Dole Campaign Cashes In on Its Front-Runner Image : Politics: Prospect of success has fueled big donations. Some backers see their contributions as an ‘investment.’

The Dole for President campaign recently received a letter from a potential contributor who wanted to know how the game worked.

“I know I can’t afford enough to get Italy,” the author wrote, referring to the ambassador’s post there, “but how much would I have to give for New Zealand? Could you please send me a complete price list?”

“We don’t know if he was joking or not,” said Howard Wilkins, one of the national co-chairmen of the Dole finance committee.

Probably not, and Ambassador Wilkins should know.

Wilkins, a prosperous Wichita, Kan., businessman and real estate investor, was named envoy to the Netherlands in 1989 after contributing $100,000 to the Republican Party during George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign.

Requests for favors as blunt as the recent letter are rare, but they are emblematic of the enviable position Dole finds himself in six months before the first presidential primary. The well-oiled Dole money machine is raking in cash at a rate of more than $100,000 a day, far outstripping the fund raising of any of his GOP competitors or even President Clinton.

Dole’s fund-raising prowess demonstrates once again that while love can generate modest amounts of political money, only the prospect of success--and spoils--brings in the really big bucks.

Right now, Dole has the smell of a winner, and the biggest problem for his finance team may well be the danger of repetitive stress injuries from slicing open check-laden envelopes.

“People read the papers and watch TV; they know who’s going to win,” said Zachariah P. Zachariah, an enterprising Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., cardiologist who serves as Dole’s top Florida fund-raiser.

“It’s not about emotions. It’s all about who’s winning and they want to be part of the winning team,” he added.

That team has already attracted a blue-chip list of Republican luminaries, corporate titans and accomplished GOP fund-raisers, all of whom see in Dole the party’s best chance to recapture the White House.

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Some of them were Dole supporters when he last ran for President, in 1987-88 as an insurgent challenging the presumptive nominee, Bush.

But the bulk of the list consists of emissaries from the chamber of commerce and country club center of the Republican Party, with a particularly strong contingent from Wall Street.

The honorary chairman of the Dole finance committee is Max Fisher, an 87-year-old Detroit financier who deserted the Democrats in 1968 to support Richard Nixon and who has been a major GOP cash rainmaker ever since.

The chairman, John Moran, a former Californian with interests in oil and manufacturing, joined the Dole campaign earlier this year after serving two years as the finance chairman for the Republican National Committee. He raised $115 million for the party during his tenure.

His senior lieutenants include Lodwrick M. Cook, the chairman of Arco; Philip F. Anschutz, a Denver billionaire who is trying to buy the Los Angeles Kings hockey team; Henry Kravis, the New York investment banker who recently hosted a Long Island fund-raiser to celebrate Dole’s 72nd birthday--taking in more than $300,000; Donald Marron, chairman of the brokerage house PaineWebber Inc., and Georgette Mosbacher, aspiring makeup magnate and wife of Robert A. Mosbacher, Texas oilman, former commerce secretary and Bush’s 1992 campaign chairman.

The senior fund-raising group also includes oilman T. Boone Pickens, CEO Leslie Wexner of The Limited Inc., former Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis and Russell Meyer, a longtime Dole friend and Cessna Aircraft Co. executive.

To a greater extent than Democrats, Republican donors--and those who solicit their donations--view their contributions as investments rather than as signs of ideological solidarity with the candidate, Dole aides say. The contributors want a stake, not a statement.

“We’re in a strong position since Sen. Dole is the clear front-runner and contributors are more likely to view writing a check as a sound investment,” Dole campaign spokesman Nelson Warfield said.

With Dole holding a commanding lead over his Republican rivals in every poll in nearly every part of the country, there is no shortage of potential “investors.”

“It’s a heck of a lot easier than it was in ‘87-’88,” said Jo-Anne Coe, the day-to-day director of the Dole fund-raising enterprise. “Back then, we were running against an incumbent [then-Vice President Bush]. Now we’re viewed as the incumbent. There is so much more support out there in the form of people volunteering to help.”

Coe says that unlike Texas Sen. Phil Gramm or former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, Dole is a reluctant fund-raiser himself, preferring to leave the money solicitations to subordinates or members of his finance team.

At a fund-raiser in Los Angeles in June, Dole warmed up the well-heeled crowd with a favorite line, telling the 250 donors at a $1,000-a-head gathering that they were lucky that his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, the president of the American Red Cross, was not there. “Whenever she’s with me, she’s poking around for a vein while I’m grabbing for your wallet,” Dole said.

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In fact, most of the pocket-picking falls to the 60 members of Dole’s national finance committee, a group committed to raising between $100,000 and $1 million each before next February.

Their job is to build a nationwide network of local bigwigs who each can corral dozens of $1,000 donors to attend the roughly 20 big-dollar fund-raising dinners the Dole campaign is planning for this year. As one top Dole fund-raiser put it: “The rule used to be ‘Give it or get it.’ Now it’s ‘Get it or get someone else to get it.’ ”

One of those someones is “Zach” Zachariah.

“It’s much easier [raising money] for Dole than it was with Bush in 1992,” Zachariah said. “Even when [Bush] was the sitting President, the numbers didn’t look too good. He was wounded and people didn’t want to open up their wallets, and I didn’t blame them.”

Zachariah, who emigrated from India 23 years ago, spends two or three hours a day on the telephone, hitting up prospects, patients and pals from other campaigns. “I don’t give up easily,” he said. “I keep after them until they’re willing to give me $1,000 to get me off the phone.”

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Coe said the “major donor” programs--the big-bucks dinners and the $1,000-a-pop solicitations--have brought in about half of the $13 million Dole has raised since the beginning of the year.

Most of the rest has come from an expensive direct-mail operation conducted by the Falls Church, Va., firm of Odell Roper & Simms, which has billed the campaign $1.3 million for its services already this year.

The direct-mail operation is prospecting among the 500,000 names of potential donors that Dole has accumulated over 35 years in public life. Nearly 140,000 of them have already responded to Dole appeals, Coe said.

All this could change, Dole aides admit, if the candidate stumbles, if a health problem emerges, if his legendary mean streak resurfaces. There are plenty of rivals to take up the front-runner’s post and a few non-candidates--such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) or former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell--who could change the dynamic of the race overnight. As Dole has learned to his advantage so far this year, political contributors are a notoriously fickle and opportunistic lot.

But for now at least, Wilkins said, it’s smooth sailing for the Senate majority leader.

“We’ve got the right candidate and all the right people in all the right places doing all the right things,” said Wilkins, who was Dole’s finance chairman in 1987 before switching to Bush when it became clear that the vice president would be the nominee. “A lot of people have waited a long time for Bob Dole to become President.”