Biker chick and invisible woman race for the White House

Hillary Clinton is being kept out of sight, but Elizabeth Dole is being played for all she is worth. Rupert Cornwell reports

The image is deliberately fuzzy and timeless: the candidate's wife clad in a warm apricot-coloured suit, on a sofa in an airy flower- filled living room that recalls the North Carolina where she grew up. In her rich southern accent, she extols the virtues of her husband. "Bob Dole," she says, "doesn't make promises he can't keep."

Of the television advertisements the Dole camp has come up with, this one is perhaps the most effective yet, simultaneously rubbing away the veneer of harshness from the candidate's image, reaching out for the women's vote and underlining the issues of trust and character that are moving centre-stage in the campaign. But then again, with the possible exception of the retired general Colin Powell, Elizabeth Dole is perhaps the most potent weapon her husband has.

With less than four weeks left before the poll on 5 November, one of the campaign's most intriguing sub-plots has been the role of the wives. They have much in common; both boasting glittering Ivy League academic resumes, both trained as lawyers, both emblems of emancipated, high-achieving womanhood at the end of the 20th century, and neither of them one of nature's cookie-bakers.

But where Mrs Dole seems omnipresent, Hillary Clinton is almost invisible. Not a squeak is to be heard of Bill Clinton's campaign call of 1992, "Vote for me and get two for the price of one." On the stump, Mr Dole constantly refers to his wife: Mr Clinton almost never - and understandably so.

Among women, and in up-market East Coast enclaves like Massachusetts, the First Lady remains a popular figure. But she is identified with many of the least loved policies of the Clinton administration, above all, the failed attempt at health-care reform. More generally, she is, rightly or wrongly, perceived as the embodiment of the "liberalism" that her husband is trying at all costs to avoid. "I'd be very surprised if they ever let her talk on camera," Alex Castellanos, a Republican media expert, drily commented last week. With Elizabeth Dole, the opposite is true.

Far more articulate than her husband, she averages 20 or 30 public appearances a week - as many as he does, or more. Some are routine speeches at fund- raising events and women's clubs, variations on the theme of Bob Dole as "a workhorse not a show horse", contrasting the plain-spoken Republican with the glib, flashy and deceitful occupant of the White House.

Others are less conventional - none more so than when she took to a motorcycle and roared on to the set of Jay Leno's Tonight Show last week, wearing not her usual pearls and pastel-shaded tailleur but jeans and a leather jacket emblazoned with the words "Bikers for Bob". Then came one of Campaign 96's more absurd lines: "I've come a long way - from Harvard Law School to biker chick."

Not quite what is expected from an elegant 60-year-old woman who has served in the cabinets of two Republican presidents and is on leave of absence from a $200,000-a-year (pounds 130,000) post as head of the American Red Cross. But her purpose is clear - to remind viewers that Bob Dole is a human being, not a one-dimensional, stiff-suited cut-out who has spent his entire life on Capitol Hill, severed from the real world.

The advertisement serves to the same end. With Mrs Dole's insistence that "I know Bob Dole and you can trust him", it is part of Mr Dole's long-awaited autumn offensive on the Clinton character issue, which his advisers believe offers his best and perhaps last chance of erasing the president's big lead in the polls.

Plainly invigorated by his widely praised showing in Sunday's television debate, Mr Dole opened hostilities during a bus tour of New Jersey this week, and in a new batch of radio advertisements saying that America suffered from a moral crisis, originating "not in your house but the White House". It is now open season on Mr Clinton's slipperiness, Whitewater and other lapses.

Most important of all however, Mrs Dole is a bridge to the women's vote that eludes her husband. The two candidates are running roughly level among men. Among women however, polls put the President 20 or more points ahead. Unless Mr Dole can sharply reduce that lead, he is all but doomed.

Thus far his wife's performances have won glowing reviews but not, it would seem, many new votes among that fashionable new swing vote of 1996, the suburban "soccer moms" exhausted by juggling jobs, home, and their children's sports fixtures. If anyone can bring the "soccer moms" back into the fold however, it is probably Elizabeth Dole.