DOLE'S RACE IN TROUBLE FROM START : CAMPAIGN BEGINS IN FITS AND STARTS.

Byline: Elizabeth Kolbert The New York Times

On a gusty evening 3-1/2 weeks before Election Day, Bob Dole was standing on a makeshift stage in an airport hangar in Wichita, Kan., smiling out at the audience.

The scene before him was not inspiring. The hangar was just over half full, even though Dole was in his home state on a Friday night in the heat of the election season. A sizable portion of those who had shown up were Clinton supporters, there to disrupt the event.

Dole's older sister, Gloria Nelson, who had driven 150 miles from their hometown of Russell, Kan., to join him, worked her way across the stage to stand beside him. ``How's it going?'' she whispered.

Dole's smile never left his face, and his eyes never left the crowd.

``Pretty rough,'' he said.

On Tuesday, Dole's political career, one of the most enduring in American political history, effectively came to an end. To run for president, he had resigned his seat in the United States Senate and given up the position he was, by many accounts, best suited for, majority leader.

Dole sacrificed these things not merely to lose the presidency, but to run one of the most ineffectual presidential campaigns in recent memory. Always the legislative tactician, Dole, according to his close associates, approached the presidential race much as he did a congressional negotiating session, believing that the key to victory was a clever endgame strategy. But so bleak were the polls, and for so long, that Dole was forced to realize, far earlier than most losing candidates, that the endgame would probably not be enough.

The week after he confessed his private pain to his sister, Dole, in two tense and scolding conversations with his campaign manager as he sat in a hotel room in Southern California, offered what now appears to be an autopsy of his campaign.

He was upset about the embarrassment of the bungled attempt to win Ross Perot's endorsement. He was mystified by the states he was visiting. He was unhappy with the television advertisements. He was convinced, in short, that the presidency was about to escape him yet again.

At 73, Dole often seemed a man out of step with the times, and in President Clinton, he faced an opponent who had come to personify the methods of modern American politics.

From the very start of his candidacy, Dole's friends wondered whether he had the political agility to take on Clinton, or whether it was worth risking his hard-won reputation for the uncertain prospect of unseating an incumbent in good economic times. By Tuesday, when Dole had completed his frantic shuttling across America and landed in Russell to vote, it seemed painfully clear that he did not, and that it was not.

Although he had built a career embracing deficit reduction, he had, in the hope of political gain, subordinated that goal to a call for a 15 percent tax cut. Although he had worked diligently to broaden the Republican Party, he found in the end he could barely hold onto its core voters. And although he had spent decades trying to live down his reputation as a ``hatchet man,'' he finished his campaign on a note of bitterness.

There was something haunting, yet also finally authentic, about the way Dole ended his fourth and last national campaign, losing once again to a rival who, he clearly believed, was less deserving than himself.

In the final weeks of the race, as it became apparent that there was no last-minute maneuver that would rescue him, Dole cut himself off almost completely from the aides who were trying to persuade him to end on an upbeat note. In frustration, he turned his attacks from his opponent to the press and finally to the voters themselves.

``Where,'' he demanded, again and again, ``is the outrage?''!

Eight months before the first Republican primary, Dole - reluctant and nervous - went before an audience of film executives in Los Angeles to denounce what he described as the corrupting influence of Hollywood values on American cultures.

It was the spring of 1995, and Dole, it was assumed, was laying down one of the cornerstones of his campaign. The speech won him a flurry of attention both from the mainstream media and from the conservative activists who would be key to his electoral prospects.

But then, the issue disappeared. Dole barely discussed it. He did not incorporate it into his major speeches and it was never highlighted in his advertisements.

In retrospect, the Hollywood speech was a defining event for Dole's campaign, but not for the reasons the candidate and his aides might have hoped. It was the first of a series of bold statements and gestures that had no follow-up, a pattern that would prove devastating to his candidacy.

In the most telling example, when Dole officially resigned from the Senate in June, the move seemed to create the perfect opening for the candidate to articulate the themes of his candidacy. That opening was never filled.

By now, many of Dole's weaknesses as a candidate have been abundantly documented. He is a halting public speaker who tends to ramble off the topic. He often comes across as stiff, even sullen, on television. He is given to wry off-the-cuff remarks that undermine his own arguments.

But beyond the traits that were in daily evidence as he traveled the country, Dole, it became clear, was limited by a view of the world shaped by over 35 years as a member of Congress. He was never ever to make the transition from legislative tactician to presidential candidate, and he paid the price for that from the day he announced in Russell until the day he conceded in Washington.

Dole was always arguing that important campaign decisions could be delayed - ``His argument was that, `we don't need to focus until the convention, until Labor Day,' '' one aide said - as long as possible. In that sense, he approached the election as if it were an omnibus bill, where the final compromise is forced by the deadline of a congressional adjournment.

A campaign goes into free fall

In an effective campaign, the organization compensates for the shortcomings of its candidate. A stronger campaign team might have made up for Dole's weaknesses. Instead, the organization Dole assembled reflected and amplified his limitations, producing a kind of anti-synergy where the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Dole surrounded himself with a group of like-minded people, short-term tacticians without strong ideologies. They were, by and large, young and inexperienced in the complexities of presidential campaigning. Perhaps just as significantly, they had little personal history with Dole; few could say they felt comfortable with him and many had little personal loyalty to him.

Like the candidate, the campaign manager, Scott Reed, tended to focus on immediate goals, rather than on long-term planning. His detractors at campaign headquarters took to privately mocking his habit of drafting endless ``to-do'' lists, which he kept neatly stacked on his desk. (``To do: find a message,'' was how one of his colleagues parodied the exercise.)

Reed, who did not return phone calls seeking comment for this article, seemed to share Dole's faith that the election could be won in the fall, publicly asserting that the campaign was due a lucky break and privately confiding to reporters that newspapers were preparing devastating stories about the president's personal life. No such story was ever published.

The shortcomings of Dole's campaign team were apparent already last March when it became clear, though not yet official, that Dole would be the Republican presidential nominee. Even in the darkest moments of the primary season, when Dole lost in New Hampshire, he had always remained the obvious front-runner, so his victory could hardly be called a surprise.

Still, Dole's campaign was, according to those who worked on it, utterly unprepared for this moment. The months of April, May and finally June passed without anything approaching a general election plan. Dole was not advertising on television, pleading poverty after the primary, though there was Republican National Committee money the campaign could have used, had it chosen to.

In the meantime, the campaign organization began to break down into warring factions. Reed, the campaign manager, was barely talking to Don Sipple, whom he had hired to be the campaign's new chief strategist.

The Reed faction argued that Sipple was not producing, and made fun of the memorandums he wrote, which were filled with broad - some called them fuzzy - concepts, but no clear directives how to proceed.

The Sipple faction, meanwhile, complained that its ideas were being ignored. The week after Labor Day, Sipple was forced out.

It was in that context of backbiting and infighting that the campaign essentially backed into what would eventually be its organizing theme: a 15 percent across-the-board tax cut that Dole proposed just before the convention.

By Labor Day, it had become clear that the tax cut plan was not catching on. Lacking any other unifying theme, Dole bounced through the fall, experimenting by the week with different messages: that Clinton was responsible for an increase in teen-age drug use; that he was a liberal; that he could not be trusted; that he was too liberal; that he was unethical. One result of these quicksilver changes, in the view of some of his own aides, was that Dole undermined his description of himself as steady and dependable.

With typical detached acerbity, Dole commented on his campaign's increasingly obvious deficiencies during the first round of debate preparations in October. Dole's debate advisers sought to put him through a run of trial questions and answers, according to a participant, but the candidate cut them off: ``What I want to hear is not questions and answers: I want a strategy for winning this debate and winning this election.''

Dole paused, and then delivered his own verdict to his assembled staff, seated behind tables in the ballroom at the Seaview Hotel in Bal Harbour, Fla. ``We've never had a strategy for winning this election,'' he said.

Candidate struggles to the finish line

On the first night out on the 96-hour, campaign-ending journey that would return him to Washington to concede Tuesday, Dole stopped at a bowling alley in East Lansing, Mich. It was one of those ostensibly spontaneous, though in fact entirely staged events that campaigns routinely arrange - a quick drop-by to win a flash of attention in the local press.

Dole's campaign had publicized the ``spontaneous'' appearance in advance and, as had by now become routine, Democratic hecklers were waiting for him. As Dole picked up the microphone to address the assembled Friday night bowling leagues, Clinton's supporters broke into a chant of ``Four more years!'' At first Dole tried to yell over them - ``No more years!'' - but he had been campaigning for 14 hours straight and his voice was failing. Even at a distance of five feet, his words could barely be heard. Looking ashen and frustrated, he quickly gave up and led his entourage back to the caravan of buses waiting in the night.

Now, at the end of the campaign, Dole knew he had lost, and he reverted to form. He took control over the schedule, the message, even the itinerary. It was he who decided that the campaign would go on the nonstop 96-hour trip. It was he who decided the campaign should approach Ross Perot and ask him to drop out of the race.

It all ended Tuesday night, in a hotel suite on the 11th floor of the Renaissance Hotel in Washington. Dole was there with his wife, his daughter, Robin, Reed and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. He watched calmly as the election results came tumbling in, confirming what he had known since that moment his sister had turned to him on the stage in Wichita and probably even before that. Still, there was one last bit of business to attend to.

It was nearly 11 o'clock, and with the election at its unsurprising conclusion, Dole turned to McCain, his loyal friend from the Senate.

``We ought to start planning my speech,'' he said.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Bob Dole

Failed to find message

(2) Bob Dole gestures as he and his wife, Elizabeth, head for his campaign headquarters Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Associated Press