Clinton/Gore '96 Dole/Kemp '96 Showdown '96 Washington Post: Campaign '96 National Enquirer

THE tortured presidential campaign of Bob Dole has suffered another grievous blow as aides struggle to shield their candidate from questions about an alleged affair a quarter of a century ago.

The story was catapulted on to the national media agenda yesterday when the Washington Post said its own "extensive inquiries", conducted since August, had confirmed a tabloid exposé claiming that the veteran senator had conducted a adulterous four-year liaison with an Australian-born secretary.

The irony of a Dole sex scandal becoming news 10 days before the election is mordant. The senator can gnash his teeth and curse the media for alluding to a single affair in the late 1960s, while his opponent seems to get off scot-free for compulsive philandering. But such is politics.

It is a disaster for the Dole campaign, which is already in dire straits as it tries to close a 15-point gap in the polls. The most likely effect is to depress voter turn-out among Christian conservatives. "They're going to say he's just another Washington hypocrite and stay at home on election day," said Reed Irvine, head of Accuracy in Media in Washington.

The Republicans are worried that the affair could cost their party control over the House and Senate as well, because low turn-out by the Republican grass roots could throw a large number of toss-up seats to the Democrats.

When asked about the allegations on the campaign trail in Texas, Dole waved his arm dismissively at the reporter and said: "You're worse than they are." The Dole campaign is now trying to prevent the press from getting too close to the candidate. Reporters who persist in bringing up the subject have been threatened with the loss of "pool privileges" which give them access to Mr Dole.

Roberts decided to speak out because she was offended by the way Dole has been promoting "family values"

The campaign spokesman, Nelson Warfield, dismissed the story as tabloid trash. "Last week the National Enquirer published stories on deep-sea diving monkeys and a cross-dressing school teacher," he said. "Next week they will trash Bob Dole. Maybe there were no UFO sightings to occupy their attention."

The National Enquirer, in fact, has a solid standard of evidence when it publishes political exposés, even though it is a supermarket tabloid. In its edition, coming out this week, it alleges that Dole had an intense affair with a woman named Meredith Roberts from 1968 to 1972. At the time, he was still married to his first wife, Phyllis Holden, whom he divorced in an abrupt and ruthless manner in 1973.

Roberts decided to speak out, she said, because she was offended by the way Dole has been promoting the theme of "family values" and attacking the character of Bill Clinton. "Everybody thinks Bob Dole walks on water but he's not squeaky clean," she said. "His marriage was going downhill so he sought love and comfort somewhere else."

She said that Dole, whom she called "Prince Charming", used to visit her apartment for romantic trysts. "We were madly in love. There was feeling and passion," she said, adding that "his marriage was already in trouble and I had nothing to do with it".

At the time, she was working as a secretary in Washington and wrote freelance articles for an Australian magazine. She had hoped to marry Dole, who instead proposed to a rising star in political Washington, Elizabeth Hanford. Now 63, Roberts lives quietly with a house full of cats in the Virginia suburbs of Washington.

Leonard Downie, the executive editor of the Washington Post, said his newspaper had spiked a story on the affair earlier this month. "After completing our reporting I decided that the information that we had about this personal relationship 28 years ago was not relevant to Robert J. Dole's current candidacy for president and did not meet our standards for the publication of information about the private lives of public officials."

He has accused Mr Clinton of selling out US human rights policy in Indonesia

The Washington Post, widely perceived as a Democratic newspaper, had little choice. After consistently ignoring well-sourced stories about Mr Clinton's sexual affairs, the newspaper would have set off a firestorm by exposing Dole on charges that are picayune by comparison.

Miss Roberts' charge of hypocrisy is not entirely justified. The striking feature of this election campaign is that Dole has refused, adamantly, to discuss the personal life of the President - whether it involves allegations of personal drug use, bribery in Arkansas, the sexual harassment lawsuit of Paula Jones or anything from the immense "bimbo" archive. His attacks have been confined to issues that involve abuse of power in the White House.

In recent days he has accused Mr Clinton of selling out US human rights policy in Indonesia in exchange for campaign contributions from the Lippo Group, an Indonesian banking conglomerate that has been sanctioned for money-laundering.

And he has tried to stir up a sense of outrage against the White House for misusing the FBI in concocting criminal charges against American citizens who had become a political liability - the Travelgate affair - and for obtaining 900 confidential files on Republicans, and then lying about it in sworn testimony before Congress. These are legitimate issues, uncannily similar to the Nixonian abuses of Watergate.

Republican activists have been imploring him to go further, to denounce Clinton as a delinquent sociopath, a man without conscience, shame or honour who violates every norm of civilised behaviour. Dole would not budge, warning that it would backfire if he went "negative".

Now, perhaps, it is easier to understand why he was so skittish about the character question. He tried to make up for lack of ideology in his campaign by presenting himself as the man of honour and principle. It was a hazardous strategy. He is a Washington insider of tarnished metal who appears to have been found out.

Mr Clinton is a lucky man. He philandered his way through the 1980s with multiple affairs. Arkansas state troopers have come forward with allegations that they pimped for him on countless occasions, and paid for nightclub orgies with state credit cards.

Women have claimed that they were threatened with violence if they spoke out about past affairs with the Governor of Arkansas.

All kinds of laws may have been broken. Clinton got away with it, while poor Bob Dole is in trouble for what appears to be a very human lapse almost 30 years ago. As conservatives love to remind us, nobody ever promised that life would be fair.

21 October 1996: Party chiefs desert 'nasty' Dole
17 October 1996: Dole bets on character card to beat Clinton

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