I like Bob Dole; I even had the pleasure of interviewing him once. But he was doomed in '96; you can't knock off an incumbent president unless you can be sold as a face of change, and Dole was the opposite, a decades-long veteran of Congress. The outcome was so predictable, that even in an age without sophisticated district-by-district polling, I picked all 50 states a few weeks before on my radio show and ended up right on 48, with my two misses the closest races in the country.