"As I found out in New Hampshire," where he has now lost three times, "it was a lifetime."

As recently as this morning, Mr. Dole was recalling in front of an audience that his pollster in 1988 told him he would win that year's New Hampshire primary by 20 percentage points, and that he lost it by 9. Experiences like that one inform the Senator's air of fatalism.

He was asked whether he planned to call former President George Bush to seek his endorsement. "I probably will in the next couple of days," he said, adding that it depended partly on whether Mr. Alexander dropped out. "Lamar was in his Cabinet," Mr. Dole said, a nod toward the pull of old loyalties, which the majority leader understands well.

"I'm not a very good pressure person," he said. "I don't go around pressuring my colleagues. I figure they'll make up their minds. It's not very fair for the leader to go in and say, 'Don't you want to be on my team?' "

He said he had found his message of Republican unity ("This is a struggle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party") to have been particularly effective in his drive to overtake his opponents.

"I think Buchanan does frighten some people," he said. "Even exit polls in South Carolina, where people agreed with him on issues, they concluded maybe his views were a little far out."

As he looked to the future, he said he would stick with his basic message. "I think I keep going out and preaching experience, leadership, judgment," he said, "then talk about what we're going to do," including work with Democrats to balance the budget and cut taxes.

But he said he knew he had to broaden his pitch.

"Crime, that's a big problem," he said, acknowledging that his standard campaign speech was void of any reference to it. "We're still working on some things there. Environment. Something Republicans shy away from. We need to spend some time on that so we don't get pushed off into the corner that we don't care about the environment."