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Bob Dole made the speech of his life before the Republican National Convention Thursday night. Was it good enough to help him into the White House? Did he grab his moment of history?

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A RealAudio version of this analysis of Dole's acceptance speech is available. Listen to a RealAudio version of Dole's acceptance speech. Complete NewsHour coverage of the 1996 Primary and Election campaigns.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Let's open this up and get some other opinions, beginning with William Safire, the New York Times columnist, author of a book on great speeches called "Lend Me Your Ears." Mr. Safire, what kind of grade or assessment would you put on this speech?

WILLIAM SAFIRE, Author, "Lend Me Your Ears:" I thought this was a good solid, thematic speech given by a man who has learned finally to make a speech. He started off slow. I think he picked up confidence when he started socking the Teachers Union. And I think the theme that he said at the end was the theme is a powerful one. It's trust. Now there's a subtlety there. He talks about the theme being the trust of government in the people. And that fits his economic philosophy. But, as he talks about that trust, what he is saying, or what the listener and the viewer picks up is trust in him. And that, I think, wisely exploits one of the great differences in the candidates, and one of his big strengths.

JIM LEHRER: Is it the kind of speech, Bill, that--I know this is difficult to say instantly like this--but is it a memorable speech? Are there things from this that people will hum afterwards for weeks, days, months, years to come?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: This was not a speech with a lot of quotable one-liners. You can see he put in a few Kennedyesque lines, turn-arounds or balance things. You know, we cannot guarantee the outcome but we shall guarantee the opportunity. Those are speech writers' lines. What he came across with, I think, and you've got to remember it's the impression you come away with that counts, and not the quotability of certain lines or even the slogan that comes from it--I think what he came across with was a certain solidity and seriousness of purpose. The, the style was plain spoken, and he used the phrase plain speaking twice because that's what he has to hit versus high rhetoric of the other man, the President. There were a couple of Kennedyisms, as I said. I liked the use of the word "grace" and "gracious." He's done that a few times.

JIM LEHRER: You knocked your mike down, Mr. Safire. We lost some of those words.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, certainly Liddy Dole did better when her mike went off yesterday than I did just now.

JIM LEHRER: She had somebody standing there to hand her another one. We don't have anybody like that.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Now, one of the important things in an acceptance speech is you have to have some villains, like FDR had the economic royalists, and he had a litany of villains.Hillary's philosophy, it takes a village, no, it takes a family. So he came to grips with that. And certainly Boutros Boutros-Ghali is an applause line and a trigger for an applause line in this convention. I didn't like the reference to elitists. That's a little bit of class warfare, and I think he ought to get off that. The Teachers Union, he disagrees with 'em, and he'll never get their vote, and he confronted them. I liked particularly his frankness on the age issue, where he talked about it and talked about the, the gracious compensations of age. That's a nice, that's a very well turned phrase.

JIM LEHRER: Particularly because it's in all the polls show it's his No. 1 negative.

WILLIAM SAFIRE: The way he handled it is to say, okay, here's an issue, and I recognize it, and I can triumph over it. JIM LEHRER: All right. Let's bring four others into this discussion, Bill Kristol, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, and Haynes Johnson. Haynes, what did you think of the speech?

HAYNES JOHNSON, Author/Journalist: I think it was very strange to me. I feel almost painful about it. I think that what we saw preceding the speech was remarkable. The video, which is a public relations thing, there was a natural, easy, modest, poignant person speaking. The speech, itself, I agree with both Mark and Paul that it was an unusual speech, it was like a State of the Union speech, and it didn't have to me, just listening to it and listening to it carefully, it didn't really have the large theme. Bill says, Bill Safire says it was about trust, but that theme wasn't articulated throughout the speech. And also it seemed to me to go almost backward. He was talking about things as if they are being fought now. He talked about decades of assault upon American values and so forth, and I was thinking, well, I scribbled a note 28--20 of the last 28 years America's been governed by, by Republican Presidents, and he talked about crime, and we're going to pursue them, and violent crimes, and they'll go to hell, their life will be hell, and so forth. But it lacked any kind of, well, we'll pursue terrorists to the end of the earth. People would like to believe that, but you don't get a real specificity of how it will be dealt with, the real problems of the country. And I guess from the beginning of this long election year, which is now just beginning really finally, there has been this question about the vision for the future. Everybody uses the 21st century. But I don't get a real sense of where he wants to take the country, other than, yes, cut the taxes, but he's going to do even what Reagan did. He's going to increase the defense spending. He's going to have a missile like Star Wars defense, so there's going to be--it opens the door to a great debate about how do you pay for it, and is that the world in which we're entering now when the Cold War is over? I found it just to close the circle, the first part was absolutely powerful, oddly enough, the video about himself as a person, when he was just talking off the cuff--the speech, itself was a laundry list.

JIM LEHRER: Michael Beschloss, what do you think?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: Well, you know, Jim, the last couple of days we've been saying that in the new age all these convention speeches are going to be slick, short, and TV-friendly. Not tonight. This was a very long speech, nearly an hour, which particularly in contrast to the last couple of days I think perhaps seemed even longer than an hour. There was a lack of discipline. It did ramble. There were some interesting points of appeal, but this did seem like something that was perhaps cobbled together by committee. I think one thing may be a virtue in all this, and that is that both explicitly and implicitly tonight, Bob Dole was nominating himself as the non-Bill Clinton, the candidate who is not slick, the candidate who is not calculated. We saw some of these lines, good candidates don't run from the truth, greatness is how honest you are, and the willingness to stand fast in hard places. And I think one of the things he was trying to achieve and oddly enough, the lack of artifice may help this, is to show that this is not the slick actor that you have on the other side. And that also tends to undergird the other element of the appeal, which is I'm not Bill Clinton and the true right of center candidate, I am the one who really stands where most of America does.

JIM LEHRER: Doris. Doris Kearns Goodwin, what is your opinion of this speech?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian: Well, the irony to me was it seemed that the most powerful part was where his personal life story joined his public leadership when he talked about this father and the fact that he would never betray those in need because it would mean betraying his father. And there was a whole section there for a long period of time that sounded very un-Republican. In fact, I suspect if you look back at acceptance speeches, the emphasis on the needy in this speech was far greater than you'd find in Republican acceptance speeches in the past. The other interesting thing that struck me, he is a plain-speaking man, as everyone says. But much of it was abstract and literary. Whenever Roosevelt spoke, concrete examples, stories, homely examples, this had a literary quality, interestingly, that doesn't fit the man in a certain sense, long parts of it. And the other problem, I think, was that there were different sections of the speech, some programmatic, some literary, some philosophical, some personal, and he delivered them all with the same voice. I mean, that's the difficulty. If you're going to have different kinds of sections, even if committees wrote different sections, your voice has to rise to the occasion and be different when you're talking in different ways. I think he delivered it well in terms of his embarrassment about worrying that it wouldn't be a good speech, you could feel that embarrassment at the beginning where that nervousness--I'm so glad he went through the crowd because I think he absorbed energy from the crowd, and it undid some of the nervousness I was feeling for him. So I think it certainly was a well-delivered speech, but it didn't rise to the occasion in terms of having any gradation of emotion, depending on what he was talking about.

JIM LEHRER: Bill Kristol.

WILLIAM KRISTOL, The Weekly Standard: Well, Jim, when we got the speech about an hour before Bob Dole delivered it, I thought it was an interesting speech to read, large chunks of it at least. It wasn't, I don't think, maybe that interesting a speech to watch on television, unfortunately, partly because we did go back and forth on the biographical part, autobiographical part, to the programmatic part in quite a lot of detail, and back at the end, to, to the form of autobiography. The other problem or at least question that the speech raises, and it's a pretty interesting speech, and a thought provoking speech, much more than most acceptance speeches, is at the end of the speech Bob Dole stresses that he's an optimist, he's the most optimistic man in America, he says, and yet in the early part of the speech, and quite a moving part of it, he says he wants to be a bridge to a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence. To those who say it was never so that America has not been better, I say you're wrong. And I know it is very unusual in American politics for a politician to say that America's better days are behind us. I mean, it is really conservative in a funny way. Ronald Reagan was the great conservator. Ronald Reagan, I believe, never would have said that things were better back then. And I just don't know. I think that's tough, and I personally am sympathetic to the point of view about certain areas of our life, but I think it is a tough, it is a tough platform to run for President on.

JIM LEHRER: Starting with Bill, and working backward, just the question that everybody posed going into this speech was that Bill--that Bob Dole had to introduce himself to a great segment of the American population and show the real Bob Dole. Did he do that tonight, do you think, Bill?

WILLIAM KRISTOL: Well, I do think he showed a good bit of autobiography in a moving and interesting way. I don't think he tied that in in a sense as well as he might have to his claim for leadership for these last four years of this century. Maybe that's the question mark I think that hangs over the speech.

JIM LEHRER: Doris, do you have the feeling that was the real Bob Dole speaking tonight?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think he showed himself a man of dignity and to some extent a man of character. I think the problem is when you're looking at your leader, his personal biography matters only if it tells you where he's going to take the country, and what he's going to do with those four years if we give it to him. And I'm not sure that that connection was ever made. It's almost like a disconnect between the State of the Union type part of the speech and the policy programs which didn't fit together in some ways.

JIM LEHRER: Michael.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think there were few false notes, very few false notes, and particularly in contrast to many earlier acceptance speeches in history, but the question really has been all this long year whether Bob Dole is capable of delivering a focused speech that's going to put his best foot forward. He sure didn't do it in his response to the State of the Union by President Clinton in January, and I think this speech did not answer that question in the affirmative.

JIM LEHRER: Haynes.

HAYNES JOHNSON: I want to echo what Bill Kristol said. I did scratch myself a little note "back to the future" when he talked about that, that business about looking at America's best days, in effect, who were there. "I was there," he said, and that really is an interesting difficult thing for a politician. You want to lead America ahead, not look back, and it does reinforce the sense of his age, and the fact that he does speak for a different generation. However, one other thing I--it does set the stage for a real debate about his program, the government, how it's going to work, how the taxes are going to affect, who's going to pay for it, but that's to come.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Bill Safire, how would you answer the question about whether or not that was the real Bob Dole and whether he did a good job displaying himself to people who didn't know him?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, I seem to be the only one here tonight who thinks it was a good speech. It was the real Bob Dole, and I did not object to the meat and potatoes in it. I know we're all attuned to 41 minute speeches, but he let it roll, and I think he had a lot to say. There were subtleties in it; where he talked about honorable compromise is no sin, some of us heard Barry Goldwater's opposite line about extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no sin.

JIM LEHRER: I also wrote--Bill, excuse me--when he said that line, I wrote "answer to Buchanan," that he was saying that--because Buchanan has been saying, you know, don't compromise--did you read it that way?

WILLIAM SAFIRE: Well, Buchanan came out of the Goldwater tradition. I think also he--the way he handled his war injury, he didn't talk about this is what happened to me, feel sorry for me. He came at it with concern about his father who traveled to the hospital and introduced it that way, in a kind of modest way, and I thought that was quite effective.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. All right. Now we want to go to Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center. Andy, refresh our memory. How long does it take for the impact of an event like this, of this magnitude, with all the attention on it, to be felt in a meaningful way, either positively or negatively, with the electorate?

ANDY KOHUT, Pew Research Center: Well, I think it's going to take a little while for people to first of all watch those film clips on the 11 o'clock news because that's where most people will be getting some--seeing this speech, not here on television. I think a minority of the electorate will watch it directly, a large minority but still a minority. And I think it will take a while for people to think about what he said and hear what resonates and what the clips are. I think the real issue here is whether it--he made any progress with these people on his--one of his biggest problems, which is the human dimension. Did that 35 year old high school graduate female who thinks he doesn't understand them or care about her needs, did this speech do anything to, to assuage those fears and doubts? And it's very difficult to judge that--his success in that regard--because being here is not being there, which is to say in people's homes and tomorrow morning on the morning news shows, where they're going to begin to reflect on this.

JIM LEHRER: What does--what does your experience say about--you say most people would not have seen this speech tonight so they will see the clips and they'll also read their newspapers in the morning and they'll listen to the Shields & Gigots and all these other folks here. Is that, is that important, what people say about it in, in forming an opinion down the line of the, the ultimate opinion that matters?

MR. KOHUT: Absolutely. It will create a climate of opinion, at least for a while, which will at least give the Doles, Dole a chance to--Dole's positives in the speech or the good things that he tried to achieve in this speech an opportunity to succeed or if, if the reviews are bad, it will, that climate of opinion will hurt him.

JIM LEHRER: Okay.

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