A too-sincere high school senior, a little guy whose classmates mocked him and sometimes beat him, Bauer was parked on the couch in his family's modest house in Newport, Ky., watching television. Newport was a Godforsaken, broken-down town then, a haven for gambling, corruption, other sins. And home was no refuge: Beside the young Bauer, his alcoholic father guzzled "probably his third quart of beer for the night."

Together, they watched actor Ronald Reagan address the nation on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

"I am going to talk of controversial things," Reagan began. "I make no apology for this."

Bauer was transfixed.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," Reagan said. America must choose, "Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

It came to be known as "The Speech." And Bauer heard the call, as clearly as he had heard the altar call at First Baptist back when he was 13, the congregation belting out "Amazing Grace," the teenager from the troubled home drawn forward to embrace his savior.

"I turned to my father and said, `Dad, that guy's gonna be president some day, and I'm going to work for him in the White House, "' Bauer, now 53, recalls.

"And he said, `You're nuts."'

Twenty-two years later, Bauer's father came to visit him in the West Wing of Reagan's White House, where he was working as a domestic policy adviser. Bauer heard The Speech dozens of times in the 1980s, surrounded by others who had answered the call that night. And every time, Bauer says, it was as true to him as it had been Oct. 27, 1964.

They talk about Ronald Reagan all the time, the other candidates. Sprinkle his name about like confetti, each of them claiming the mantle of the GOP's sainted, now sadly infirm hero. Even Bill Bradley, the Democrat, invokes Reagan, for his leadership skills.

This makes Bauer angry. Where were they in 1976, he wants to know. When he was a campaign volunteer sweating for the dream. This close to his hero.

"I quite frankly believe that if that wonderful, decent man wasn't suffering from a horrible disease, he'd be holding press conferences right now about whether we have forgotten what he taught us," Bauer says.

The party has come loose from the moral moorings Reagan had fixed so tightly, Bauer says. That's why Bauer had to come forward, put aside his role as president of the Family Research Council and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families, and bring his efforts to protect unborn children and traditional marriage and morality into presidential politics.

So, here he is. Visiting New Hampshire middle schools on brisk mornings, telling rosy-cheeked 8th-graders that an 11-year-old rape victim who gets pregnant should not be allowed to have an abortion. Challenging an audience of high school seniors with his argument that allowing same-sex marriages will throw society open to a flood of other perversities, including pedophilia. Trying to making the front-runners for the nomination, both avowed opponents of abortion, look less than committed to the cause. Yet still polling in the single digits -- 2 percent in the most recent Globe/WBZ-TV survey.

Bauer was not always so fervent. He leaned towards the pro-lifers, but not strongly. It was Reagan who put him in charge of researching the abortion issue, exposing Bauer to much that repelled him, giving him that passion, too.

Bauer chafes at being called a one-issue candidate. He has spoken as much of China as of abortion, he says. But he cannot pretend the latter is not much more important to him, "the great civil rights crusade of this century."

And he rejects suggestions that he is in the race to build up his national profile, or to land a berth in a Bush administration. Sure, he says, if you were laying bets, you'd have to go with George W.

"But politics is a history of surprises and we'll have to wait and see," he says. "I think we've already beaten expectations and whatever happens, I believe I'm going to be a voice in politics for a long, long time.''