All about Bob.

In 1978 Bob Dole hired Bob Lighthizer as chief Republican counsel to the Senate Finance Committee. When the GOP won the Senate two years later, Lighthizer took over as the committee's staff director and chief counsel, 33 years old and in a hurry. "When I first knew Bob he used to chew tobacco and had a spittoon under his desk," says Claud Gingrich, then a Finance Committee colleague. "He's a lot more mellow now. People can't believe that." In 1983 he became Deputy U.S. Trade Representative and brought his bare-knuckled negotiating skills to bear in getting foreign countries to agree to tough steel-import quotas meant to protect domestic producers. Soon, he had shot through the revolving door to become, in private practice, a top-notch lawyer for those same U.S. steel producers, an informal Dole advisor, and an all-around Washington Mr. Fix-It.

Lighthizer sits on the advisory board of the Economic Strategy Institute, a protectionist outfit, and recently told the Wall Street Journal that he would "slash the 'free' out of free trade and say trade is an expedient." So, is he a protectionist? "I don't think that really adequately captures, frankly, the opportunism of his positions," says one Washington-based trade lawyer. "I think Bob is a pragmatic person when it comes to trade, and what tends to dictate his positions is what clients he has. And what he thinks is politically smart from a Dole point of view." Or as another Washington insider recently told National Journal: "[H]e struck me as the first USTR person who had almost no ideological predispositions."

The label for Bob Lighthizer isn't free-trader or protectionist, but Dole man. His is almost the ideal profile of a Dolenik: he's a long-time loyalist; he served on behalf of Dole in the Senate; he has a murky ideology that can take a back seat to the exigencies of politics and business; and he's smart, hyper-competent, and adept at working the corridors of Washington power. One long time Dole advisor opines that what "you're going to get out of a Dole Administration [is] Dole." It's a truism that has all the more force because the inner circle that Dole would presumably draw on for an Administration -- Lighthizer is touted as a possibility for White House chief of staff -- seems almost to personify Dole's stumbling rationales for his candidacy: they're all about Bob Dole, and all about getting things done.

In roughly the same mold as Lighthizer is Rod DeArment, now a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, but formerly a Finance Committee staff director, Dole chief of staff, and deputy secretary of labor under Elizabeth Dole. Robert Ellsworth, a close friend of Dole's and possibly candidate for Secretary of State, has a Washington-based international consulting firm. Another Dole man, Tom Korologos, never actually served on Dole's staff, but managed to wisecrack his way into a friendship with him in the Seventies. He now is a granddaddy of Washington lobbyists. "I think [he is] one of the best human beings in Washington," says Reagan National Security Advisor Dick Allen. "That said . . . he is a person who has spent most of his life on process."

Sound familiar? Doleniks reflect their man; their politics may vary, but they tend to be downtown-Washington lobbyists and consultants, rather than policy specialists or advocates for ideas. The cynic can see in the thriving K Street businesses an effort to cash in on Dole Inc. But it's more than that. An almost tribal sense of loyalty informs Dole supporters. In this respect, the quintessential Dolenik is Jo-Anne Coe, a quietly effective aide who has been with him since his days in the House in 1967. "She [has] submerged her ego with his," one former Dole aide explained to the New York Times in January. She shares an essential quality with Chief of Staff Sheila Burke and other top Dole senate aides. "They're people who get things done," explains one Senate observer. "That's both their strength and their weakness." A strength because the Senate isn't an easy place to get things done, a weakness because it's not always clear why exactly they are doing them.

If the Dole operation has mastered the Senate, in 1980 and 1988 it was singularly ineffective at Republican presidential politics. The campaign in 1996 has been different -- more disciplined, more conservative -- thanks chiefly to the exertions of campaign manager Scott Reed, a former Jack Kemp aide and a nuts-and-bolts political pro brought on board at the beginning of the campaign. Not every Dole loyalist appreciates the change. Grumbling from those who want to "let Dole be Dole" periodically surfaces in the press. Richard Norton Smith, a longtime Dole friend, wrote a memo to Dole that hit Time magazine last fall. Smith argued "Your authenticity has been sacrificed in the pursuit of ideological purity." The Boston Globe recently quoted a source "close to both Dole and his wife" calling conservative Dole speechwriter Mari Maseng Will "a nightmare."

But the biggest shake-up at the campaign so far favored its more aggressive faction. Deputy campaign manager Bill Lacy, a veteran of the 1988 campaign, was skeptical of the Hollywood speech and delayed Dole's American Legion English-Only speech from July to September of last year. He had a timid style, waiting for polls and consultations before acting. After the Iowa caucuses, he contributed to the crucial error of attacking Pat Buchanan as an "extremist" in TV ads. Meanwhile, he counseled holding off on running attack ads against a surging Lamar Alexander in New Hampshire until tracking polls actually showed his movement. In the event, switching the campaign's fire from Buchanan to Alexander may have been the smartest tactical decision of the early primaries.

In the wake of New Hampshire, Lacy got canned, giving Reed full control of the campaign, which he had previously split down the middle with Lacy. Out with Lacy is moderate-leaning pollster Bill McInturff, leaving the polling field to ideological conservative Tony Fabrizio. Don Sipple is taking over direction of the media campaign; although he has worked for moderates like California Gov. Pete Wilson, Sipple doesn't shrink from tough, issue-oriented ads. And he brings with him his frequent working-partner, former Bush pollster Fred Steeper, whose memo interpreting the 1994 elections as a product of GOP conservatism on social and cultural issues became must-reading in Washington last year. It's not a bad crew.

A countervailing sign is the diminished role of Mari Maseng Will (Mrs. George Will). She is part of the Dole tribe -- she worked for both previous presidential campaigns. But she is also ideological. "Every single thing that Dole has done good this year has direct correlation to Mari," says one Will partisan. She was responsible for making a "values day" part of Dole's well-received three-day announcement tour last year. She not only wrote the Hollywood speech but engaged in the internal hand-to-hand combat necessary to get it delivered. She had a big hand in the English-Only speech, but also in Dole's response to the State of the Union; the latter was a flop, although that had more to do with Dole's delivery than with the text. Her departure from the campaign is officially voluntary, although she had been taking flack from other Dole insiders. But it's a loss even if she remains an outside advisor.

Jockeying of this sort will surely continue throughout the fall --and into any Dole Administration. The picture is not totally bleak for conservatives. The larger Dole entourage has its movement conservatives. Supply-side former Rep. Vin Weber got on the campaign early and has had an influential voice. Sheila Burke's deputies Kyle McSlarrow and Dennis Shea (now with the campaign) are trusted by conservatives. And those closest to Dole are not necessarily politically obtuse. If Lighthizer is too sympathetic to Pat Buchanan's message on trade, he had the sense to realize that calling him an "extremist" was a mistake. But advisors and friends closest to Dole tend to be, in fundamental ways, close to Dole. There are no Ed Meeses there, nor are any likely to emerge to win a fight over Dole's fundamental politics. In any battle for his political soul, the winner is always going to be Bob Dole.