BOB DOLE: FACING THE AGE ISSUE

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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.