CAMPAIGN '96: HERE COMES THE CANDY

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What you see in Bob Dole's campaign is not what you get. Well...not always. Or not much longer.

So far, it is true, the campaign has often been as listless and unfocused as it has looked. Last week, for example, Dole spent his waning days as Senate majority leader--he leaves this Tuesday--pushing to a vote two doomed causes: the balanced-budget amendment and a land-based antimissile system. Both lost, not only on the floor, as Dole knew they would, but in public attention. That was captured by two of Bill Clinton's ideas: a new tax credit for college students and their parents, and a $200 reduction in closing costs on house purchases financed by FHA mortgages. Both proposals are open to criticism: the closing-cost move, for one, will benefit less than 10% of all new-home buyers. Never mind: the plans address two huge concerns of millions of families--the costs of college education and of housing--and they allowed White House spokesman Mike McCurry to hail hyperbolically "American Dream week."

Some of what has been emanating from the Dole camp lately, however, appears to be a sort of smoke screen. Campaign aides have let word get around that the candidate's forthcoming economic program will feature sweeping tax cuts. That has kept Republican supply-siders quiet but exposed the candidate to some heavy hits for supposedly abandoning his 35-year devotion to budget balancing. Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska, for example, jeers that Dole is becoming a "tax-cut candy man." Such sneering is at best premature. Much of it has been based on a 14-page memo from economists advising the campaign that has been widely leaked but was only a preliminary version of what wound up in Dole's hands.

In fact, say campaign insiders, Dole's program, though it will include tax cuts, will go far beyond them. If some top aides get their way, it will focus heavily on the pervasive insecurity many families feel despite economic growth and rising employment. The idea is that Dole would urge corporations to make increased use of such arrangements as flextime (greater freedom for workers to arrange different schedules day to day), to give workers more compensatory time for long hours and to provide more part-time work. All are spread-the-work schemes that might offer alternatives to the frequent pattern of heavy layoffs, exhausting overtime for the workers still on the job and an increasing reliance on temporary workers.

Details so far are fuzzy to nonexistent. Working them out will be one of the jobs of Donald Rumsfeld and Vin Weber, who last week were named co-directors of policy planning. Previously, what policy planning there had been was run out of Dole's back pocket, and that was plainly not working. Rumsfeld, a former White House chief of staff and Secretary of Defense, is regarded as a tough and smart operator, but some party veterans consider him to lack a sure instinct for what will win votes. They hope that deficiency will be compensated for by the appointment of Weber, a former six-term Congressman from Minnesota who is considered one of the G.O.P.'s sharpest minds.