THE CANDIDATE’S DAUGHTER TAKES CENTER STAGE

There are many women in Washington like Robin Dole–alone at 41, having had a succession of jobs that never quite turn into a career, longing for a husband and children but knowing that time is not on her side. The difference for Robin Dole is that as the only child of presidential candidate Bob Dole, she has the burden of transforming the workaholic Doles, who live in the Watergate and eat frozen dinners on their rare nights at home, into a Norman Rockwell tableau befitting a family-values party.

Robin has been in public life since age 5, when she wore a slogan on her skirt that read I’M FOR MY DADDY, ARE YOU? And yet in this campaign, she is so protected by campaign handlers that she is like an unaccompanied minor on an airplane. As an aide turns on a tape recorder and takes notes, Robin repeats well-worn anecdotes. How her Dad taught her to drive in a Ford Falcon. How she wrote a note to her father asking to get her ears pierced, with boxes drawn for his yes or no answer–to which he added a box marked “maybe.” When pressed for something new, she comes up with a story about her father bringing home a cat from Kansas that she had grown fond of during a vacation.

Robin was a teenager by the time her father asked her mother Phyllis, an occupational therapist he had met when recovering from war wounds, for an “emergency” divorce. By then Dole, who was wedded to his seat in the Senate, was sleeping in the rec room and eating with the family only at Easter and Christmas. After the breakup, Robin lived with her mother and spent vacations from Virginia Polytechnic Institute with her father. When Dole looked back in 1993 on his time with Robin, he mused, “You try to catch up with some of those things in life that slip by.”

Robin is candid about what she calls the “void” in her life. She lost her job last year as an administrator in Century 21’s lobbying office. “I’m very content, but there’s a small, medium area I would like to fill,” she says. Like many children of divorce, she loves the idea of family and hopes for the opportunity to have a child. She jokes that the Doles’ dog Leader is “my stepbrother.” On the first Mother’s Day after her father remarried, she took flowers to Elizabeth Dole, who, she says, cried because she didn’t think of herself as a mother figure.

Robin spent last Christmas with three troubled adolescents from the Oakton Arbor treatment facility, where she may have found her calling in counseling youths. After the election, she hopes to get a full-time job there.

Dole’s daughter makes her first prime-time speech on Wednesday, addressing the convention in her gravelly, husky voice. Despite months on the campaign trail, it will be the first look many voters get. In the video called An American Hero, intended to reintroduce the real Bob Dole, Robin ended up on the cutting-room floor.

–By Margaret Carlson. With reporting by Ann Blackman and Tamala M. Edwards/Washington