SAN DIEGO -
Forget Bob Dole and Jack Kemp. The names that lurk in the back of Republican minds are that old playground pair, ''Willie Makeit'' and ''Betty Won't.'' The pressure on Bob Dole to come through and deliver at least an acceptable acceptance speech on Thursday night is making more palms sweat than Dan Quayle in a spelling bee or Pat Buchanan speaking to the NAACP.
As if to frame Mr. Dole's clipped, no verbs, broken sentences, shrapnel of ideas, the whole convention has been organized like a Burger King production line of fast-food speeches.
Cincinnati Rep. Rob Portman began the week with a six-minute Whopper of a speech - but then the party kept saying hold the mayo, hold the mustard until his walk-on role as an extra in a cast of thousands was nearly meatless.
It was typical of the hurry-up, get-on-get-off schedule throughout the week.
No Pat Buchanan will be allowed to hijack the teleprompter and take the Republican Party on a queasy carnival ride of divisive negativity. Not this time. Mr. Buchanan refused to submit his speech on video like the other also-rans who lost to Mr. Dole. Hold the Buchanan.
Pete Wilson, governor of California and former mayor of San Diego, was uncermoniously tossed off the speaking freight-train at the beginning of the week. Right in his own backyard.
No side tracks, no train wrecks. The unity is seamless because there's no time for an objection, much less an argument over abortion or anything else.
The mission for all Republicans was clear: ''We've got to give Americans a reason to keep watching,'' said Sen. John McCain during an impromptu press mugging in a hotel hallway.
Keep America watching - long enough to give Mr. Dole a second look. Colin Powell's ripping embrace of Republicans and new direction toward tolerance should do just that.
But a second look is all he gets here. For all the positive news about his climb in the polls, for all the rock-star enthusiasm about Jack Kemp and all the teary eyes over a poignant and touching appearance by Nancy Reagan, the whole week will make it or break it during Mr. Dole's speech tomorrow night - just 20 minutes, an eye-blink compared to the gassy yakathons President Clinton has inflicted on TV viewers.
And Mr. Dole has a problem. While Mr. Clinton can say nothing for hours and make it sound like a game-show host awarding the ''Come on down, grand prize for YOU!'', Mr. Dole could make the Gettysburg Address sound like a list of chemical preservatives on a box of prunes.
That's what has Republicans here sweating it out.
They talk tough and upbeat, smacking around Mr. Clinton like stunt men in a Western-movie saloon brawl.
''I can just hear the delegates in Chicago yelling, President Clinton, stay the courses,''' Texas Gov. George Bush Jr. joked during a caucus - pep-rally for the Ohio delegation. ''If we had been buying a car instead of electing a president in 1992, we'da turned it back in for consumer fraud.
''The radical left has tried to portray irreconcileable differences between our candidates,'' said Ohio Treasurer Ken Blackwell. But any differences between Mr. Dole and Mr. Kemp ''pale in contrtast to the irreconcileable differences between Bill Clinton on Monday and Bill Clinton on Wednesday,'' he said.
A debate between Jack Kemp and Al Gore will be ''the quarterback debating the goal post,'' another speaker said.
It's good for a laugh, but it's just locker-room trash-talking to get up a game face for the showdown to come.
And it's a big showdown. At stake is a crusade to put a choke collar on government that has loaded our national Visa card with $5.3 trillion in debt. As a way to make that amount even remotely imaginable, Republicans describe it this way: A business making a million dollars a day, seven days a week, would have to begin at Year 0001, work until 1996, and continue working another 700 years to earn ONE trillion.
The bottom line: Republicans are serious about it. They still have the ''medicare cuts'' steam-iron scorch marks to prove it. Anyone who thinks Mr. Clinton is serious about cutting the deficit must also believe all those juicy FBI files in the White House were just an honest mistake and incriminating Whitewater records were left in Hillary Clinton's room by the ectoplasm of Vince Foster.
So Mr. Dole has great issues, from tort reform to tax cuts.
He also has a massive stockpile of black powder for assault-weapon advertising. While Mr. Clinton has been spending millions on negative attack ads, Mr. Dole has been forced by election laws to hunker down and endure the withering incoming barrage. No more. He leaves the convention with an aresenal of about $80 million from his party and his own campaign checking account.
And he owns the high ground to place his character artillery. Mr. Clinton weasled out of the draft, cheated on his wife and goes through promises like Kleenex, yet he still insisted to Hillary's guru that his best quality is, ''I have a good heart, I think.''
Mr. Dole's heart is not in doubt. He passed a test of courage that most of us will never have to take. He climbed out of a foxhole in the middle of battle and risked his life to carry a wounded soldier to safety. Mr. Clinton has long ago shrugged off his oleaginous maneuvering like some beaded, fringed jacket from the Vietnam era. Mr. Dole still carries the pain and the scars.
Heart? Character? It's no contest.
What worries Republicans is that those things might not count if Mr. Dole hides his heart and character under a brittle shell and gives the American people a clammy handshake on Thursday night.
''I hate for so much to be riding on one speech, but he has been more presidential in his recent appearances,'' said Jo Ann Davidson, Ohio House Speaker and convention delegate.
He doesn't have to be great. He just has to be good. If he blows it, the battery-boost from Mr. Kemp and Mr. Powell will be only a temporary repreive for a condemned campaign, and Willie will make it four more years.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer and part of the Enquirer team covering the Republican convention this week in San Diego.
