FACING THE AGE ISSUE

By MICHAEL DUFFY AND NANCY GIBBS

Bob Dole celebrated his 72nd birthday last Saturday, an occasion of more than passing significance. For it reminded the leaders of his party, the pundits searching for big issues and perhaps even a few real live voters of the thing Dole would most like them to ignore: if he were to win the presidency in 1996, he would be the oldest man ever inaugurated. Even if age doesn't matter, ideas do. At the very moment when voters have installed a generation of laser-guided, soul-driven Republican reformers, he finds himself cast as the embodiment of old-style, gear-grinding politics.

There is some comfort in the fact that Bill Clinton has an age problem too. With his first term more than half over, the President has left voters with a queasy feeling about his judgment and fortitude. His critics deride the "yuppie Zen President" who represents a feckless generation that protested wars while their elders fought them and lacks the confidence that comes from sacrifice.

Whenever presidential contests have brought generational change, the youngsters have always inherited power from their elders: Lincoln from Buchanan, Kennedy from Eisenhower and, of course, Clinton from Bush. When Bob Dole entered the Kansas house of representatives in 1951, Bill Clinton was five years old. Never before have Americans reached so far backward in their search for leadership-which is why the Republican Party is now confronting a historic dilemma.

Dole has come to dominate the Republican field so completely -- last week a TIME/CNN poll put him ahead of his closest rival by 32 points -- that his nomination looks increasingly inevitable. But as Dole's lead over Clinton has vanished, there is a growing fear in G.O.P. circles that the party is about to nominate a man who does not excite the party's rank and file; a Washington insider in an age when the term has become an insult; a closet centrist with a hard head and a bleeding heart; and, most worrisome, a candidate who might squander the party's chance to exploit Clinton's weakness and gain a new Republican dynasty.

All the messy concerns boil down to one question: Is Dole too old? Is he physically capable of completing what amounts to three back-to-back marathons: running the Senate, running for President and then completing four and possibly eight years as Commander in Chief without a noticeable degradation of energy, mental acuity or temperament?

The voters don't seem to be worried: 3 out of 4 participants in the TIME/CNN survey don't think Dole's age is a problem. But they have yet to be forced into confronting the question the way Americans were in October 1984, when the 73-year-old Ronald Reagan concluded the second debate of that presidential campaign with his rambling thoughts about a time capsule and a drive along the California coast. Though Dole's health is excellent, the question will not go away because it has become a code for a deeper concern. Namely, is Dole's brand of back-room politics, with its emphasis on vote counting, compromise and dealmaking, too old-fashioned for a party that owes its ascendancy to the politics of conviction, confrontation and change? "We think the voters are a lot less interested in how many years Bob Dole's been on the planet than in how many years he's been in Washington," remarks Dan Schnur, a strategist for California Governor Pete Wilson's presidential campaign. "No question, the voters are looking for change. Bob Dole has been in the Congress for 35 years."

Sooner or later every generation turns into a cartoon, a caricature sketched by history and then distorted by memory. How voters and the party activists weigh the generational question in the coming months is likely to be one of the two or three big factors in the 1996 campaign. All Dole has to do is show that he might just win because of his age rather than in spite of it. "His policies are a helluva lot more attuned to the mood of the country than the incumbent's," says former Reagan imagemeister Michael Deaver, who argues that even baby boomers might be ready to turn back to the grownups. Dole actually draws his strongest support from voters 35 to 50. Says Deaver: "The boomers stop and say, 'What did we ever do? We have the most divorces, and we smoked a lot of dope. What has our generation brought to the table?'"

Last month in Goffstown, New Hampshire, Dole pointed to kids playing in a supporter's backyard and said the election was "not about our generation. It's about their generation. Maybe our generation has one more mission left to accomplish." Dole's strategy is simple: age is an asset in a race against Clinton. "It's experience, it's leadership, it's character and it's values," says an aide. "It's everything Clinton lacks.''

For rivals and pundits alike, the age issue offers a chance to examine Dole's heart and mind, along with the events that have shaped him. He has lived too hard and seen too much to deride the government as the enemy. Dole grew up on the prairie during the Depression, when the Federal Government meant jobs, farm price-support programs and rural electrification. After his Army service left him physically broken and unable to walk, it was government doctors who helped put him back together and G.I. Bill money that put him through school. As a county attorney signing welfare checks, he discovered that his grandparents were on the list of recipients. Dole's first floor speech as a freshman Senator in 1969 was a plea for funds for housing for the disabled.

Even now, as his party portrays government as a fungus, Dole refuses to apologize for his beliefs. In New Hampshire over Memorial Day, Dole repeatedly told crowds, "We're not trying to devastate government. We're trying to downsize it." Nor does he apologize for his bargaining skills. "I think if there is a complaint, it comes from people who don't understand, first of all, leadership, and secondly, the Senate," he told Time last week. "You're not 'cutting deals'; you're out there trying to get something done. And I think most Americans expect us to.''

Neither that record nor that rhetoric would seem to make him the natural standard bearer for the G.O.P. warriors who rode into Washington last fall promising to wipe out the very practices that Dole has spent the past 34 years mastering inside the Beltway. "There are so many now who grew up fighting a bully government," says Georgia Senator Paul Coverdell, who, though 56, is part of the newer generation in Congress because he was elected in 1992. "We had to overcome it." By contrast, Coverdell notes, Dole came of age when "government was seen more as a facilitator, a partner. It wasn't an adversarial relationship."

Republican true believers, for example, were horrified this winter to hear Dole on the Sunday chat shows saying he might go along with Clinton's effort to raise the minimum wage in return for the President's agreeing to cut capital-gains taxes. As one Senate aide put it last week, "Dole does not have any concept of the political advantage of losing. There are times when you make your political point better by losing, or at least by risking losing." That pragmatism frustrates the new daredevil Republicans in the Senate. And it marks a distinct contrast with the style of Newt Gingrich, whose entire political career has been a near-death experience.

Frustrated Republicans may flirt with the idea of a late-entry Gingrich candidacy, but that doesn't spell a mutiny. Of the two leaders, Dole is more popular, with favorable-impression ratings around 42%, compared with Gingrich's 35%. And even staunchly conservative members of the Christian Coalition are prepared to work with Dole in the belief that he stands the best chance of unseating Clinton.

Last week also provided new evidence that Gingrich is no pure ideologue and Dole is no mere expediter. A political truism holds that it is one thing to campaign and another to govern; now that Newt has to win floor votes and Dole has to woo voters, each is exactly as ideological as self-interest dictates.

Gingrich has been cutting deals on everything from term limits to taxes. It was Gingrich, for example, who persuaded Dole last week to delay a vote scrapping affirmative-action policies until the Republican Party devises a different way to help blacks and other minorities without resorting to quotas.

For his part, Dole has tried to allay conservatives' doubts about his convictions with lunges this spring to the right on gun control and his attack on Hollywood. He reminds the fervent budget cutters that back in 1985 he engineered the only across-the-board cut of federal programs (including a freeze on Social Security) that the Senate has ever passed-only to be undercut by Ronald Reagan. Last week Dole tried to push through one of his pet projects: easing regulations on business, a measure that is designed to appeal to conservative hard-liners. But when it comes to meat inspections and water-quality standards, his party is on the wrong side in the polls, and Democrats had the votes to force Dole into setting the bill aside.

The fate of that reform bill revealed the danger of running the Senate and running for President at the same time. Dole's dual role is both enviable and impossible: he can place himself right in the middle of any issue he wants to address, demonstrating wisdom and leadership while denying his rivals the chance to advance their campaigns from the Senate floor. But he also has more to lose; his tough regulatory bill was a hit with conservative New Hampshire voters, but not with enough moderate Senators to prevent the embarrassing defeat. A watered-down version might have passed but would have unleashed New Hampshire editorial writers who call him "Bob Cut-a-Deal Dole."

It was in the midst of those exhausting battles last week that his New York ally Senator Al D'Amato pulled Dole aside and asked him the question that's on the mind of his friends and enemies alike: "Are you taking it easy? Are you taking care of yourself?"

The concern was natural. Dole has a grueling job even without the monstrous demands of a national campaign, demands he knows well from bitter experience. After he lost to Bush in 1988, Dole figured his chances at the White House were shot. As a loyal Republican, he couldn't imagine challenging a sitting President in the 1992 primaries. Then came the diagnosis of prostate cancer in 1991; he underwent surgery in December to have his prostate gland removed. Finally, Clinton's victory in 1992 seemed to herald a Democratic rebirth that would leave Dole sniping from the sidelines in his position of Senate minority leader.

But as Clinton's fortunes fell, Dole reviewed his position one more time. He sought advice from his old mentor Richard Nixon the year before Nixon died. Nixon gave Dole hope of turning his age into an advantage. "Your critics," Nixon wrote, "will try to focus on the age issue. However, after four years of Clinton and his baby boomers, age may not prove to be a liability ... Most important, you have not lost any of your mental sharpness. Looking back over the years, I vividly recall that De Gaulle, Adenauer, Yoshida and Zhou Enlai were all in top form mentally in their 70s."

Still, it was hardly a simple decision. Though Dole is indeed young by the standards of other countries, "age works against you in the U.S.," says Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia. "It works for you in a country like Japan, which honors older citizens and appreciates their institutional memory. Here people think that candidates in their 70s are focusing more on the past than on the future." Dole himself looked into his future and fretted over the age question. "You want to be pretty certain you can do it,'' he said last week. "I don't think age is just a state of mind. Obviously, you do get older, and things don't work as well in some cases.''

Throughout American history, it's not so much a candidate's age as how he wears it that weighs on voters. William Henry Harrison was 67 when he ran for President in 1840, and judging from what passed for press reports at the time, no one seemed to care. Democrats tried to frighten voters after Eisenhower fell ill in 1955. "They ran ads saying that if you elected Eisenhower, you were going to get Nixon because [Ike] was going to die," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Even Reagan, who was 69 in 1980, was able to deflect the issue with a combination of shrewdness, humor and take-it-or-leave-it confidence. "Conservative Republicans never sat around and said about Reagan, 'Don't you think he's too old? It's a hard job,'" recalls a party insider. "They knew who Reagan was. They trusted Reagan to be Reagan and stay Reagan, and they thought, 'If he has a heart attack, he'll still be Reagan.'''

As it contemplates the race against Dole, the Clinton camp is not expecting much bounce from the generation gap. "These things don't mean much," says a veteran Clinton adviser. "Only a month ago, everyone was saying that Dole was a genius for his attack on Hollywood. Now he's sagging? I don't buy it." Dole's advisers have nonetheless been ruminating about how to address the issue of his age and health; three months ago, they decided it should be addressed early and candidly, both to pre-empt his critics and to ensure that any future health alarms don't prompt suspicions of a cover-up. Says Marlin Fitzwater, White House press secretary at the time George Bush collapsed at a state dinner in Tokyo: "You want to deal with those problems well before you throw up on the Japanese Prime Minister."

A nine-page document, released last Friday on the eve of the candidate's birthday, is the most complete medical information released about a presidential candidate in memory, including chemistry, urinalysis and blood charts, an ekg chart and a four-page summary. "The patient is in excellent health with all medical conditions stable or controlled," was the verdict of Dr. John Eisold, the attending congressional physician. Dole's campaign carefully leaked the materials early to selected news organizations, including Time, and provided opportunities to photograph the candidate on his treadmill.

In speeches, Dole takes the age issue in stride. "I'll put Strom Thurmond on the ticket for age balance," he jokes (Senator Thurmond is 92 years old). But Dole's real advantage comes just from showing how hard he can work. When a voter asked Dole in Keene, New Hampshire, earlier this year whether he was simply too old to be President, Dole's reply was almost a dare: "Stick with me for a day and see for yourself."

Dole's daily life has been one long stamina-demonstration project. He begins his schedule around 7:45 a.m., though aides admit he isn't a morning person. He dresses himself with a buttonhook -- painstaking exercise for a man without the use of one arm, struggling through the top button of his shirt and the knot on his tie by himself. He exercises regularly on the treadmill his wife Elizabeth bought him a few years ago and then spent months coaxing him to use. (Horrified at the recent photo ops, she vowed to buy him some decent jogging shorts for his birthday.) Now he's as religious about his workout as his wife, spending 30 minutes on the machine three or four times a week. Because pulling backward is one motion his disabled right arm can make, Dole bought a rowing machine last year to improve his upper-body strength.

Once at work, Dole often holds three or four meetings simultaneously in his large suite of offices. The Senator slips in and out of the sessions like a negotiator at a five-way labor dispute, urging the parties forward, keeping negotiations going, all the while shuttling back and forth to the Senate floor.

But he has begun to make some accommodations to age. He has become compulsive about working the phones while sunning on his Senate veranda -- the tan he works hard on, says a Senator, is his "secret weapon." Dole admits to putting "a little stuff'' on his hair to keep out the gray, although he insists he does not color his eyebrows. And he sometimes slips off to his new hideaway near his office for a nap on a couch that Dole nabbed when Senator Howard Metzenbaum retired last year at 77.

Otherwise his pace is relentless. Since announcing his candidacy in April, Dole has flown 39,000 miles. None of those who work closely with him believe the Senator is flagging. Concedes Ron Klain, staff director of the Democratic Policy Committee and spokesperson for minority leader Tom Daschle: "I don't see any speed off his fast ball at all."

In Washington he typically works into the night, hits a reception or two and tries to finish by 9. Then it's home to his apartment at the Watergate, where he and Elizabeth might catch an old movie and eat dinner on TV trays. Before bed he checks in with his advisers by phone and tries to be in bed by 10:30. The Doles socialize sparingly, usually just with a few close friends for an occasional dinner. Weekends are punctuated more by work than play; the couple go for walks, go to church and enjoy a ritual Sunday brunch.

Dole doesn't smoke and rarely drinks. He eats carefully while in town and follows Nixon's admonition never to eat before a speech. On the road he indulges in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and his advancemen have been known to peel off from his motorcades in search of local Dairy Queens on his behalf. "Gotta eat a little something," he'll say. "Gotta keep the energy up."

Once a micromanager who scheduled his own radio-advertising buys, Dole has made a virtue of necessity and begun to delegate more. When campaigning, he now assents to three events in a day where before he might have done seven. More "staff time" is built in, both because Dole has learned he doesn't have to scurry around and see everyone in Black Hawk County, Iowa, and also because he knows he probably shouldn't. "He's 71 years old," said a senior aide just before the last birthday. "It's something we're sensitive to. We're not going to overschedule him."

But sometimes the system breaks down. When Dole is tired or angry, it shows. In May his response to Clinton's prime-time address on the budget was a fiasco. He looked his oldest self: dour, pinched and miserable. Aides complained later that they had had only a few hours to prepare, but in fact, Dole's many commitments left him with only a few minutes. An aide approached him at 8:50 that night and asked, "What are you going to say?" Replied Dole: "Dunno. Gonna go down and find out." The lack of preparation was clearly visible: rival campaigns have already spliced together tapes of that speech and other bad moments and shown them to focus groups.

Dole's Republican rivals face some delicate choices. The G.O.P. frowns on too much internal bloodletting during primaries; why, after all, should they hand the Democrats ammunition to use in the fall? So while his age has clearly emerged as a target, his opponents must be careful about aiming for it. Campaigning in Iowa last week, Texas Senator Phil Gramm, 53, noted that he has to work hard at becoming known because "Senator Dole has the advantage of having been a public figure since 1960. I was a junior in high school in 1960." For Gramm, this counts as subtlety.

At the Republicans' gathering in Philadelphia in mid-July, Lamar Alexander, his own campaign virtually stillborn, took a swipe as well. "Our goal," he said, "is to nominate someone who can beat Bill Clinton and who has the energy and the vision and the skills to implement the Republican agenda in the next century. And I believe that won't happen unless we nominate someone who can make this a campaign for the future." Mark Merritt, an Alexander aide, said later, "Lamar's point was that America's got to make a decision: Do they want a President who uses a rearview mirror for his road map into the 21st century."

Regardless of whether the age issue is set aside, Dole must still confront the larger question of what he wants to do as President. That, more than his chronological age, is what the 1996 campaign will be about. "Bob Dole's problem is that he is in the middle of legislative fights every day," says his former campaign manager Bill Brock. "It makes it difficult for him to pull back from the minutiae of some debate and start looking for the larger issues and how to give people a greater sense of togetherness and national purpose."

Why should Bob Dole be President? His current answer lies somewhere between "I've earned it" and "I've been tested." These have proved to be sufficient for Republican legatees in the past. But the party has changed since 1988. And the long-standing claims of a Grand Old Man may no longer satisfy the Grand Old Party.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman, James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Barbara Burke/New York

With reporting by ANN BLACKMAN, JAMES CARNEY AND KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON AND BARBARA BURKE/NEW YORK