THE AD WARS TURN NASTY

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

For once, Bob Dole drew an excited response--in this case a spontaneous gasp--from a crowd. To an audience at Chaminade Prep school in West Hills, California, Dole read a quote from Bill Clinton in 1992. Asked by a young man on an MTV show if he would inhale marijuana a second time around, Clinton replied, "Sure, if I could. I tried before."

Could this finally be the Dole campaign's spark? His aides hoped so. Within two days they had rushed onto TV a spot featuring tape of the actual 1992 MTV show, though with the original color converted to a blurry black and white that made Clinton look as if he were being viewed through drug-glazed eyes. Earlier ads had prepared the way by calling rising teenage drug use a "moral crisis" that Clinton has failed to fight effectively. This one suggests a sinister theory: the President views drugs as a laughing matter.

Clinton aides, who have long braced themselves for a renewed assault on the President's character, fired back Saturday with an ad charging that "to fight drugs, all Bob Dole offers are slogans: 'Just don't do it.'" The spot accuses Dole of having "voted to cut the President's school antidrug efforts--by 50%" and goes on to accuse Dole of nondrug offenses, including having "joined with Newt Gingrich to cut vaccines for children." The ad, and probably others to follow, seeks to shift the battleground to Dole's whole record--wrong, in Clinton's eyes, on many popular issues--on the principle that the best defense is a good offense.

This approach is unlikely to divert Dole from the drug issue. But it is most uncertain whether that will really give him much traction. "Cataclysmic" is how a Dole adviser describes the effect of a government survey purporting to show that teenage drug use doubled from 1992 to 1995. But polls of voters taken even after that widely publicized finding still rank drugs roughly fifth among the issues that most concern the electorate (the economy is No. 1). One reason may be that people do not see among their own children and the children's classmates quite as great a surge in drug use as the survey points to. Changes in the way the survey has been conducted over the years and extrapolations from tiny numbers suggest its conclusions may have been overstated.

Also, even before the latest exchange, Clinton had proved himself to be an expert counterpuncher. In response to an earlier Dole drug ad, the Clinton campaign last week ran a spot announcing, among other things, that the President "now wants drug testing [of prisoners] to keep abusers locked up." That was illustrated by a cell door slamming shut.

Moreover, the Dole campaign continues to self-destruct. Even worse than taking a tumble, which resulted in pictures of the candidate helpless on the ground, and referring to the "Brooklyn Dodgers" (who moved to Los Angeles almost 40 years ago), Dole last week let Clinton win the endorsement of the nation's largest police union virtually by default.

Clinton had been wooing the police for years, by securing federal funding to put more cops on the beat and pushing gun-control measures (Dole opposed both). Still, there was enough Republican loyalty in the Fraternal Order of Police for its officers to give Dole an equal chance to win its endorsement. The F.O.P. sent both candidates a questionnaire about police issues. The White House replied with thoughtful answers, Dole's aides with canned rhetoric. Then union officers asked for personal interviews. Dole's staff responded with a form letter saying the candidate was too busy, but "we will keep your invitation on file." Clinton and top aides chatted with F.O.P. leaders in the White House Sept. 9 for 45 minutes--taking 15 minutes away from the time allotted to the next visitor, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Big surprise! The F.O.P. gave Clinton its first-ever endorsement of a Democrat.

Nonetheless, Dole plans more drug ads and, starting this week, new spots touting his tax cuts. Earlier ones fell flat, but these will feature not the figure 15% but instead $1,600--supposedly the amount a middle-class family would save each year. There will also be a relentless attempt to pin on Clinton that awful tag "liberal." Will it work? The question is almost irrelevant: this approach is just about all Dole has left.

--Reported by John F. Dickerson with Dole and Tamala M. Edwards/Washington

With reporting by JOHN F. DICKERSON WITH DOLE AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS/WASHINGTON