OUTH BEND, Ind. - This is going to be a big Republican year in Indiana. George W. Bush is coasting to victory here. Richard G. Lugar is on track for a landslide victory that will give him his fifth term in the Senate. The GOP may even pick up a House seat.
But for all the Republican momentum, for all the disfavor of Democrats, for all the distrust of the big-government idea, the governor's office in Indiana may again be beyond the Republicans' reach - for the fourth consecutive election.
Ordinarily, a gubernatorial contest here would attract little national attention; unlike most states, Indiana selects its governor in presidential-election years, and the race is almost always overshadowed by the bigger national drama. So it is this year. Except for one factor, of interest mainly to political insiders but with large implications for the future of Republican politics:
The candidate running the uphill battle against Democratic incumbent Frank O'Bannon is one of the torch-carriers of the Republican revolution and one of the leading theorists of the new conservatism.
A connected conservative
He is congressman David McIntosh, 42, little known outside Indiana and Capitol Hill but one of the principals in the debate that has reshaped the Republican Party, given new energy to the conservative movement, and upended many of the assumptions that rule Washington.
Together with William Kristol, an influential editor and commentator; Ralph E. Reed Jr., the onetime head of the Christian Coalition and now a powerful GOP political consultant; Grover Norquist, a Massachusetts-reared lobbyist and agent provocateur; and Clint Bolick, a legal activist, McIntosh is one of the idealists and ideologues who remade Washington and inspired a provocative new book on the new conservatives by Nina J. Easton called ''Gang of Five.''
McIntosh's connections are a spindly thread through this new conservatism. As a protege of both Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former vice president Dan Quayle and one of the founders of the conservative Federalist Society, he is at the center of the yeasty debate on the right. He was the head of Quayle's Competitiveness Council and the leading congressional crusader against regulatory excess. He was named chairman of a government-reform subcommittee as a House freshman. He opposed budget deals negotiated by his own leadership with the Clinton White House. He pushed former House speaker Newt Gingrich to shut down the government in late 1995 and early 1996. He was part of the abortive coup aimed at Gingrich, who in the view of his critics had strayed from the new conservatism into the comfortable waters of practical politics. He was elected chairman of the Conservative Action Team, the shock troops of the right on the Hill.
And now, after only six years in office, he is also frustrated out of his mind. He watched Gingrich cave, his own regulatory initiatives be spurned, and the Senate Republicans buckle to the pressure to get along by going along. He calculated that he wasn't getting much of anywhere in Washington and listened to the Greek chorus whose lilting reprise fills every corner of conservatism: The action should be in the states.
''I look for market-based approaches on regulation and let decisions be made lower in government rather than higher,'' he said the other day. ''A lot of these reforms are reforms for a governor.''
From theory to practice
So now McIntosh has traded in philosophy for management and is back in his home state - he moved here from California as a boy - hoping to turn Indiana into a laboratory for conservative reform. ''You have to stay true to your principles, but to get things done in government you have to work within the system,'' he said. ''I relish the opportunity to show that some of these ideas are very practical and can be done.''
He is still finding frustration in every corner. He's running on a reliably Republican platform, emphasizing dramatic cuts in property taxes and promising to hold the line on state spending, but this time his opponent is a likable Democrat who actually used the phrase ''compassionate conservative'' four years ago, when he succeeded another Democrat, Evan Bayh, who is now a US senator.
McIntosh is hitting O'Bannon hard, charging the governor with mismanagement, blaming his administration for a large fish kill in the White River, which runs through Indianapolis, and saying his rival has failed to address the needs of low-income seniors. But his tax-cut offensive hasn't caught fire yet, and he knows it.
Even so, a well-funded Republican gubernatorial candidate in Indiana can't be dismissed. ''It's a presidential year and that's always a good time for Republicans in Indiana,'' said Walton Collins, who teaches in Notre Dame's American Studies Department. ''He's got some visibility. And he envisions himself in some kind of high office. Indiana has supplied vice presidents before.'' This is McIntosh's test, and the new conservatism's.
