The virtually certain nomination of Bob Dole as the Republican presidential candidate sets up a campaign between a 35-year veteran of Washington and a four-year survivor, between a politician free of scandal and one who lives on the edge, between a hero of war and an avoider of war.

President Bill Clinton is a master of the television age. Dole still struggles with the medium.Clinton loves to play the visionary but tends to promise more than he can deliver. Dole struggles to specify what he would do as president.

Clinton says he feels your pain. Bob Dole rarely mentions that he lives with pain from war wounds.

Voters will have eight months to contrast the two as they travel thousands of miles and make hundreds of speeches. Many experts predict they will:

Throw mud, lots of mud.

Talk economics, in this era of job jitters.

Pledge peace, in an uncertain world.

Polling data show Clinton leading Dole in Florida, California, the Pacific Northwest and the industrial Midwest - battlegrounds the president must win to prevail in the Electoral College.

If Clinton becomes the first Democrat to capture Florida since Jimmy Carter's 1976 win, most experts see him winning re-election. So far, his position as a protector of Medicare and other government benefits vital to senior citizens has proved more potent than Dole's pitch as a trustworthy man summoning his generation for one last mission.

But the election isn't until November, and a nationwide survey last month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found both candidates have weaknesses.

Key words in voters' descriptions of Dole: Old. Conservative. Very old. Honest and experienced popped up, too.

Of Clinton, voters said: Good. Trying. Okay. Some also said liberal and dishonest.

"There's some real problems for Dole, and some potential problems for Clinton," concluded Karlyn Bowman, polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

"Dole's problem is the passion gap. Clinton believes in everything he's saying, even if he's saying two contradictory things," added GOP pollster Frank Luntz. "Clinton is very intense, Dole is not. On the issues, Dole has to punch up the emotion. Clinton has to be more consistent."

Three issues - the economy, foreign policy and scandal - usually determine the fate of incumbents. More than a few unanswered questions (who will Dole pick as his running mate, how will he handle Pat Buchanan's insurgency, how tough will the Whitewater rapids be for the Clintons?) could take on great importance, too.

THE MUD: This will not be a pretty campaign. Ask Republicans what the race will be about, and they say the issue will be character, by which they usually mean Bill Clinton's entanglements in the Whitewater land development mess in Arkansas and his old reputation as a womanizer and draft dodger.

Don't expect Dole to bring up the Whitewater scandal directly, at least at first. Luntz and others say Republicans can raise what they see as Clinton's string of unkept campaign promises and voters will recall that they can't trust him.

"He said in 1992 he was going to end welfare as we know it, gonna have tax cuts for families with children, he was gonna balance the budget, the list goes on and on and on," Dole said at in Jacksonville this week.

"We sent him the first balanced budget in a generation. He vetoed it. We sent him tax cuts for families. He vetoed it. We sent him welfare reform. He vetoed it. So I've got an idea, let's veto him in November of 1996."

The Clinton campaign will run on its record of success - passing a deficit-reduction bill through Congress, enacting family leave legislation and tax breaks for low-income workers. Democrats will argue that Clinton was the last defense against attempts by Dole and the GOP Congress to roll back spending on popular programs.

Republicans cringe when Democrats charge that the GOP wanted to "cut" spending. It was, the Republicans say, a slowdown in the growth of spending. To say otherwise, they insist, is negative campaigning.

The AFL-CIO is planning a $35 million campaign aimed at slamming the GOP balanced-budget proposal. Perhaps the biggest budget battleground will be Florida, which counts 1.7 million military veterans, 2.6 million Medicare recipients and 1.7 million Medicaid beneficiaries among its residents.

"I don't know that the president is going to win Florida. But I think what he can do at a minimum is force Dole to spend time and money here, rather than in the Midwest," said Richard Scher, a University of Florida political scientist and occasional adviser to state Democrats.

THE ECONOMY: If nothing else, rebellious Republican Pat Buchanan's candidacy woke up the political elite to the feeling among many working Americans that the ground is shifting under them. There are two sound bites that suggest the two principle candidates were a little out of touch.

First, listen to Bob Dole: "I didn't realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign."

Then, recall President Clinton from his State of the Union speech: "Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades."

The truth is the economy does look pretty good - by traditional measures. Unemployment is below 6 percent. Clinton can rightly claim that 8 million jobs have been created during his presidency.

Many Americans, though, worry their jobs will wash away with the next wave of corporate downsizing. Numbers say inflation is in check, but people who go to work every day see their paychecks dwindling while those of corporate moguls are increasing.

"I want some of my money back," said Steve Perrington, 37, an itinerant construction worker at a carpet plant in LaGrange, Ga. He says he is making just $2 an hour more now than he did when he started 15 years ago.

Clinton, Vice President Gore and Labor Secretary Robert Reich have begun to talk about what government can and cannot do in this era of economic anxiety. Their solutions include more training for displaced workers and the 1993 deficit reduction package that the administration says lowered interest rates and improved the economy.

Dole has touched on the economy with a speech that he calls the "four freedoms of economic security." They are freedom from unreasonable taxation, from excess regulation and from deficits and the freedom to a fair marketplace.

The title of Dole's speech, delivered in New Hampshire this winter, was borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt. Dole also sounded a little bit like Clinton, as the populist challenger of four years ago.

Highlighting the plight of workers who saw wages stagnate, Dole said: "These are the Americans who for years have paid their taxes, played by the rules and have made sure that America's future was always better than the past.

"Yes, these are the best of times for many who work on Wall Street. But the facts leave no doubt that they are also the worst of times for many who live and work on Main Street, Main Street America."

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: The third cloud that could rain on Clinton's parade are the trouble spots overseas. After a string of minor successes, Clinton foreign policy has taken a few hits. Bomb blasts in Great Britain and Israel have rocked peace initiatives in Ireland and the Mideast. The U.S. initiative in Bosnia has claimed one American life, but experts fear the number could grow as the peacekeeping drags on. Even though Dole supported the president's decision to deploy troops, he could shift gears and criticize Clinton if the situation blows up.

INTANGIBLES: The president has what political pros call "high negatives."

Translation: People hate him.

"His lack of military. His draft dodging. His extreme left-wing stuff. His unbelievability. It goes on and on," said Henry Von Genk, a 74-year-old retired lieutenant commander.

That's the sort of fertile ground that allows negative attacks to take root and grow.

Dole, on the other hand, has a problem with age - he's 72 now - and with the right wing of his party. Those seemingly unrelated areas will intersect when he chooses a vice presidential nominee. Everyone will be watching that choice because of an unstated premise: If Dole dies as president, his No. 2 would become No. 1.

That will be topic A in political circles between now and the conventions.

"If he picks Colin Powell as his running mate, I think the election is probably over," said analyst William Schneider. "He's got to pick someone of immaculate and unquestioned presidential stature."

But Powell is unacceptable to the anti-abortion crowd, led currently by Buchanan. Also unacceptable is Christine Todd Whitman, New Jersey governor who supports abortion rights.

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Schneider says voters will fall into what he calls "buyers' remorse", a dissatisfaction with the choice between Dole and Clinton. Talk will begin anew of a third party.

Will it happen? Who will Dole pick as a running mate? How does Clinton answer the charges that he's too slick for his own good? How will the two candidates respond to Americans' anxieties at work and at home?

Eight months before the election, the contrasts between Clinton and Dole are easily seen. But the answers to these questions are not. And that's why the election season has only just begun.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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