A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR HELPS THE MEDICINE GO DOWN

By NANCY GIBBS; MICHAEL DUFFY/SAN DIEGO

It was no accident that Travis Tritt sang, in the convention's closing hymn, "I wish I could turn the clock back/to the way my daddy said it was before." Nor that the most powerful moment of Bob Dole's acceptance speech came when he invoked the honor of the father he loved, standing all the way on the train from Kansas to Michigan to visit the son he thought was dying in the hospital. For months the campaign has been played as a custody fight--who would be the better father of our country; whom would you trust, Clinton or Dole, to leave your children with; who is better equipped to help raise our kids, send them off to school in their uniforms, turn off the trash on TV, get them home safely before dark. And as Dole set out to define himself to the American people, he staked his claim to be head of the household: baby boomers may think a father should be a friend to his children; Bob Dole says he should be a model for them.

And so on Thursday night he looked the American people in the eye and in a stern, commanding speech told them that unless they shaped up and stopped failing key moral "tests," unless they substituted what is hard and right for what is easy and fun, the nation's best days were past. The mere act of voting for him, suggested Dole, would be morally renewing because he was asking them to make hard choices: courage over comfort, honor over wealth. Whether or not the polls bounce and the mood changes, Dole tried to frame the election as a choice: I am older, wiser, firmer and better, while my opponent--so flush with easy promises--is younger, weaker, bad for you.

But maybe Dole knew, maybe the polls and the consultants persuaded him, that this was too bitter a message to offer unsweetened. The children had become too spoiled to listen. That fact turned his speech, and the $74 million campaign that is about to unfold, into a study in paradox. In Verse 32, he told voters they had been insulted four years ago when they were told that material wealth was the only thing that mattered, as in "the economy, stupid." But by Verse 43, Dole was putting money on the table himself. If necessary, this father will pay his children to be good. And if necessary, he will risk using his grandchildren's money to do it.

It was at once a challenge and a bribe. For at the center of Dole's campaign for the next two months will be the economic plan that would cut an average family's taxes by $1,400. Having spent the past two years spilling blood over what spending would have to be cut to help balance the budget and having spent his political life arguing that work has to come before play, Dole spun around and embraced Jack Kemp and his supply-side optimism for reasons more tactical than spiritual. He may still not believe it will work, but he can believe it will help him win. Trent Lott, the Mississippian who replaced Dole as Senate majority leader, was shocked, although happily, saying, "I would'na bet 50' a week ago that it'd be going the way it's going."

When the king converts, his courtiers do well either to fall on their knees beside him or at least to keep their heresies private. Even Republicans who vaguely disagreed with Dole's vision were delighted that he finally had one. As recently as three weeks ago, many G.O.P. lawmakers were less focused on the hope of winning the White House than on the fear of losing the Congress. And so last week was something of a spectacle of genuflection. House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, as ruthlessly honest a budget cutter as they come, was calling himself a "supply-side deficit hawk" and gushing, "I love this program! I think it's a terrific program!"

But it could be argued that what they were really doing was hitting the default key. As values guru Bill Bennett puts it, "You've got to go to places where Bill Clinton can't go." For the President to utter the words "middle-class tax cut" would amount to what Dole communications director John Buckley calls "revisiting the scene of the crime...He can chase us down several alleys. He cannot chase us down the tax-cut alley."

That is not to say he won't try. White House aides last week were wondering if they could get away with cutting capital-gains taxes for middle-class people who sell their primary residence for less than $500,000, as well as with adding a tax credit for employers who hire welfare recipients. Democratic polling showed that the President slipped at least 5 points after the Republican Convention. "We'll regain every one of those points by the end of our convention," says Clinton strategist Dick Morris, "and we hope to have a 20-point lead by Labor Day."

Going into San Diego, it looked as though Jack Kemp was riding in to rescue the man he had long opposed. The Reagan-Kemp message was always that there is nothing wrong with America that a good tax cut won't solve. When Dole adopted that message two weeks ago, even before he announced his choice for a running mate, Kemp's wife Joanne told him, "Jack, you won."

And for most of the week, she appeared to be correct, right down to the funny little plane that circled the convention center every day pulling a big blue sign that read back jack for president. Though only an ad for a hamburger chain, the warning was clear to deficit hawks, who heard the occasional chants from the floor of "Kemp-Dole, Kemp-Dole." Meanwhile, Kemp, who had just a few weeks before planned to stay miles away from the convention center, returned like the prodigal son, giving interviews, having tearful homecomings, comparing himself to Churchill, telling TIME, "I'm out of my wilderness years."

The coming-out party, orchestrated by Dole's folks, made some Dole operatives nervous, which is why by Tuesday there was talk of shortening Kemp's schedule, limiting his interviews, closing events to reporters. His acceptance speech was viewed with alarm even among Kemp insiders, who kept telling their boss to be prepared to keep it to "300 words." He may have won the fight for the party's soul, but he needed to be humble in victory.

And so it was all the more astonishing that Dole rose to the podium on Thursday night, grabbed the tax-cut crowd by the lapels and told them they were only half right. There was still plenty wrong with America that a tax cut could not heal. It was as though he stared down his new partners, said I'll take your hope-growth-and-opportunity and stick it in my knapsack, but I'm here to deliver a message from the ages. "All things do not flow from wealth or poverty," he said. "All things flow from doing what is right."

This was a breathtaking challenge to his opponent in the White House. The killer line was the assertion that the Administration's failings were born not of the political so much as the personal. Dole's attack was unforgiving and absolute, a big departure from the language of backroom compromise. The perpetrators, he said, were "a corps of the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned."

By this time, it was clear that anyone expecting a dry policy paper had wandered into the wrong room. Dole invited into the hall the God of the Old Testament, and all around the room the faithful stirred. The culture warriors and evangelicals complained all week that they had won the platform and lost the podium, as a series of pro-choice, big-tent messengers dominated prime time. But as it turned out, the big speech really belonged to the devout. Dole mentioned abortion barely at all, but he placed himself so clearly in the hell-in-a-handcart camp that he had to pull back at the end and declare himself the "most optimistic man in America."

On one level, the speech involved an enormous risk. Dole ended by telling voters that a campaign is not just a contest of candidates, "it is a mirror held up to America." It was a nervy image to use after so many months in which both Clinton and Dole crisscrossed the country trying to figure out what voters wanted and giving it to them. In his defining moment Dole tried something more daring: he said he would rather make us good than make us happy. Rather than telling voters, "I'm just like you," Dole was asking, "Are you like me?"

It would be the hardest of hard sells were it not for the fact that Dole was pandering at the same time. He wrote his own indictment into the text: "For too long we have had a leadership that has been unwilling to risk the truth, to speak without calculation, to sacrifice itself." And while he may have preached a sermon on Thursday, his aides had already left the church; they're busy scheduling a Dole-Kemp bandwagon that will take the tax-cut promise to every battleground state in the next three weeks, backed by a 20-state advertising blitz. Some supporters aren't even bothering with DOLE-KEMP '96 buttons. Theirs read: 15%.

Now Dole has a choice. For the rest of the race he must decide what he is going to ask of Americans and what he is going to give them. The test of his courage will be whether Thursday night's lesson represents the first time he told the voters who he really is and where he dreams of taking them--or the last. --With reporting by James Carney and Karen Tumulty/San Diego

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY AND KAREN TUMULTY/SAN DIEGO