Elizabeth Dole Wears Her Resume Like a Campaign Button

RED OAK, IOWA —  Rumbling across Iowa this summer, Elizabeth Hanford Dole is offering Republican voters not an agenda, or even a cause, but a resume. She is betting her presidential campaign on a message in which ideology and detailed proposals on issues take a distinct back seat to far more personal appeals.

With some success, Dole is encouraging women “to make history” by supporting her bid to break the ultimate glass ceiling. Even more emphatically, she is touting her experience--in Cabinet offices for Reagan and Bush, and for eight years as president of the American Red Cross.

“That’s what I’m offering--30 years of experience in trying to deal with tough issues and make a difference,” she told the mostly female audience who recently gathered on a sultry afternoon in this southwestern Iowa town.

It’s a quiet, unhurried, unhectoring appeal, so low-key that Dole, 63, sometimes asks her audiences for their votes only as an afterthought. In some of the small Iowa towns that Dole visits, this pitch goes down as smoothly as lemonade on a summer day; in Red Oak, Dole’s audience listened rapturously to her speech and crowded around her afterward.

‘Much Better Qualified Than Bush,’ Backer Says

“I think she’s much better qualified than [George W.] Bush . . . and if you have a highly qualified woman, it’s time to support her,” said retired teacher Ruth Rocker after Dole spoke to a standing-room crowd in nearby Atlantic.

But earlier that day, in two appearances to audiences of young professionals in Des Moines, Dole made a much more faint impression.

“I didn’t hear anything new or earth-shattering--not a lot of meat there,” said Republican Steve Pullman.

In those contrasting reactions are the boundaries of the challenge facing Dole in her first bid for elected office.

Dole still projects compelling star power for many Republicans, especially women. But, apart from her gender and her experience, she’s had difficulty articulating a clear reason why voters should pick her as the party’s next nominee.

“She is a talented, smart, capable person, but what is the rationale for her candidacy?” says GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who’s advising Arizona Sen. John McCain, another contender for the Republican nomination. “They have ended up having to run a gender-based appeal because she doesn’t have anything else to say.”

Dole’s inability to establish a clear niche in the crowded Republican field has led her to experience something unprecedented in her gilded career: downward mobility.

When she left the Red Cross last January, she trailed Bush by just 10 percentage points in an NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll. Their latest survey found Dole still in second place--but now 48 points behind Bush. She’s taken a similar plunge in New Hampshire.

“She had a tremendous opportunity in February and . . . she didn’t take the steps necessary,” said Dick Bennett, president of an independent polling firm there. “History says you sort of have one chance and I think it will be very difficult for her [to recover] now.”

Dole supporters say her slow start-- which has included the replacement of moderate GOP consultant Kieran Mahoney with conservative Tony Fabrizio as her chief strategist--represents only the inevitable growing pains of a first-time candidate. And Dole herself confidently dismisses the notion that she has already squandered her window of opportunity.

“I don’t think more than 5%, if that much [of the voters], are engaged at this point in presidential politics,” Dole said in an interview. Referring to Bush, she added: “The landscape is strewn with politicians who had huge amounts of money and didn’t get very far.”

In fact, as she tries to reignite her campaign, Dole still has some formidable assets.

Here in Iowa, site of the critical first caucus next winter, she has been able to recruit significant elements of the grass-roots organization that helped her husband, former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, win the state when he ran for president in 1988 and 1996. And she has proved to be a more engaging one-on-one campaigner than many expected. Though her events still sometimes feel overly scripted--at each stop, she took three or four questions from the audience, no more and no less--Dole herself is personable and relaxed.

Then there’s the gender factor. Dole’s campaign seems ambivalent, if not schizophrenic, about the role of gender in her campaign. Dole firmly insists, “I am not running because I’m a woman; I don’t want people to vote for me because I’m a woman.”

Yet the campaign takes almost every opportunity to remind audiences of Dole’s opportunity to become the first female president. In July, she hired a plane to fly over the Women’s World Cup soccer finals with a banner that read: “Go Team USA! Make history--Elizabeth Dole.” In her Iowa speeches, she links her candidacy not only to the women’s soccer team but also to the flight of the space shuttle’s first female pilot.

That emphasis is finding Dole a constituency, both among older women like Rocker and younger supporters like Sandy Bierbaum, an ebullient postal service clerk who introduced the candidate in Atlantic.

“She has the values I support--the family, getting back to basics in the schools,” says Bierbaum. “I hate to say it, but because she’s a woman and she has those values, she makes more of a connection.”

But few believe the connection with women alone will be enough to move Dole into the finals of the GOP race. And other than gender, her message has been diffused.

It’s not that Dole has entirely avoided specifics. She’s laid out plans on gun control (endorsing background checks at gun shows and other restrictions resisted by most of her rivals), trade (where she’s called for negotiating a free-trade zone throughout the Western Hemisphere) and farm policy. She’s embraced a bipartisan panel’s recent proposal to reform Medicare by opening the system to greater marketplace competition and called for diverting part of the Social Security payroll tax into private accounts that workers could invest themselves.

To many analysts, the problem is less a lack of specifics than an absence of edge. Early in her campaign, Dole seemed intent on running as the centrist alternative to Bush--promising not to pursue a ban on abortion, praising bipartisanship and moving to his left on gun control. But since Fabrizio succeeded Mahoney about two months ago, Dole has downplayed her emphasis on centrist issues like gun control--though without finding a clear alternative message to replace it.

As a result, her speeches strike some listeners as a virtually generic recounting of positions that almost all Republicans support--lower taxes, increased defense spending, local control of schools. As Pullman, the Des Moines Republican, noted after watching her: “She did a good job speaking, but what she said, anybody can agree with.” In her emphasis on competence over ideology, Dole can sound strangely like Michael S. Dukakis in a dress.

Tax Plan’s Unveiling Set for This Fall

Dole says more policy specifics are coming; she’ll lay out a tax plan, for instance, this fall. The question is whether those ideas will create a more distinct identity for her--or come in time to reinvigorate her campaign.

Since Dole appears to be stronger in Iowa than any other state, many GOP insiders believe that a poor showing at the GOP straw poll in Ames on Saturday could virtually doom her candidacy.

Calm and disciplined, Dole discounts such talk. But there’s a faint note of urgency now when she tells her audiences in Iowa, “If you’re going to be supportive, please don’t wait until February, because Aug. 14 has become a major date.”

At the least, it may be a date that begins to answer whether Elizabeth Dole’s campaign still has a chance to make history--or has already seen its best days.