Dole patrol.

Critics called the Republican National Convention an infomercial, but San Diego was amateur hour compared to the "Listening to America" forums Bob Dole is holding across the country. In Pittsburgh, a hundred invited guests sit in a warehouse belonging to Gamma Racquet Sports, Inc. -- the kind of small business Dole's economic plan is meant to help -- listening to Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa.) introduce the candidate. The fresh-faced, 38-year-old senator paces with a microphone, explaining what Bob Dole can do for you, right now, money-back guaranteed. He elicits tightly controlled bursts of applause straight from 2 A.M. television. The product could as easily be Frizz-Ease or the Ab-Master as a political program. Before it's over, you expect Richard Simmons to bounce out in skimpy purple shorts and hug the fattest guy who's in favor of a 50 per cent capital-gains tax cut.

Of course, the main attraction isn't the light-on-his-feet Simmons, but Bob Dole, who is anything but. Dole maneuvers through these forums like a high-wire act. He is up there, trying to connect, trying to listen to America, but will he trip? His wit plays well. After the owner of Gamma gives a glowing spiel about his company's tennis products, Dole deadpans: "Nice racket you got here." Everyone laughs. Later, Dole interrupts a rambling questioner, with a smile, but a little snappish: "What's your bottom line?" Watch that edge, Bob. He goes on to explain why regulatory reform didn't pass -- "We needed 60 [votes] to cut off the debate" -- just bursting to say one of those incomprehensible process words: "cloture." He resists. When a single mom tells how she couldn't get her small business off the ground, Dole begins his answer, "There is a government program . . ." No, Bob! Don't contradict your message by recommending government help! "I know Rick would follow up as far as the SBA is concerned."

Ahhh! But Dole quickly rights himself and talks about creating more private-sector opportunities again. He leaves the crowd of hand-picked Republicans impressed with his straightforwardness. When Dole made this early-September visit -- his third recent trip to Pennsylvania -- he brought a sharpened tax message. In his Saturday radio address, he told Americans how they are sending on average almost 40 per cent of their income to the government, as much as they spend on food, shelter, and clothing combined. He pounded the IRS, promising to "end [it] as we know it," and spelled out how cutting just a small slice of federal spending -- some $10 trillion over the next six years -- would pay for the tax cut. He scores Clinton's alternative of "targeted" tax incentives as just another wat "to dictate how you should spend" your money.

It's as about as convincing on taxes as Dole is likely to get. The campaign realizes it has lost traction on the tax front -- polls show people by a narrow margin trusting Clinton more than Dole on the issue -- and it has to punch a message through with more immediacy for the average person. The campaign (or at least what seems to be the dominant faction at the moment) is convinced that one reason the plan hasn't taken off is that public awareness of it is still low. Hammering relentlessly on it in coming weeks -- with occasional jabs on an issue like drugs -- will boost those numbers, goes the theory, and inevitably Dole's overall numbers as well. The model is Christine Todd Whitman's New Jersey campaign in 1993, when a singleminded focus on taxes paid off, but only at campaign's end. So while all of GOP Washington panics at Clinton's renewed 15 - 20 point lead, the Dole campaign seems ready to stay the course.

There's no doubt Dole's tax plan still has untapped potential. The question is whether it has enough. The New Jersey model, for instance, has flaws. Christine Whitman benefited from a huge GOP get-out-the-vote effort, while incumbent Jim Florio, still suffering from lingering unpopularity, ignored his base. Dole, on the other hand, faces depressed GOP turnout and is squaring off against a President with nearly 60 per cent approval ratings. Dole is also trying to sell an economic message in an economy growing at a 4.2 per cent pace last quarter, with an unemployment rate at its lowest in seven years. It's an indication of how hard the GOP has to stretch for bad news that the RNC recently issued a press release on declining construction spending. On the social front --fertile ground for the GOP -- Dole has been disarmed by both the GOP Congress, which kicked away issues like crime, and Dick Morris, who helped the President snatch them up.

Dole is left half a candidate. In a packed gym at the University of Scranton, he is greeted by an enthusiastic, sweaty throng of more than a thousand locals and pompom-waving students as the sound system blasts jazzy riffs from the Blues Brothers sound-track. Dole keeps up the energy with slashing and amusing attacks on Clinton on taxes, which go on for perhaps a bit too long. Then what? He talks about drugs. The Dole campaign swears this is a cutting issue, particularly with women; focus groups of 15 women sympathetic toward Clinton will reportedly leave after hearing the drug message loathing the President. But the crowd in the gym isn't particularly moved; drugs is simply not a defining issue. Can Dole get mileage from it? "If they can prove the President is on drugs now," says political analyst Stuart Rothenberg, "they may have a chance."

But Dole still has an energetic crowd when he moves to his speech's close. "Let me just say this," Dole intones, a bleacher full of students yelling behind him. "This is America, the greatest country on the face of the Earth." It's an utterly banal line. But there's still something moving about it from Dole -- he means it, and proved it somewhere in Italy fifty years ago. This, then, is where Dole can close the deal, making up for his charisma gap with an emotional evocation of his small-town life and service to country. But Dole keeps stepping on the mood. When he mentions Russell, Kansas, he motions to fellow Russell native Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), on the stage with him: "Arlen and I grew up there little different times. He's much, much younger . . . But nobody gets old there. But, in any event . . ." Then Dole says he "wasn't born with this suit on." Well, he pauses: "Come to think of it I wasn't born with any suit on."

Dole seems emotionally incapable -- except in rare instances -- of playing on his past effectively. The asides and quips always distance himself from himself. The problem isn't that Dole is too hardened or bitter really, but that he's too brittle. Watching him, in front of the Pittsburgh forum, standing with his arms crossed, his left hand holding what seems to be an almost empty right sleeve, brings home again the grievous nature of Dole's wound. There's a vulnerability to him. Dole choked up during his convention speech just saying he loved his father. To his eternal credit, it would simply be impossible for him to make the excruciatingly managed play on emotion of Al Gore talking about his sister. Dole, beneath it all, is a man of such deep feelings that they aren't readily available for manipulation, a fact that contributes to his image as the candidate of coldness.

Which in turn contributes to his poor showing among women. The campaign considers the conservative base locked up with the tax plan and the choice of Kemp as VP, and is concentrating on re-capturing women and GOP moderates. The focus on jobs and small business is considered attractive to women, increasingly the owners of small start-ups. Drugs, again, are considered a women's issue. So is education, a topic Dole treats well on the stump: he asks rhetorically why all parents in America shouldn't have the same ability as the President to send their children to private schools, and he shellacs the teachers' unions. The real danger of Dole's play for moderates is that it scares the campaign off the kind of wedge issues that polarize the electorate along liberal -conservative lines and send "Reagan Democrats" scurrying to the GOP.

The issue of race preferences is the foremost example. The Dole campaign doesn't think it polls well. And it is afraid of the issue's "volatility." But when you're 15 points behind, volatility is a good thing: stock-market crashes, hostage crises -- bring them on! More fundamentally, the preference issue goes to the half of the campaign that has been missing so far. Dole's best-received non-tax line on the stump is when he vows that he, not Boutros Boutros-Ghali, will make decisions about committing U.S. troops to combat. Sound familiar? It's a straight lift from Pat Buchanan. Dole has adopted the Steve Forbes line on taxes; now he needs Buchanan's on the social issues (or at least Gingrich's circa 1994). With crime and welfare essentially neutralized, Dole can still talk about multiculturalism, bilingual education, illegitimacy, and even abortion to get to the differences between the parties. In Scranton, for the first time since his nomination, Dole hit on partial-birth abortion; he did it only after prodding by Senator Santorum on the trip from Washington, but it was a step toward appealing to Catholic swing voters.

Dole needs them desperately if he is going to negotiate a tough-looking electoral map. His aides figure he has to win everything from Idaho east to Minnesota, with the exception perhaps of Montana and New Mexico. Then he has to sweep the South, with the exception of Louisiana and Arkansas, but definitely including Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky (Clinton states in 1992). Only then can Dole afford to lose California and almost all of the Northeast. The key battleground states would be Pennsylvania (where he is down by 14 points), New Jersey (down by 13), Ohio (down by 6), Michigan (down by 10), and Iowa (down by 14). Any Dole strategy looks like a fairy tale as long as he is 15 points behind nationally, with even must-win Florida breaking for Clinton. But the campaign takes solace in the fact that twice in the campaign --once in June, once in August after the GOP convention -- Clinton's big lead collapsed. That is evidence, they maintain, that when voters truly focus on their choice, it's a tight race.

THE question is whether they will ever again get the focus they want. In Pittsburgh, Dole had just zipped off a line about the teachers' unions, when right outside the door of the warehouse a cargo train began to rumble by on a railroad bridge. It made it hard to hear, as car after car rolled by. Here was Dole, standing with a microphone, just a man, again getting drowned out by forces beyond his control: whether it's the White House unblinkingly selling Clinton as a conservative, or an economy humming along nicely, or, in the previous week, the missile attack on Iraq, or just a day earlier, Hurricane Fran. Dole handled the situation well: "That's the bridge to the future," he said, gesturing outside the door, "more taxes, more drugs, etc." The crowd laughed, but the symbolism seemed -- appropriately enough -- pretty ominous.

The Dole campaign, despite everything, recently contacted Ed Meese for advice on putting together a presidential transition. Give Dole credit: maybe he really is the most optimistic man in America.