CAMPAIGN 2000 / THE EMERGING FIELD

Alexander shows no glitz, much resolve

By Mary Leonard, Globe Staff, March 24, 1999

NASHUA, N.H. -- A funny thing has happened to Lamar Alexander on his way to the White House, again. He's lost the red-and-black plaid shirt that was his Tennessee good ol' boy trademark in the failed 1996 campaign. He won't go near a piano, although his talent was part of the act four years ago.

And he walks no more across New Hampshire. This time, Alexander, a Republican candidate for president, has traded up to a sports utility vehicle.

It's not really such a funny thing. In fact, giving up the gimmicks that marked Alexander and overshadowed his message in 1996 now threatens to make the former GOP governor, already noted for his lack of charisma, downright dull.

"I'm not dull," Alexander, 58, protested after a St. Patrick's Day political roast in which each speaker poked fun at him. Even Pat Griffin, a Manchester publicist who works for Alexander, quipped, "In college, Lamar actually experimented with having a personality."

Alexander has a dilemma, and it isn't that he doesn't have a compelling issue (improve education), a sterling resume (a two-term governor, a Cabinet secretary, a university president, a successful businessman), and loyal organizers in key states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

It's that Alexander looks about as dynamic as his worn-out workshirt, in a race where two Republicans who are as moderate as he but untested in presidential politics -- Texas Governor George W. Bush and former Labor secretary Elizabeth Dole -- have all the star power.

The situation would frustrate, even anger, some politicians. To an overachiever like Alexander, however, the competition is an incentive to run harder, get up earlier, shake more hands, raise more money, and stand before more microphones. He officially announced his candidacy for president on March 9, but in truth, Alexander has been running for the GOP nomination since 1997.

"I'm a little amused that I get the reputation of working so hard to do this, when so far as I can tell, it's the only way that anyone who has wanted to be president has ever done it," said Alexander, noting that since Dwight D. Eisenhower, no GOP president has won his party's nomination on the first try. "It's a big country, it's a big job, and this is how you get it."

While Bush minds his official business in Texas and Dole steps gingerly onto the campaign trail, Alexander is in full-candidate mode: One day he's in North Dakota, defining an education policy. Another day it's Iowa, where the subject is agriculture. On a busy day in New Hampshire, the first primary state, he greets guests in Nashua before the breakfast roast, holds a news conference, hosts a corned-beef-and-cabbage luncheon, and fields an evening of questions at a town meeting at Manchester's WMUR-TV. The next day, Alexander flies to Florida for fund-raisers.

"I've met him before," said Eileen Dawe, a GOP state representative in Nashua. Dawe isn't ready to support Alexander, though she calls him "a charming gentleman."

Alexander was here for the 1996 GOP primary, and polls showed that despite his earlier third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, he was gaining on the front-runner, Bob Dole. Senator Dole launched attack ads -- not against commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, who eventually won the New Hampshire primary -- but at Alexander, whom Dole deemed a bigger threat. Alexander did not rebut the ads and came in third, 3,800 votes behind Dole. Shortly after, Alexander dropped out of the race.

The experience was infuriating and illuminating for him.

"I'm not going to go through that pass a second time without being armed," Alexander said. "The advantage you have from being around the track once is that you know how to get around it now, and it is a very fast track."

Alexander learned other lessons that, he asserts, are making him more polished and prepared for the presidential contest in 2000. Foremost, he's gone formal, embracing his last name instead of his first ("Lamar!" said the 1996 bumper stickers), and giving up the plaid flannel for a gray suit, white shirt, and solid-hue silk tie (a green one in the morning, a red one at night).

"Some people thought I'd just gone out and bought the shirt for the presidential race," said Alexander, insisting that the plaid shirt was no phony prop but rather his comfortable uniform when he walked across Tennessee in a successful quest for the governorship in 1978.

"They also thought, 'Lamar Alexander? He's the guy with the shirt,' " he said. "I'd like them to think Alexander's the guy who is going to fix the schools."

Tom Rath, the GOP committeeman in New Hampshire who is Alexander's chief adviser and strategist, said it was even worse than that. "Voters here knew he had two names," Rath said. "They just didn't know which one came first."

Since the last election, Alexander has also disciplined himself to adhere to a few simple campaign themes aimed at "bringing out the best in America," he said, and to have answers so fine-tuned that they sound almost rehearsed. His mainstream, GOP mantra is to fix public education, improve family incomes by lowering taxes and repairing Social Security, and strengthening the national defense.

"I feel much more comfortable with the issues and with my presentation than I was four years ago," Alexander said. "And there is no better way to introduce yourself as someone who wants to be president than to be confident of yourself and your beliefs and to be tested on them day in and day out."

Alexander, of all the GOP hopefuls, should be in the best position to capitalize on education as today's number one issue on most voter polls. As Tennessee's governor from 1979 to 1986, he is credited with improving the state's mediocre schools and he instituted merit pay for teachers. He also prodded the nation's governors into making education their priority issue. He got a close-up look at higher education as president of the University of Tennessee from 1988 to 1990. And from 1990 to 1992, he served as President George Bush's secretary at the Education Department, an agency Alexander proposed abolishing in the 1996 campaign.

That proposal is gone this time, replaced by Alexander's more family-friendly plan for moving education policy and funds into the hands of local districts and parents. He doesn't use the word "voucher," but Alexander does propose $1,500 scholarships for the children of middle- and low-income parents to be used at public or private schools.

"Lamar is no Johnny-come-lately to education," said former Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, who is the national chairman of Alexander's campaign and his top grass-roots organizer in the state. "He's a visionary, he's someone who was ahead of his time in realizing the importance of the issue."

The irony is that while Alexander may be the visionary, Bush also is expected to make education the centerpiece of his campaign. And Dole is poised to make a special appeal to Republican women voters, the same constituency Alexander is wooing with his promise and proposals to be "on the side of parents."

"You could just hear the fizzle go out of Alexander's campaign when Mrs. Dole got into the race," said Paul Young of Exeter, who is working for GOP candidate Steve Forbes. "Alexander is a non-factor in New Hampshire. After Bush and Dole, we worry more about Dan Quayle than we do about him."

Though Alexander hardly registers in the polls 11 months before the first presidential caucus, it's premature to underestimate an experienced candidate with well-oiled organizations in both New Hampshire and Iowa and a Tennessee fund-raiser named Ted Welch, who raised more than $17 million for Alexander in 1996 and expects to have as much as $15 million in the bank for him by the end of this year.

Besides, Alexander's investments have made him wealthy. He and his wife, Honey, have four grown children, and, as the candidate says, "I guarantee you, there are a lot duller things to do" than run for president.

"I think it's a very big privilege to be one of a handful of people to say 'this is where the country ought to be going' and to be the one person to set our new agenda in the year 2000," Alexander said. "Why am I running? It may sound schmaltzy, it may sound old-fashioned, but who wouldn't want to be the first president of the new century?"