DOLE ACCUSES NAACP LEADER OF ATTEMPTING TO SET HIM UP.

Byline: The New York Times

Bob Dole said Thursday that the president of the NAACP was ``trying to set me up'' by inviting him to address the African-American organization's annual meeting earlier this week. Dole, the likely Republican presidential nominee, said he would look for friendlier audiences that ``I can relate to.''

He said that Kweisi Mfume, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was ``very liberal,'' and his campaign aides suggested that Dole would have been walking into a lion's den by attending the meeting.

Mfume, a former Democratic congressman from Maryland, responded by saying that Dole's comment was an attack on his character, while others, including Colin Powell, the retired Army general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have expressed regret that Dole declined the chance to address the nation's largest and oldest civil rights group.

Republicans have had a rocky history at the organization's conventions. In 1983, George Bush, then vice president, faced a chorus of boos and hisses when he tried to portray the Reagan administration as sensitive to the plight of African-Americans. In 1984, Bush and President Reagan cited scheduling conflicts in declining invitations to the NAACP convention, instead sending Elizabeth Hanford Dole, Dole's wife who was then secretary of transportation, to cite the administration's accomplishments. She was received politely but not enthusiastically.

Dole's remark, which he made when he returned here after a three-day campaign swing, kept alive a potentially embarrassing episode for the Dole campaign in so far as it suggested that Dole's relations with African-Americans were strained and that he lacked the discipline to refrain from a negative comment.

By contrast, the former Senate majority leader made a direct appeal to Jewish voters in New York when, after meeting this morning with Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared that Israel would have a ``stronger'' bond with America in a Dole administration than it has now.

Dole began the day as a guest on the ``Imus in the Morning'' radio program, saying at first that he had not been aware of the NAACP invitation. But later he implied that he had turned it down because Mfume was ``one of the leading liberal Democrats.''

When Don Imus, the host, reported that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is a close friend of Dole's, had said that the candidate avoided the meeting because he might have been poorly received, Dole assented. ``That probably would have been the case,'' he said.