NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE / DAVID M. SHRIBMAN

Smith muddies the GOP's field

By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, February 23, 1999

WOLFEBORO, N.H. -- With his avuncular smile, his shopworn homilies, his lanky first-baseman gait, and his rusticated innocence, he hardly looks the part. But within a year it may be clear: For Republicans seeking the GOP's 2000 presidential nomination, Bob Smith will be the most dangerous man alive.

Not because Smith, the New Hampshire senator who officially entered the nomination fight here last week, has much of a chance to be president. But because he has almost no chance to be president.

Almost everyone else in the Republican field -- Texas Governor George W. Bush, former Red Cross president and Cabinet officer Elizabeth H. Dole, Senator John McCain, former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, Representative John R. Kasich -- is at least a remotely plausible GOP nominee. That very sense of plausibility will restrain all of them, blunt their edges, soften their appeals. They will not want to be too this, or not enough that.

Not so Bob Smith. He's running for president, but without the passive restraints that will buckle all the other Republicans firmly in their seats as they navigate the icy slush of the back roads of Iowa and New Hampshire.

There is nowhere in these two states that the Republican presidentials will not go. But there are plenty of places in conversation they won't go, and one of them is abortion.

But not Bob Smith. He'll go there -- and by doing so, he'll drag every last one of the Republicans there, too.

But Bob Smith, orotund and outrageous enough to qualify as the Republican presidential field's gift to political cartoonists, will also go to every nook and cranny of American conservatism. No plausibility restraints on him. No governors on him. Just plain Bob, out on the road, living on the land, planting land mines for the rest of the Republicans.

The other day, in a school gym festooned with banners, there were early, edifying glimpses of how Smith might shape the race:

- "Like Jefferson, I want to start with the right to life," he said, adding that 35 million abortions since Roe v. Wade were "immoral," "unconscionable," and "below the dignity of a great nation." Count on Smith to make that point at the presidential debates at the University of New Hampshire and St. Anselm's College and Dartmouth. Watch Bush squirm.

- "I will nominate only -- and you need to know this -- pro-life justices to the Supreme Court." This is a state accustomed to big pledges. For decades every New Hampshire governor has taken "the pledge" not to impose a sales or income tax. Smith will have plenty of opportunities to trap all the GOP candidates into making this new pledge, on television. Watch McCain squirm.

- "I am not a leap-year conservative, jumping out of the grass every four years saying, 'Look at me, I'm conservative!' " If the Republican nomination fight were a yacht race, many of the candidates -- who were moderates before they converted, more to realism than to conservatism -- could be said to be tacking right. Watch Alexander squirm.

- "Washington, D.C., the City of Takers." Smith is no habitue of Embassy Row and is a stranger to the salons of Georgetown. He isn't even the most influential Senator Smith in Washington (the invitations go to the senator from Oregon, Gordon Smith, not the one from New Hampshire). So he won't mind carpet-bombing the capital, criticizing its insider culture, lampooning its antiseptic respectability. Watch Dole squirm.

He may be running a Gilbert & Sullivan campaign, heavy on the sentimental, more from the heart than from the head. But all of that, to choose the most beloved Republican word of the decade, empowers Bob Smith.

He isn't president now and probably won't be on Jan. 20, 2001. So he has nothing to lose in a field where his rivals have everything to lose. He's proof, too, that polls do matter. There's real power in having the support of only 2 percent of likely New Hampshire Republican primary voters. It's the power of freedom.