"I don't make many promises," Bob Dole likes to say. "And the ones I do, I keep."

That's a two-fer jab at President Clinton, who applies campaign promises the way people in the 1950s sprinkled salt on their french fries.Dole may have backed away from directly attacking Clinton's character, after polls showed voters reacted negatively, but he can't stop showing his disdain for Clinton's relationship with the truth.

Everyone who got that middle-class tax cut Clinton promised four years ago ought to vote for him, Dole says with a little smile.

"Nobody got it. Nobody. He gave you the biggest tax increase in history!"

On the campaign trail this year, Clinton's promises are small-bore, but they're exuberant and endless. Just last week, he proposed requiring teenagers to pass a drug test to get a driver's license.

No matter that it's the states, not the federal government, that grant licenses. If parents are worried that their children might be using drugs, President Clinton and the government can find a way to help.

With Clinton, the abundant promises are a way of demonstrating that he understands ordinary people's problems. They're one reason he's ahead with virtually every demographic group.

Actually, though he protests it, Dole is no slouch in the promises department. He has wrapped his candidacy around twin promises to cut everybody's taxes and to balance the budget.

On taxes alone, Dole promises: a 15 percent across-the-board cut, a $500-per-child tax credit, to halve the capital gains tax, to repeal the tax increase on Social Security recipients, to scrap the current tax code and replace it with a "fairer, flatter, simpler" tax system and "to end the IRS as we know it."

Dole promises that he won't touch Social Security or Medicare, despite Democrats' claims. He promises that his economic plan will enable mothers to quit their jobs; it'll pay for child care or a family vacation.

"Now if both parents want to work, that's fine," Dole says. "But they shouldn't have to work."

Trouble is, people admire Dole but they don't believe they'll ever see his tax cut.

"It's not reality," said Kevin Tomich, 27, in Santa Ana, Calif., who voted for Bush four years ago. "It won't happen."

Other voters say they don't see how Dole can pay for the tax cut, unwittingly echoing Clinton's mantra that it's a risky scheme that would blow a hole in the deficit.

Dole and other Republicans trace voters' skepticism to President Clinton's reneging on his tax cut promise. But voters also remember George Bush's broken tax pledge.

For a long time, Dole declined to give a clue about how he'd pay for the $550 billion tax cut. Naturally, Clinton seized the opportunity to spread doubts about the Dole plan. When Dole did get around to explaining how he'd pay for the cuts, it was a classic Washington answer. He would simply increase federal spending at a slower rate than Clinton and return the difference to the taxpayers.

"The president wants to spend 20 percent more over the next six years. We want to spend 14 percent more. We want to take the difference, only 6 percent, and give it back to the people," Dole says.

Clinton, too, is promising a tax cut, but it's smaller and designed to encourage certain behaviors. Clinton targets the cut to help families meet real problems - affording higher education, buying their first home, paying medical bills.

As the campaign enters its last days, Dole is still searching for ways to make the kind of emotional connection with voters that Clinton makes.

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Conscious that many believe the country is economically sound but morally bankrupt, Dole has gone back to casting himself as the moral leader. He promises to keep his promises. He makes his presidential quest sound like a moral crusade.

As Dole pitches his character ("we're talking about courage"), his wife is on TV in ads and interviews attesting to Dole's truthfulness. When her husband says he'll do something, he does it, Elizabeth Dole says, again and again.

"I fought for America before, but this is a different kind of war," Dole told an audience in Florida last week. "This is a battle for the soul of America."

Or maybe it's a battle of promises.

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