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For these three, the post-game spin contest is crucial. Here's a playback of their takes on the straw poll results and a look ahead at their playbook of messages for the remainder of the race. Dole needed to get within striking distance of Bush and to seal off the rest of the pack behind her. On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked "the top three." Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race ("win, place, and show") and noting that "no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. The Boston Globe called Dole "the winner of this contest-within-the-contest." Dole touted her "victory" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's "real winner." In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been "outspent by millions of dollars." Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her "surprisingly" strong third. She, therefore, I think, is the biggest winner." Playbook 1. Instead, "he finished closer to Dole than to Bush." Having narrowed the field to three, Dole needs to focus the contest on criteria that favor her. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none. On every talk show, Dole vowed "to demonstrate that the candidate with the most experience is more qualified than the candidates with the most money. ... This is the more obvious criterion that distinguishes Dole. Newspapers hail Dole's female followers as evidence "that she can attract new voters to the GOP." Like Dole, Bauer needed to crack the top tier and seal off the pack. Since sports analogies tend to cut off the top tier at three rather than four (e.g., "bronze medal," "win, place, and show"), Bauer changed metaphors, telling reporters that he had reached "the first rung of candidates" and that lower finishers might soon perish. On Meet the Press , he called himself the "breakout candidate." While some pundits lumped Bauer with the winners, others offered him the next best position--"leading the rest of the pack"--or at least distinguished him from the "losers."
 Describing the progress of a few candidates during the primaries
 Describing the progress of a few candidates during the primaries  Describing a few major candidates and their core beliefs during and at the end of the primaries  Describing George W. Bush's decisions over the course of the presidential primaries  Describing every candidate's major decisions over the course of the presidential primaries