at broadening his appeal; he made no inroads among Democrats and relatively modest progress among independents, who still give Clinton a decisive advantage in the Gallup poll. Democrats are confident that Dole did little to change that with his hard-edged speech.

“This was a speech to the [Republican] base,” said Mark Penn, the pollster for the Clinton campaign. “It was immigration, defense, war hero, taxes. You didn’t hear environment, young people, women.”

Finally, the GOP convention apparently made little immediate progress at denting Clinton’s standing with the voters. Though Republicans say their private polling tracked some erosion in Clinton’s job-approval rating--which recently has run at the highest levels of his presidency--both public polls and the Clinton surveys show his standing remaining well above 50%--the critical measure of health for an incumbent.

That could be ominous for Dole: Other incumbents with approval ratings above 50% this late in the election year have cruised to reelection. But Republicans say they laid the groundwork in San Diego for a sharper critique this fall that could surface latent doubts about Clinton’s character, record and leadership.

“That wasn’t our job here; our job here was to lay out the case for Dole,” Merritt said. “We needed to raise our credibility during the convention to run a contrast campaign in the fall.”