IS IT POLLING OR IS IT PUSHING?

By JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/MANCHESTER

AS PAT BUCHANAN ROSE IN THE POLLS IN IOWA, the Dole campaign began to panic--and to plot. It quietly added some new and pointed questions to its routine polling. Its telephone polltakers began asking hundreds of voters in New Hampshire whether they would be more or less inclined to vote for Buchanan if they knew he once said that women lacked "ambition and the will to succeed," and that South Korea, Taiwan and Japan should be armed with nuclear weapons. More than 70% of those polled said they would be less likely to vote for Buchanan. Thus a campaign was born. Last week Dole began airing TV and radio ads that featured damaging quotations from Buchanan on those subjects.

Dole's opponents are outraged. Buchanan confronted Dole about the tactic, called push polling, during the debate last week in Manchester. What's more, many voters who received the calls are upset. "It's sleazy and makes me mad," says Andrew Schwaegler, 29, a tree farmer in Orford who claims he got four calls that included assertions about Steve Forbes' positions on gays in the military and abortion.

Dole deputy campaign manager William Lacy defends the practice as standard and says he has used it regularly to test opponents' vulnerabilities. The Dole campaign even asked nasty questions about Dole himself to help devise a defense for expected attacks on his tax policies. What is new this time is that voters are tired of hearing politicians slime one another, and are beginning to lash back even at campaign methods as arcane as push polls.

--By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Manchester