MASTERS OF THE MESSAGE

Presidential elections have most often turned on the great issues of the day: war and cold war, liberalism and conservatism, economic good times and bad. But in the post-ideological, slow-growth era of 1996 America, the election was won and lost on the Message--the ability to divine the hopes, fears and desires of voters, then craft the ideas, words and images that would best reach them. Bill Clinton built the most sensitive radar apparatus American politics has ever seen; Bob Dole looked at the same public mood but failed to read its meaning. This is the inside story of the Dole and...