Republican lawmakers who think attacking the New York Times could help carry them to victory in 2006 might want to consider how that tactic played for the party’s presidential nominee a decade ago.

In the final stretch of the 1996 campaign, the former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, unleashed an unexpectedly bitter series of assaults on the newspaper.

“We’re not going to let the media steal this election,” Mr. Dole thundered at a Dallas rally 10 days before the vote. “The country belongs to the people, not the New York Times.”

Every day for nearly a week,Mr.Dole complained of pervasive bias in the newspaper’s campaign coverage and pleaded with voters to send a message to the Times and other news organizations by supporting him on election day. “When do the American people rise up and say, ‘Forget the media in America. We’re going to make up our minds.You’re not going to make up our minds,'” he asked.

The charges being leveled at the Times in this election cycle are more grave. Executive branch officials and members of Congress assert that the newspaper has endangered the American people by publishing stories disclosing electronic and financial surveillance programs aimed at undermining terrorist operations.

The Times’s latest report,on a program tracking international bank transfers, was called “disgraceful” by President Bush. The Treasury secretary, John Snow, complained of the paper’s “breathtaking arrogance.” Senator Bunning, a Republican of Kentucky, went so far as to urge that the Times, its editors, and its reporters, be charged with treason.

The Republican-led House seized on the episode to vote, 227 to 183, largely along party lines, in favor of a resolution condemning leaks and calling for greater cooperation from the press.

Republican leaders in the House dismissed suggestions of political posturing and, more implausibly, even tried to deny that their resolution was directed at the Times, but Democrats insisted the Times-bashing was a transparent election-year ploy.

“We are here today because there has not been enough red meat thrown at the Republican base before the Fourth of July recess. That’s why we’re here,” Rep. James McGovern, a Democrat of Massachusetts, charged. “I am confident the American people will see through this.”

Like Mr. Dole in 1996, congressional Republicans are on the political ropes. Voter concern about the fighting in Iraq and corruption scandals in Washington are threatening re-election campaigns. Profligate spending has undercut the GOP’s credibility with its own voters.

“Picking on the New York Times is a home run with the Republican base. You can’t lose with that,” a political strategist who managed Mr.Dole’s 1996 campaign, Scott Reed, said in an interview Friday.

Mr. Reed said he agreed with the substance of the recent criticism of the Times, but also viewed the attack as a way for Republicans to rally their forces. “The New York Times debate was one of the foundations during that two or three week period that gave conservatives a hot button issue. It gave Republicans a sigh of relief that the White House was on offense for the first time since 2004,” he said.

Still, as with Mr. Dole in 1996, there was an air of desperation to the House’s action.

Mr. Reed stood by the former senator’s fusillade against the Times, but conceded that it is part of a last-ditch effort to stave off political demise. “We would switch strategies every 72 hours, but that’s what you do when you’re in an underdog situation and you’re losing,” the political operative said.

Ultimately, Mr. Dole’s Times-trashing talk provided little traction. The notion that he harbored a deep grievance against the press was belied by the fact that he seemed more comfortable bantering with reporters in a Senate hallway than delivering a campaign speech. A veteran NBC producer even used the foyer of the senator’s office as a workspace, with his blessing.

In an interview that fall, Mr. Dole acknowledged that his attacks on the Times were politically calculated. “I like the media. They don’t like them in the South,” he told CNN.

Running against the press can quickly turn ugly. As a producer-reporter who covered Mr. Dole’s campaign for ABC News, I distinctly remember one event in Texas where the worked-up crowd responded to the candidate’s anti-press tirade by hooting and jeering at reporters and photographers in their midst, leading some of us to double-check the path to the exit.

Mr. Dole also undercut his own message by broadening it to what sounded like an attack on the very voters he was trying to persuade. “I wonder sometimes what people are thinking about — or if people are thinking at all,” he declared in one speech late in the campaign.

Contrary to his wishes, the former senator’s plaintive cries of “Where is the outrage in America?” became shorthand for his campaign’s failure to resonate with the American people.

If American voters are now truly outraged at the Times’s conduct, the latest assault on the newspaper could pay a political dividend, but if they are not, Republicans in Congress could be courting Mr. Dole’s fate.

Mr. Gerstein is the national reporter for The New York Sun.