REPUBLICANS EMBRACE DOLE'S ABORTION STANCE.

Byline: Associated Press 

Bob Dole won conservative praise Friday for pledging to keep the Republican platform strongly anti-abortion and his call for tolerance of different views on the issue won enough support from GOP moderates to suggest Dole would escape a divisive convention fight.

Ending weeks of internal campaign debate, Dole said Thursday night that he would not propose - and would not accept as GOP presidential nominee - any retreat from the current platform language calling for a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

Dole also called for a ``declaration of tolerance'' in the GOP platform that welcomes those with different views on abortion or other issues. ``This is not compromise, it is civility,'' Dole said.

Dole's statement brought a flood of reaction from politicians and activists on both sides of the issue, including praise from such disparate figures as President Clinton and Pat Buchanan, Dole's conservative GOP primary challenger.

``Anything that restores civility in this debate is a positive thing and I applaud him for it,'' Clinton told reporters.

But, eager not to lose his giant lead among moderate women who support abortion rights, Clinton pointedly noted: ``He is in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban abortions and I am not. There is a real difference there that I don't think can be papered over.''

Echoing Clinton, National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League President Kate Michelman said Dole's statement ``confirms that he is willing to make abortion illegal for most American women. No verbal window dressing will change that fact.''

Of most concern to the Dole camp, however, was reaction from Republicans. And by late Friday, the consensus was that Dole had taken a giant stride toward avoiding a floor battle over abortion policy at the August Republican National Convention.

Avoiding a convention battle is something Dole advisers consider critical to maintaining enthusiastic support among the GOP's conservative base without alienating suburban swing voters who tend to favor abortion rights.

``We don't want the convention dominated by the media talking about one issue,'' Dole said Friday as he campaigned in Tennessee. ``We've got a lot of things we agree on.''

A CBS-New York Times poll on the issue, released Friday night but conducted before Dole made his statement, illustrated his need for tolerance on the issue. It found that 72 percent of Americans overall and 66 percent of Republicans do not believe the GOP platform should contain its plank supporting a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion.

Anti-abortion conservatives will have the most votes at the San Diego convention, and Dole pleased them by vowing to leave the 1992 platform intact. ``Welcome news for the cause of life,'' was how Buchanan characterized Dole's pledge.

Dole clinched the Republican nomination in March, but Buchanan has withheld an endorsement, partly because he was waiting to see if Dole would try to change the anti-abortion plank.

There was some initial concern among anti-abortion leaders that Dole wanted the ``declaration of tolerance'' added directly to the abortion plank. But after Dole aides assured them that any ``big tent'' language would go into the platform preamble, most embraced Dole's statement.

Buchanan suggested preamble language that would not single out abortion: ``We respect and welcome in our ranks those who may disagree with one or several of the planks of this platform - and we openly welcome them in the cause of a Republican victory in 1996.''