PINNED DOWN

By Michael Duffy/Washington

Few things are as painful to watch as a presidential candidate who won't take the medicine he needs and can't resist the poison he doesn't. For a moment last week, Bob Dole seized upon a good idea just when he needed it, a way to end the tobacco war with Katie Couric and perhaps win some points with soccer moms who worry about crime when they vote. Best of all, it was something he had wanted to do for months: end his opposition to Congress's 1994 ban on 19 types of so-called assault weapons. As majority leader, he had fought the ban; as a primary candidate he had promised to repeal it; as a presidential candidate he craved the sensible center. So his aides were delighted early last week when he told them he planned to change course at a speech on Tuesday. The crucial sentence was to read, "I do not support repealing that ban."

The whole thing was to remain a surprise. But as word of Dole's plan spread just hours before the speech, the Republican Party began, as one Dole aide put it, "to flip out." G.O.P. chairman Haley Barbour thought Dole would be foolish to offend loyal gun owners (and big-time contributors) in order to court a larger audience. And when House Speaker Newt Gingrich got wind of Dole's plan just after breakfast, he was furious. Dole had once promised Gingrich to repeal the ban, and now here he was, promising to uphold it. Gingrich telephoned the campaign and demanded that Dole remove the offending sentence.

But by then, Dole--and the speech--had left for the airport, and campaign manager Scott Reed had to play catch-up. He reached Dole by telephone and relayed Gingrich's gripes. As usual, Dole would make the final call. As usual, there was no one on the plane with the stature to persuade him to stick to the script, or to suggest that maybe the needs of Gingrich and Barbour no longer match those of the nominee. And though he faced what should have been a simple choice between listening to his gut or listening to a Speaker with an approval rating in the low 30s, Dole did the latter. He deleted his own idea at 25,000 ft.

Privately, many of Dole's advisers were appalled. Dole's wobbly substitute language, "We've moved beyond the debate over banning assault weapons," left in doubt whether he wanted to keep the guns off the street and permitted the National Rifle Association to claim, reasonably, that Dole had not moved at all. Of course by then, like Hurricane Bertha, Dole wasn't done shattering windows and scattering debris. Within 48 hours, he started all over again, telling CBS News that he would, if elected, "probably" veto the ban. A day later, Dole issued long-awaited platform language on abortion that reaffirmed the party's strong antiabortion plank just a month after he promised to temper it. By Friday the irresolution on assault weapons looked less like a mistake and more like a pattern.