But Dole’s innate personal conservatism was at war with the perceived political needs of the moment, and that is where his speech faltered. He scorned the ““materialism’’ of the 1992 Clinton campaign, the emphasis on James Carville’s immortal ““It’s the economy, stupid.’’ And then he spent a good chunk of his hour appealing, crassly, to the very same impulse: Dole’s 15 percent solution was the centerpiece of the Republican week, and will be the heart of the fall campaign. Indeed, the Republicans – who gripe endlessly about Bill Clinton stealing their ideology – quietly made off with much of the Carville-Begala playbook, especially the notion that the ““forgotten’’ middle class has been ““squeezed’’ by the vicissitudes of the global economy. There is a wonderful irony here. Polls say that Democrats seem more credible than Republicans when it comes to caring about squeezedom. But the liberal corrective – soaking the rich to fund job training and education bureaucracies – isn’t nearly as compelling as the conservative response: giving you money.

This may be voodoo, but the Republicans spent much of the week trying to prove the zombie walks. Exhibit A was New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who came back from the way-dead to win in 1993 on the strength of a proposed 30 percent tax cut (an idea given her by the neozombic publisher Steve Forbes). It’s an interesting story, if true: Whitman said her poll numbers went down after the plan was announced, but rebounded when the public saw she was really, really serious about cutting taxes. But that doesn’t appear to be what actually happened. ““Our polling showed the public never believed the tax cut,’’ says Jim Andrews, a Demo- cratic consultant who worked on the losing campaign in New Jersey. ““So she pretty much ditched it the last two weeks of the campaign, and put up a lot of ads reminding people that our candidate [the then governor Jim Florio] had raised taxes. They knew that was true, and it worked.''

It may be where the presidential campaign of 1996 is headed, too. Polls suggest the public isn’t buying the tax cut yet (and the skepticism is, of course, justified: the bond market would probably soak up all the Dole-Kemp cash in the form of higher interest rates). Republican consultants were hinting furiously that if blue-sky, supply-side optimism didn’t wash, October would yield a sludge harvest of negative advertising about the president’s character, as well as nonstop shots at the First Lady (who proved an irresistible target last week for everyone from Dole to George Bush, who clearly doesn’t like the way Hillary treats the help). Even the equine, equable Governor Whitman couldn’t resist tossing a paddock patty at the Clintons, noting to NEWSWEEK editors that the White House had been forced to institute a special, intensified drug-testing regime for its rowdy young staff. The Republicans will have to be very careful about the rough stuff, though. ABC News had a ““focus group’’ of undecided voters watch the convention with little machines that recorded their instant reactions to the rhetoric being disgorged: every time a speaker went negative, they went ballistic. The ’90s, it seems, are a prohibitively nice decade.

So, no hope for the GOP? Actually, there is: more than a few Democrats are quietly worried that the tax cut will work. ““It may not have cut in the Whitman campaign,’’ said one, ““but Whitman did keep her promise after she won. And so did John Engler [in Michigan], and a lot of the other Republican governors. They have a track record now. Dole will benefit from that. And the president hasn’t made a counteroffer.''

Dole may benefit from it, but only if he is perceived to be a tax-cutting sort of guy. And he isn’t, really. Nor, thank God, is he even close to being ““the most optimistic man in America.’’ Optimism is a curious dodge. It’s been the coin of the realm since Franklin Roosevelt: ““We have nothing to fear but fear itself’’ was probably the most effective sentence uttered by a president in this century – but FDR wasn’t really an optimist, at least not in the relentless, semi-unhinged sense that Jack Kemp is. He was a realist who understood the appearance of optimism was crucial for morale. Ronald Reagan knew that, too, and the purpose of this year’s Republican convention was to rekindle that flame (and snatch the party back from the pinched hatemongers of Houston). Bob Dole seems an unlikely suspect to carry the torch, but there is real – old-fashioned, unspun – substance to the man. He remains a long shot, but no longer a pathetic one, and I suspect he’ll give the boomer a tussle.