The Shadow President

In Washington games of good cop-bad cop, Bob Dole often plays the heavy. But last week a different Dole was on display. While some of his Republican colleagues were busy blasting Bill Clinton's domestic agenda to pieces, the Senate minority leader gave every appearance of struggling to put things back together again. On health care, Dole asked, "Why aren't we sitting together? Why don't we make a list of all the things we agree on?" Later, when an angry Clinton blamed G.O.P. partisanship for sinking the crime bill, Dole declared that "playing the blame game won't get us anywhere" and faxed a letter of ostensible compromise to the President as he flew on Air Force One. Who is this statesman-like, conciliatory character in the body of Dole?

As chief of the opposition in Congress, he is instinctively pugnacious and frequently savages the Administration when it suits him. But a likely presidential candidate cannot appear blindly partisan on all issues. Ask Dole if he wants to run for President, and he answers with typical drollery, "Every country ought to have one." He coyly points out that he's making some preparations -- just in case. But ask Dole if he really wants to be President, and the whimsy fades. "It's something that I think I could do, that I'd be willing to do, that I'd hoped to do," he told TIME. Yet all that, he added immediately, "doesn't get you there."

Dole certainly works as if he wants to get there. He has put his supporters on alert for a national campaign. Most weekends he travels on behalf of G.O.P. candidates, raising money for them while raising his own banner among influential party centurions. He has high hopes that in this year's elections, Republicans will gain several Senate seats. " 'Seven More in '94' is our slogan," he chirps. Winning those seats would give him a promotion: to majority leader. That would make Dole even more the Republican shadow president.

In running for the real job, his first primary-like test is his performance in leading his party's charge against the health-care plan devised by majority leader George Mitchell and endorsed by the President. While ideologues on the right wanted to oppose any expansive health-care legislation, Dole fretted about being tarred as an obstructionist. But with Democrats in turmoil on the issue and the Clintons' proposal junked, Dole gained more freedom to make peace with his colleagues.

While he originally endorsed a scheme by Republican liberal John Chafee, the minority leader now sees that plan as bad politics because it would require individuals to provide their own coverage. Instead, Dole has crafted his own health-care plan, a spare model based on changes in insurance practices and subsidies for the working poor. Forty of the Senate's 44 Republicans promptly signed on; party conservatives praised him for rescuing the G.O.P. health-care initiative. As he campaigns for G.O.P. candidates, Dole promises voters that if nothing passes in 1994 and if they send more Republicans to Congress, "we'll give you a good bill next year that doesn't put bureaucrats between you and your doctor."