BOB DOLE: FACING THE AGE ISSUE

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Once a micromanager who scheduled his own radio-advertising buys, Dole has made a virtue of necessity and begun to delegate more. When campaigning, he now assents to three events in a day where before he might have done seven. More "staff time" is built in, both because Dole has learned he doesn't have to scurry around and see everyone in Black Hawk County, Iowa, and also because he knows he probably shouldn't. "He's 71 years old," said a senior aide just before the last birthday. "It's something we're sensitive to. We're not going to overschedule him."

But sometimes the system breaks down. When Dole is tired or angry, it shows. In May his response to Clinton's prime-time address on the budget was a fiasco. He looked his oldest self: dour, pinched and miserable. Aides complained later that they had had only a few hours to prepare, but in fact, Dole's many commitments left him with only a few minutes. An aide approached him at 8:50 that night and asked, "What are you going to say?" Replied Dole: "Dunno. Gonna go down and find out." The lack of preparation was clearly visible: rival campaigns have already spliced together tapes of that speech and other bad moments and shown them to focus groups.

Dole's Republican rivals face some delicate choices. The G.O.P. frowns on too much internal bloodletting during primaries; why, after all, should they hand the Democrats ammunition to use in the fall? So while his age has clearly emerged as a target, his opponents must be careful about aiming for it. Campaigning in Iowa last week, Texas Senator Phil Gramm, 53, noted that he has to work hard at becoming known because "Senator Dole has the advantage of having been a public figure since 1960. I was a junior in high school in 1960." For Gramm, this counts as subtlety.

At the Republicans' gathering in Philadelphia in mid-July, Lamar Alexander, his own campaign virtually stillborn, took a swipe as well. "Our goal," he said, "is to nominate someone who can beat Bill Clinton and who has the energy and the vision and the skills to implement the Republican agenda in the next century. And I believe that won't happen unless we nominate someone who can make this a campaign for the future." Mark Merritt, an Alexander aide, said later, "Lamar's point was that America's got to make a decision: Do they want a President who uses a rearview mirror for his road map into the 21st century."

Regardless of whether the age issue is set aside, Dole must still confront the larger question of what he wants to do as President. That, more than his chronological age, is what the 1996 campaign will be about. "Bob Dole's problem is that he is in the middle of legislative fights every day," says his former campaign manager Bill Brock. "It makes it difficult for him to pull back from the minutiae of some debate and start looking for the larger issues and how to give people a greater sense of togetherness and national purpose."

Why should Bob Dole be President? His current answer lies somewhere between "I've earned it" and "I've been tested." These have proved to be sufficient for Republican legatees in the past. But the party has changed since 1988. And the long-standing claims of a Grand Old Man may no longer satisfy the Grand Old Party.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman, James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Barbara Burke/New York