Campaign ’96 / BEHIND THE SCENES : Dole’s Strategic Command for the Battle of ’96 : His advisors helped him win the nomination. Now they must chart a course for the White House. These are the names to watch.

WASHINGTON — Now that Sen. Bob Dole has locked down his party’s presidential nomination, an expanding whirlwind of personalities will surround the Kansas Republican’s run for the White House.

By election day in November, an assortment of friends, colleagues and wannabes will climb aboard the Dole bandwagon, all offering ideas on how he can beat Bill Clinton. If he wins, many hope to be remembered for their sage advice once he begins to build his Cabinet and administration.

For Dole, who trails Clinton in opinion polls, the choice of his entourage--consultants, strategists and advisors--is a challenging blessing. In the balance hang the moves he makes as he tries to take over the White House.

Here’s a thumbnail look at the leading lights among Dole’s political advisors, people certain to garner even more public scrutiny in the coming months:

Elizabeth Hanford Dole

From the campaign stump, Dole likes to tell audiences that the best thing about electing him is that America will get Elizabeth Dole as first lady. “And she won’t be running health care from there either,” he often adds--an aside guaranteed to win applause.

Indeed, Elizabeth Dole has already said that if her husband is elected, she wants no formal role in his administration. She plans to return to her job as president of the American Red Cross, she says. But that’s not to say she won’t have influence.

On the contrary, she has more top-level, policy-making experience than most of her husband’s congressional colleagues. (Her listing in Who’s Who in America is twice as long as her husband’s.) A native of Salisbury, N.C., Elizabeth Dole served three GOP presidents as head of the Federal Trade Commission, transportation secretary and labor secretary.

Should Dole win, it is unlikely she will disappear into charitable work and not play a role--either officially or as a private sounding board for his policies.

Robert Lighthizer

During the height of the Reagan administration, Lighthizer bonded with Dole while serving as staff director and chief counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, which Dole chaired. That perch afforded the freckle-faced Ohio native an opportunity to display his skills in House-Senate-White House negotiations on major tax, budget and trade bills.

Now, by many accounts, Lighthizer is among the most important and influential advisors around Dole. Some say he is a leading candidate to become chief of staff in a Dole White House.

Currently he’s a partner in the Washington office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a large New York-based law firm, and moonlights as the Dole for President campaign treasurer. Just as important as raising and disbursing money, Lighthizer has persuaded Dole to articulate an economic campaign message that acknowledges the fiscal anxieties of working Americans.

That was the theme Dole began to strike during the New Hampshire primary campaign when he declared that “these are the best of times for many who work on Wall Street,” but “also the worst of times for many who live and work on Main Street.”

Sheila Burke

Having survived an attempted coup late last year by conservative Republican activists, Burke stayed largely underground during the primary campaign.

A former nurse and San Francisco native who is also a former Democrat, a self-described social moderate and, most alarming to ardent GOP activists, a supporter of abortion rights, Burke has often come under attack.

Last year, for example, antiabortion activist Phyllis Schlafly called Burke “Hillary Lite” and syndicated columnist Robert Novak accused her of practicing “militant feminism.”

Burke didn’t back away from the fight but Dole kept her out of the primary campaign fire, sequestering her in his Washington office.

Now that Dole is back on Capitol Hill, where Burke has worked for him since 1979, and where she is now his chief of staff, her influence is likely to rise.

Scott Reed

One of Dole’s earliest moves--even before he announced his candidacy--was to persuade Reed, then the executive director of the Republican National Committee, to come aboard. Reed gambled, correctly as it turned out, that his former boss, Jack Kemp, would not run.

Reed was hired in what could be compared to a double-billing at the top of the Dole campaign, sharing the stage with William B. Lacy, who was named the same day as Dole’s chief strategist.

But after the Dole campaign ran aground in New Hampshire, the team broke up in a shake-up.

Reed was given the entire managerial job and Lacy, who was tagged by campaign critics with pushing an unsound strategy, was offered a demotion to deputy campaign director. Instead, he left.

Reed, who played a key role in orchestrating the GOP’s takeover of Congress during the 1994 elections, is a forceful administrator. Campaign sources credit him with instilling a sense of discipline that was sorely lacking in Dole’s previous presidential forays.

Don Sipple

Sipple, president of a Washington-based political consulting and polling firm, was the biggest winner in last month’s campaign shake-up. He captured the strategic planning job vacated by Lacy. Campaign insiders say Sipple chafed under Lacy’s directions and often felt his opinions were ignored or overruled.

Sipple, who had been a key strategist for Gov. Pete Wilson’s reelection campaign in 1994, came into the Dole camp late, joining after Wilson dropped out of the race.