Elizabeth Dole gets spontaneous with Clinton's former chief of staff, Close race brings out attack ads and Harley-Davidsons

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jan Cienski National Post

Friday, November 01, 2002

GREENVILLE, N.C. - North Carolina has never been a state for subtle politicians.

Under pressure from a black challenger in 1996, Jesse Helms, the veteran Republican Senator and head of the powerful foreign relations committee, ran a no-holds-barred TV commercial featuring a pair of white hands crumpling a job application letter while the narrator intones, "You needed that job ... but they had to give it to a minority."

Elizabeth Dole may not be from the same rough-hewn school as Mr. Helms, whose retirement opened up his seat in next Tuesday's Senate race, but she learns quickly.

Faced with a tough fight from Democrat Erskine Bowles, she has taken to attacking his wife, whose family owns textile mills, for costing locals some jobs.

"Erskine Bowles says he'll protect jobs, but his $2-billion family business is exporting our jobs to Mexico and China," says a Dole commercial. It carries an added kick because Mr. Bowles was chief of staff to Bill Clinton, who negotiated the free trade agreement blamed for sending many North Carolina textile jobs overseas.

Mr. Bowles, 57, a wealthy investment banker, has responded with his own volleys accusing Mrs. Dole of sneakily attacking his wife. "There's just no excuse for Elizabeth Dole's attacks on my wife, Crandall," he says in his riposte, ending with the exhortation, "Stop trying to trick people, Mrs. Dole."

The reason for the invective is not hard to discern. If Republicans want to end the Democrats' one-vote majority in the Senate, they cannot afford to lose a single seat they now control. That is why party heavy hitters have been swooping into North Carolina to bolster Mrs. Dole's Senate bid.

Party bigwigs have reason to worry. Initially, Mrs. Dole was far ahead because she was a star in a celebrity-starved state, a home-grown talent who had made a name for herself in Washington.

She fled North Carolina 40 years ago, decamping to the U.S. capital where she served as labor secretary and transportation secretary and headed the U.S. Red Cross.

But after soaring ahead by as much as 16 points in early polling against Mr. Bowles, she has seen her lead shrink to about six points, slightly more than the margin of error.

There is precedent for electoral disaster. In 1999, Mrs. Dole took a promising early bid for the U.S. presidency and rapidly ran it into the ground with a stiff, over-scripted and inept campaign.

This year's incarnation has been a lot feistier, although still featuring a well-groomed candidate with perfect hair and makeup clad in a brightly coloured designer suit.

During a recent debate, Mrs. Dole, 66, sallied forth repeatedly from behind her podium, rushing to the front of the stage as she described Mr. Bowles' tax-and-spend liberalism with short chopping motions.

"Thank-yew verah much," she ended in her honeyed southern belle tone. Her staff is keen to shoot down any suggestion she is scripted, pointing out all the spontaneous things she does on the campaign trail, most of which seem to do with Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

The candidate's association with Hog riders began with her husband Bob's failed 1996 presidential campaign, when she rode on the back of talk show host Jay Leno's Harley. She repeated the stunt, albeit without Mr. Leno, during a student rally this year at Duke University.

During a campaign swing through the state aboard her "Eliza-bus" she saw a Harley dealership and insisted on stopping to chat with the bikers, said Mary Brown Brewer, her spokeswoman. "She does a lot of spontaneous things," Ms. Brewer insisted.

Mr. Bowles began to chip away at Mrs. Dole's positive image by linking her to some of her husband's less popular positions.

"Once he began to associate her with controversial issues instead of neutral things like being the head of the Red Cross, it was inevitable for her popularity to decline," said Ted Arrington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

As Mr. Bowles attacks, Mrs. Dole has been doing a complicated dance, trying to motivate Mr. Helms's hard-core conservative base but still staying centrist enough to attract crucial middle of the road swing voters.

Mr. Bowles is doing a similar two-step as he tries to buff up his credentials from his White House stint without tying himself too closely to Mr. Clinton, who is unpopular outside the state's large black minority. In an effort to underline his good old boy credentials, Mr. Bowles even filmed a commercial with NASCAR auto-racing legend Junior Johnson hanging out at the North Wilkesboro speedway.

"They're going after Erskine because he worked with Bill Clinton," Mr. Johnson says in the ad. "Get off my bumper!"

The rising negative tone of the campaign has turned off many voters. "I don't plan to vote for either Dole or Bowles," said Ros Gilham, a retiree loading his shopping into the back of his car at a grocery store in Greenville.

"I don't like either of them because their campaigns seem to be saying only that they are the lesser of two evils. One says the other is a rat, and they're both right on that."

But analysts point out winning by a narrow margin is another North Carolina tradition. Most think Mrs. Dole will manage to hang on for a narrow victory.

-- Anonymous, November 01, 2002


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