THE NEW AGE OF ANXIETY

By NANCY GIBBS

BY THIS TIME, A PRESIDENTIAL RACE needs a working metaphor, a compass for the voters to steer by. In 1988 we got "competence vs. ideology," which meant "Whom do you want behind the desk when the phone rings and the Soviet empire collapses?" Then in 1992 we got "change vs. the status quo," which meant "Isn't it time to host a revolution of our own?" But now, as Bob Dole cinches his party's nomination to do battle with Bill Clinton, we find that the race is between two middlemen with rather similar ideas about what government should do, both committed to change only at the margins. And so voters are left with a different kind of question.

Already the theme of 1996 is less about the change we hope to effect than the change we feel we can't control. There is a reason polls and surveys and moody stories in the newspapers keep coming back to people's sense of being dislodged from their moorings. Clinton may call it The Age of Possibility, but the end of the century is too near, the pace too fast for most people struggling at two jobs to feel giddy about their opportunities. The national conversation is now about how to take what is best, even idealized, from our past, throw out what is no longer useful or worthy, and plant it in a new world of much, much greater uncertainty, where none of the old teachers live.

We have been here before. From the first settlements in the 17th century, to the opening of the West in the 19th, through the many mass migrations in the 20th century, Americans have repeatedly grabbed what they could carry and headed off into the tall and uncut, down a risky path to a new prosperity. As America enters the 21st century, its role as the lone superpower is uncertain; the search for a truly multicultural society is under siege; its ability to raise standards of living is in doubt; and its recent record of solving its problems together is beginning to look like the Windsors. When Americans go to the polls this fall, they are going to choose someone who they think will escort them best through a portal of unforgiving change.

It is no coincidence that both candidates are running less on what they will do than on who they are. Riding home on Air Force One two weeks ago, Clinton chatted off the record for nearly two hours on everything from the new Redford movies, the pitfalls of instant information, the prospect of living past 100, the importance of cheap vacations to American culture, global warming, peach cobbler and the NCAA basketball playoffs.

Here was Clinton at his best and worst, showing his serial sincerity, his sweet tooth for books, ideas, intimacy, an appetite that powers his presidency and also frustrates it. He leaves the impression of a man who thinks conversation is a form of leadership and speechmaking a form of decision making. It's hard to imagine such a session with Dole, beyond a tour of the Senate bill hopper. He has said he hasn't seen the movies he attacks. He is allergic to rumination. The emcee for his rally in Biloxi, Mississippi, warmed up the crowd by chanting, "Dole's not dull. Dole's not dull." But Dole, whom G.O.P. guru Ken Duberstein dubbed the Comeback Adult, can counter Clinton's act with an admonition: Sure, the baby boomer may read more, talk more, surf the net, hum the pop charts. But I am an adult with a memory, and useful scars, and a better radar system to guide us safely through the wilderness.

When it comes to making the case for character, both men are blessed and cursed by masterly biographers--David Maraniss for Clinton, Richard Ben Cramer for Dole--whose mesmerizing accounts of their lives will provide the road map to voters and scribblers for years to come. Bob Dole of Russell, Kansas, grew up with a strong family in the kind of small town that Bill Clinton pretends to come from. The Man from Hope actually grew up in Hot Springs, a resort town of healing waters and racetracks and churches built on gambling money. Both had powerhouse working mothers--Virginia Kelley was a nurse anesthetist; Bina Dole sold sewing machines door to door--though Virginia had far less luck or judgment than Bina in choosing men. Mrs. Dole would not have married a man without knowing that he'd been married three times before. Once widowed, Clinton's mother married again, to a philandering, cologne-wearing bootlegger nicknamed Dude who beat her with her shoe.

Clinton was the overachieving, overcompensating favorite son; reliquary for his mother's hopes, he got the master bedroom. In exchange, he became his mother's gladiator--to the degree that Clinton ever went to war, he did it in his own home, against his own stepfather. For Dole, growing up in Depression-era Russell, every day was a fight for survival, before he even went off to war. Cramer describes Russell as a town proud of the fact that everyone there had been broke at one time or another. When it stopped raining for a few years, the dust grew so thick they had to wrap babies in wet sheets to keep them from suffocating from the dirt. A farmer turned away by the local bank herded his cows into a corner, shot them one by one and them shot himself. Dole dug up dandelions for a nickel a bushel, delivered grocery handbills, worked in the drugstore. He listened to his parents talk about how to pay the doctors treating his little brother Kenny, after his leg got infected and the poultices and maggots and lancings couldn't heal it. He vowed at the time that he would never be such a burden, in fact thought he might become a doctor himself, for the security. But that turned out to be a hard promise to keep. The wound he suffered in Italy three weeks before the end of the war left him immobilized below the neck. When they eventually shipped him home to die, Cramer writes, "Bina had to pick eight cigarette butts out of his plaster cast. She told her sisters: they'd used her boy for an ashtray on the train."

THERE ARE GOOD REASONS THAT no matter how fiercely his campaign advisers beg him, Dole has so much trouble telling the story of what happened to him and how he survived it. "I don't know if it's generational," he said once of the reluctance to traffic in tragedy for political advantage. Dole, like George Bush and millions of other World War II veterans, left too many friends behind in unmarked graves to consider themselves heroes; they consider themselves lucky.

Clinton, of course, has a less inspiring story to tell, yet he can't stop telling it. One man can't say the word I, the other can't stop saying it. Clinton will talk about anything: his family, his sorrows, his underwear. Lamar Alexander argued that Clinton was the first President to work out his mid-life crisis in public. It is a style--emotive, confessional, dependent, self-indulgent--that can make traditionally raised men uncomfortable. He's what their dads taught them not to be--only Clinton's dad wasn't around to teach him.

Both men were smart enough to realize they couldn't go as far as they wanted to without a political partner, so they each married one. In his second wife Elizabeth, Dole found someone who could make the connections he couldn't, who could charm and dazzle and chirp as necessary. Hillary provides Bill Clinton some focus and discipline, the rigor to end a meeting or stick to a position. Both women are devout, ambitious only daughters who married men from modest backgrounds with immodest dreams. Both women went to great lengths to pursue their own careers and promote their husbands'. Elizabeth changed her stockings from Democrat to Independent to Republican as she rose to serve six Presidents and hold two Cabinet offices. Hillary kept her maiden name when it was chic to do so, changed it to Clinton when Arkansas voters disapproved, and gave herself three names after the votes were in.

But for two men in love with government service, the paths to power could hardly be more different. Dole, fittingly, is a trench warrior. His virtues shine in the closed club of the Senate: attention to detail, a kind of manly self-confidence born of his athleticism and war record, caution, impatience with cant. Clinton is "not clubbable," as the Brits say. He does not belong, he's the star--and always has been, in the way of charismatic boy wonders, star sax player and class president, Rhodes scholar and young Governor.

For Clinton the need to be President is almost viral. He has harbored it since puberty, even before he looked into Jack Kennedy's corneas and saw himself reflected there. He never really expected to make it in 1992 after he took on George Bush at the height of his Gulf War popularity. Asked when it really hit him that he had actually won the White House, Clinton told TIME about the morning after the election, when he woke up beside Hillary. "She looked at me, and I looked at her, and we just started laughing, like, Can you believe that this happened to us?" Hillary finished the thought: "A friend of ours said it's like the dog that keeps chasing the car and all of a sudden catches it."

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE BOB AND ELIZABETH DOLE FINDING their first morning as First Couple-elect an occasion for mirth. His sense of fate is well developed enough that he knows he might not get it, but he has no question that he should. His standard of measurement is Washington: all the Presidents he has known, all the Senators he jostles every day. "My instinct," says Senator Paul Simon, "is that he looks at the people who have been there during his years in the Senate and says, 'I could do a better job than he's doing.'"

That doesn't mean he knows exactly what he would do in the White House if he got there. Getting to Dole's core involves some archaeology. Surely some object will ultimately be unearthed, but only after digging through layer after layer of contradictory public positions--he is for affirmative action, then against it; he favored comprehensive health-care reform, then he dismissed the idea that there was a health-care crisis. He has fought alongside ideologues enough to learn not to trust them; in 1985, when he believed Reagan was serious about cutting the deficit, he actually took his knife to Social Security--only to be abandoned by Reagan at the urging of Jack Kemp, and to sacrifice his Senate majority as a result.

As for Clinton, he never tried to be revolutionary. Elected president of his freshman class at Georgetown, he offered his bold plan for the future: "The freshman year is not the time for crusading, but the building of a strong unit for the future...You must know the rules before you can change them." Elected President of the U.S., he fought hardest for a deficit-reduction package in 1993, then repudiated it last year, then repudiated the repudiation.

So today neither Clinton nor Dole is widely believed to believe in anything enough to go down to defeat fighting for it. That may seem unfair to say, but the exceptions are conspicuous, and anchored deeply in their personal histories. Clinton is at his best and most passionate talking about education, which gave him such a resume, and civil rights, having grown up in a segregated town where his grandfather owned a grocery store on the edge of the black neighborhood. Dole's maiden speech in the Senate was about the disabled. He will support any bill remotely related to Armenia: it was an Armenian doctor, Hampar Kelikian, who repaid his debt to his adopted country by rebuilding broken vets like Dole. He has fought for farmers, for veterans, now for victims of prostate cancer. There were few Republicans in 1974 who would have teamed up with George McGovern on anything, much less a reinvention of the food-stamp program. But Dole knew a bit more about hunger than the average Senator.

If the race does come down to character and trust, the Clinton White House knows it will be playing defense. One can imagine the White House talking points: Yes, Bob Dole is a fine man, a war hero brave and true; but look at all the bad things he's done: shilling for corporate America, pandering to his party's lunatics. Then ever so delicately, they'll admit the truth about their guy; sure Clinton wobbles, he has inhaled too many burgers, he was sure no war hero. But he's a work in progress, he's done good things, protected your grandparents, saved school lunches, wiped the smut off the tube. Clinton's paradoxical message must be, I can deliver change, prepare us for this big complex future, just as I always promised. Only now, I promise to do it with utmost discipline and sobriety.

Their strengths are so visible and their weaknesses so exposed that the number of undecideds is at an all-time low, and so is the level of commitment to either side. Voters can decide, they just can't get excited. But if that changes, if the needle moves at all, if Clinton's 10-point margin begins to shrink in the months to come, it will suggest that voters began studying the men more than listening to them, and weighing where they have come from and who they are. This, for once, is where the race might be Dole's to lose.

--Reported by Michael Duffy and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Tamala M. Edwards with Dole

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE