MISSOURI COMMENATRY: IS IT ENOUGH JUST TO BE THERE?

Bob Woodward's new book "The Choice" treats Bob Dole most kindly. In lengthy interviews with Woodward, Dole comes off as a decent sort of guy with decent instincts.

But Dole the candidate, Dole the speaker, Dole the guiding force of a presidential campaign -- that's another story -- with Woodward and with most everyone else. Dole is from another time, another era. Campaigning for the presidency in 1996 is far removed from the time and style of 1936, for example, when the last Republican nominee from Kansas, Alf Landon, made a run for the White House.

In Landon's time, a presidential candidate meandered around the country dropping harmless tidbits and minor bombshells here and there hoping that enough people in enough states could say they had seen you and you were certifiably alive. Dole pursues the same helter-skelter, unfocused technique.

Dole in his own words describes his attitude towards the press as "You feed them a lot, but don't tell 'em anything." The "feed" is movement on airplanes from city to city -- but substantive silence until something adverse pops up.

For example, Dole visited Cardinal John O'Connor in New York. Asked, when he left, if he had anything to say to Catholic voters, Dole wanly replied "No, I'm just here to visit."

The guiding rule of modern politics is: (1) Have a message and (2) stick to it. Dole hasn't found his message and is stuck without it.

The price of not having your own message is the risk of being overwhelmed by messages you don't like, such as abortion and tobacco. As these haunt Dole, he makes himself more remote from the press for fear of being asked again about issues that annoy him. Unless you give journalists something else to ask, they will revert to tried and true questions of their own.

The abortion issue should have been resolved on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Cardinal O'Connor's presence and with his blessing. It's much more than just a "visit" when the ranking American Catholic prelate is ready to bless your candidacy and your position on the delicate question on abortion.

Tobacco should never have blind-sided a seasoned political veteran like Bob Dole. Everyone following campaign funding reports knew that the tobacco companies were dumping the bulk of their money into Dole's coffers. Big tobacco makes no bones about wanting Dr. David Kessler out as Food and Drug Administrator.

An appropriate answer -- reasonable satisfying to tobacco companies and to health advocates -- goes something like this: "The scientific evidence points to the addictive nature of tobacco and to related health hazards caused by smoking. However, many people experience no negative health effects even after the long use of tobacco. What we do not want to do is embark on some frenzied crusade like Prohibition in the 1920's. We must work on this matter responsibly -- especially with young people."

With the Olympic Games about to blank out most anything of interest to the citizenry, Dole seems to have settled in to the cocoonish nature of his campaign. We can expect further munching on pastrami sandwiches in a New York deli to constitute a make-believe message for a day of campaigning.

More and more it is clear that Dole is convinced that the Clinton campaign will implode. Dole believes that his "there" in the campaign is just being there. Convincing and persuading isn't his game. Being there is.

A journalist has described the tedium of the Dole campaign as "listening to Bob Dole deliver a speech written by someone else to a group of people he knows nothing about in a place to which he will never return." Dole's strategy is more tedium, but he'll be there when Rome burns and the fires can't be put out.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.