California Preening
Dole takes California; shows weakness in key November state
Bob Dole locked up the Republican nomination in California yesterday, but instead of being able to confront Bill Clinton, the Senator finds wannabes like Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan still nipping at his heels. A recent pet phrase of Dole's is "We're the reform party," an attempt to stave off Perot's hinting at another run with his Reform Party. By virtue of the phrase's constant repetition, Dole sounds desperate; he knows that both Perot and Buchanan can hijack the GOP and take votes away from him.
After all, who are Ross and Pat kidding? Pat says that he's considering a third-party run, but could be he's just bluffing to gain influence over the GOP platform. And he must realize that a serious run on his part pretty much hands Clinton a second term. Doesn't he?
Still, the two expose a very simple truth about Bob Dole: he's just not an interesting candidate. What's at issue is Dole's appeal to a broad range of Republicans. Now that it's clearly a Dole/Clinton race, moderate and liberal GOP voters have a choice to make, and most will defect to Clinton; according to exit polls, half of California's GOP voters aren't satisfied with Dole, a third of all voters think Dole has no chance of beating Bill, and a quarter of GOP voters prefer Clinton over Dole in a two-way race. Buchanan took 19 percent of the votes in California, which isn't bad for an election that was essentially a moot point. These days there's no such thing as Dole Democrat, but there are more than a few Clinton and Perot Republicans.
Potentially, it's a lose-lose situation for Bob. If he sticks to the hard line , he loses moderate voters to Clinton--maybe even Buchanan and Perot. If he tries to play nice, he loses what little charisma he has and opens himself to further attacks. It's five months to the convention; can Bob Dole overhaul his image and current dilemma in enough time to walk up to that podium in San Diego and look...well, presidential?
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