The only real question for Bob Dole now is not whether he can win California or save the House.

The question is whether he can fully come into his saturnine self and, calling on the dark side that we love, lift himself from the ranks of Dukakis-and-McGovern losers into the ranks of tragic figures, of men made heroic by their monumental flaws.Dole has a small genius for self-infliction. A little like Lear, he is a distant man driven by ingratitude, "thou marble-hearted fiend."

He needed the nomination to prove to himself that his party and his country were not ungrateful for his decades of service. But the presidency is not a gold star. America is thanking Dole for his service and voting for President Clinton.

The Dole campaign appears to have the logic of tragedy: a feeling of inexorability, a world in which there are no more chances.

He has the requisite hubris: He forced his party to nominate him, though he had been rejected in three national campaigns. Then, slogging through 18 months of campaigning, he failed to come up with a reason for running or articulate an agenda for his party. (The Democratic Party was lost when Clinton triangulated. The Republican Party was lost when Dole detached.)

If he had been honest with himself, Dole would have known that the qualities that made him a successful majority leader were at odds with those of a successful president. Clinton, an unreliable showboat always out for himself, would have made a lousy majority leader.

"He thinks like a senator," says Lyn Nofziger, Dole's occasional adviser. "That's a gentlemen's club in a lot of ways. It's hard for him to really go on the attack. He's spent his life getting a little done here, a little done there. It's not the place from which you go out and seize the leadership of the nation."

Despite some promising noir moments, Dole is so far stuck in the unenviable position of being too dark for success and too light for tragedy. He is not truly pathetic. He is merely apathetic, an apathetic candidate appealing to an apathetic electorate. (Candidate apathy: now there's a problem.) He is the first person running for president who has the air of an ex-president.

That is probably why he keeps evoking Richard Nixon. Dole is a loner stranded in his own mind, but he cannot match his mentor's gift for the diabolical. "Darkness reaching out for the darkness," as one of the characters in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" described the late president.

There are several things that still may prevent Dole from attaining tragic status.

First, he has not been true to himself. He has run a campaign that rejected what few beliefs he had consistently fought for over 30 years. Dole is in no position to blame destiny for what is happening. The fault is not in the stars. He has put himself in this dour circumstance. He has fulfilled his own mordancy.

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Second, he is unable to produce a strong emotional response from the people. "The only moment when Americans responded to Bob Dole was when he resigned from the Senate, and said a tearful goodbye," says Dr. Gary Taylor, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Alabama. "But then he said hello again, and he's been in our face ever since."

Third, to achieve tragic proportions, Dole would have to have a moment of self-knowledge. He would need to find some way to become himself in defeat. So far, at least, he has displayed only his usual lack of introspection, tooling around the country muttering about the liberal press and Indonesian billionaires.

"Bill Clinton is the greatest lounge lizard in America and America is the lounge," says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. And Dole is the laconic, detached, been-there-seen-it-all bartender in that lounge, hearing all the stories, making grim jokes about the human comedy and waiting for closing time. Forget Shakespeare. The Republican is finally a bit player in a Sinatra song, the Joe in "Set 'em up, Joe."

And it's closing time.

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