US Presidential Elections: How old Dole got pumped up, then burst

Bob Dole completed his sprint finish to polling day croaky of voice and smiling bravely, as if to say it is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

By last night he had visited 18 states in four days, making 30 progressively shorter campaign stops along the way. Today he plans to travel to Independence, Missouri, to pose next to a statue of Harry Truman, the Democratic president who scored a huge electoral upset in 1948. Then he goes home to Russell, Kansas, to vote with his family, including a sister who, disobeying the orders of the Dole campaign team, confessed to the press last week that she knew her big brother was a beaten man.

And, for all the bravado, you sense that he knows it too. His campaign- closing dash around the United States has been a high speed procession through the stations of the cross on the way to what the stars and polls proclaim will be an inevitable electoral Calvary.

At a stop in San Diego a crowd of maybe 400 sunny Californians in sunglasses and shorts went through the enthusiastic motions but their loyalty to the old campaigner was not matched by a belief that he could win. One man tried to raise the cry "Kick Bubba's Butt! Kick Bubba's Butt" but after two attempts met with only half-hearted responses he shrugged and contented himself with shaking a miniature Stars and Stripes.

Mr Dole himself looked fresh and crisp in a dark suit and tie, having just emerged from his first rest of any significance, six hours, in two and a half days. The smile was bright but the voice betrayed weariness. Employing his trade-mark rhetorical device, gratuitous repetition, he began with "we're going to work around the clock" three times. But since the whole country has heard him say those seven words time and again on television, and since he lacks the orator's flair for imbuing the banal with drama, the crowd responded not with cheers but with perfunctory applause.

Neither did they catch fire when he declared , in glaring contravention of the available evidence, that the polls in California were showing he was in a dead-heat with Mr Clinton.

But, in the last days of his campaign, Mr Dole has hit upon a message that resonates with the Republican faithful. It is "character", of which Mr Dole says he has much and President Clinton has little. Where Mr Clinton has remained weakest in the campaign was on the question of public trust, mountains of allegations having rained down upon the White House concerning illicit deals of one shape or another.

So barely a mention of Mr Dole's fabled 15 per cent tax cut in San Diego or elsewhere on his "96-hour Non-Stop Victory Tour" but lots of suggestions that if Mr Clinton is re-elected "shades of Whitewater" will haunt him during his second term. Revealingly, however, when Mr Dole made that point it sounded more like a prediction than a warning.

Conversations with members of the crowd at San Diego revealed that the grass roots of the party were under no illusions either. A lady who, in a reference to Mr Dole's dog, wore a "Leader for First Pet" badge on her chest said the Republican candidate was a wonderful man but "pity he is not a showman like Bill Clinton".

David Jacks, who described himself as a "moderate Republican", said "Bill and Hillary Clinton are the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics". But in the next breath he admitted that Mr Clinton would shoot Mr Dole down in today's election. Wearing a "Dole/Kemp" badge, he said: "I admire Dole but he is too old, too wishy-wishy and a bad speaker."

And there Mr Jacks spoke, probably, for much of America. They will not vote for him but they admire his war record, his old-fashioned decency and his pluck, a spectacular quantity of which he has displayed at the death of the campaign for a man of 73.

How did he do it? How was he managing manifestly to outlast the bedraggled reporters on his plane, most of whom were about half his age? Sheila Burke, a trained nurse who was his chief of staff when he was in the Senate, had the answer. Lots of water, lots of juice and small snacks of fruit, cheese and crackers. "They pump you up," she explained, "and then you crash."

Quite.