EWPORT, Ky. - Even voters who know who Gary Bauer is may wonder why he is running for president.
But here in his hometown, no one is surprised.
Bauer has none of the outward characteristics of a winning national candidate. He has never held public office. His poll numbers could hardly be worse. He is short on money, having raised just $3.4 million to the $36.3 million raised by the Republican front-runner, Texas Governor George W. Bush. And, at 5 feet 6 inches tall, he doesn't exactly command a room.
Yet Bauer's candidacy makes perfect sense to people in Newport, the place once known as ''Sin City,'' where gangsters and gamblers used to flock to a rollicking nightlife on the Ohio River banks. To explain Bauer, and his overwhelmingly uphill run for president, people here turn the clock back to 1961. They summon up memories of his first long-shot crusade to help save Sin City from itself.
In a crowded field of conservative contenders, Bauer has a singular claim to the moral core of the far right. Decades before earning a measure of renown as a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as head of the conservative Family Research Council, he was a kid growing up near the infamous prostitution and gambling strips, where businessmen from Cincinnati dropped in after work, and name entertainers with mob ties came to sing.
By the time Bauer graduated from high school in 1964, the Mafia's grip on the city had been largely broken, the glittering strip joints closed - an astonishingly swift turnaround in a place known for nothing but crime.
Bauer, then a bookish teenager with a crewcut, was part of the grass-roots movement that changed Newport. He recalls being humiliated by its sleazy reputation, which landed it on the cover of national magazines. His own father was an alcoholic, bringing the embarrassment home. So when a group of local businessmen began to lobby for change, passing out leaflets and going door to door, Bauer, then a high school sophomore, joined in.
''This city got cleaned up on the same moral grounds that Gary Bauer is running his campaign on,'' said Leroy Hoffman, 79, who was a Newport police officer at the peak of the illegal boom. ''Then again, I don't know if that's the most popular thing these days.''
Indeed, Bauer's early activism almost provides the template for his current campaign. He has crafted his presidential platform almost entirely around what he sees as the nation's moral decline. Bauer, 53, rails against homosexual marriage and abortion, the American Civil Liberties Union and a liberal culture that says ''if it feels good, do it.'' He blames Hollywood for the school shootings in Littleton, Colo. He also targets elites, Capitol Hill and Wall Street.
''Too many people have forgotten that our liberty comes from God and not from any man,'' he said in April in a speech announcing his candidacy. ''When I grew up in Newport, Kentucky, with all the problems that it had - the crime, the gambling, the open prostitution, the tough corners that were dangerous to walk down at night - in spite of all those things in Newport High School, we could still pray every morning if we wanted to.''
But if that is a deeply personal message for Bauer, it is also a mantra for other conservative Republican candidates, several of whom deliver a virtually identical message. In a 13-person field for the GOP nomination, Bauer at times seems indistinguishable on substance from Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, businessman Alan Keyes and even commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, except on some comparatively peripheral issues of foreign policy and defense.
The result so far is that Bauer is running low in the polls, his name recognizable to only about 20 percent of voters asked. But he has gotten donations from more than 55,000 individuals, most of the money in $40 or $50 chunks, putting him in third place - tied with Elizabeth Dole - in total money raised so far by the Republicans.
Earlier this year, he also had a higher percentage of female donors than the other GOP candidates. But even some of his own supporters still seem less than ardent. Campaigning at a New Hampshire barbecue over the Fourth of July weekend, Bauer was greeted by just 20 Republicans, four of whom said they planned to vote for someone else in the primary.
Even if he were to differentiate himself from the other conservatives, Bush would still appear to be an insurmountable obstacle. Bauer has imagined his ideal scenario - a primary race pitting a right-wing conservative such as himself against Bush. But he also sounds as though he hasn't fully thought through the notion he might actually become president. Asked what makes him think he could win, Bauer seemed taken aback.
''Oh, gosh. Well,'' he said, ''none of us know whether we can win.''
He has also said he ''is not delusional,'' admitting he hardly seems the most presidential of the bunch.
Why, then, would someone quit a high-paying job - Bauer earned $160,000 a year at the Family Research Council - to spend long hours on the road, to subject his family to scrutiny and to endure waves of criticism?
Some do it because a long-shot campaign can prepare the ground for a future race, or call attention to a cause or issue. But for Bauer, the will to campaign feels like a subconscious tug. His own daughter says she has not allowed herself to envision a Bauer White House. What she does know is ''if he has his heart in something he is not going to back down.''
''In Newport, he hit upon something they cared about, and something he cared about,'' said Elyse Bauer, 21. ''He is shaped by his background. There's no question about it. He doesn't give up.''
The demise of Sin City began when the national media became fascinated with its underbelly, drawing attention to the Cleveland-based Mafia syndicate that ran the town with impunity. Time magazine claimed in 1961 that a Newport brothel could process a new male customer every seven minutes, calling the city ''one of the nation's most blatant sin centers.'' A local history of the town estimates that by the end of the 1950s, payoffs to the mob totalled $1 million a year.
Fed up, local ministers began to preach against crime in the late 1950s, even raising money to fund lawsuits against local law enforcement officials who refused to arrest criminals. In 1961, a group of businessmen mobilized to, among other things, get a reformer elected sheriff. Bauer, horrified by what he read in the press, was among those who signed up to help campaign.
He went door to door, passing out leaflets, facing the wrath of neighbors whose livelihoods depended on the underworld. At home, Bauer's crusade was equally tough. His father - an unskilled laborer and an alcoholic, as Bauer puts it, prone to ''psychological abuse'' - opposed his son's activism at first. In the end, he relented when he saw how dirty the antireform movement would play, after opponents slashed the tires on the family car.
The sheriff's election was the turning point. Mob leaders lured the reform candidate into a bar one night, gave him a drink that knocked him unconscious, then photographed him with a half-naked strip dancer named April Flowers. The setup failed. It ''appeared so palpably contrived ... that public sympathy immediately swung'' to the reform candidate, according to a bicentennial book about Newport.
But it drew unprecedented attention to Newport. Within a year, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy successfully shut down most of the illegal activity, after launching a massive investigation and persuading Congress to pass strict anti-Mafia laws.
What happened next rarely makes it into Bauer's campaign speech. Newport quickly fell into poverty. Clothing stores and restaurants once supported by the nightlife were forced to close. The town spiraled into a depression and only now, 30 years later, is starting to emerge. But to friends in Newport, that is a key part of what pushes Bauer.
''It set the tone for what we believe is right and wrong,'' said Shirley Turner, who went to high school with Bauer and whose husband is a close friend of Bauer. ''It told us, even though wrong is prosperous, it's wrong. The fact that the city was prosperous masked the fact that it was illegal. Any of us who grew up during that time, it left an impression on us.''
Bauer today speaks of the political ramifications of his involvement in Newport. That was where, he says, he made his first Republican contacts, and where he ''set off on the path'' to Georgetown Law School after graduating from Georgetown College in Kentucky in 1968.
And like Newport - where one of the main attractions is a theme restaurant called The Syndicate, filled with gambling mementos of the old days - Bauer is not shy about using the Sin City saga as part of his campaign.
Whether it will resonate with a public largely focused on the top two candidates, Bush and Vice President Al Gore, remains to be seen. But Bauer is not even close to giving up. Settled into a spacious office in nothern Virginia, he has prepared his wife and three children for a long summer on the campaign trail with a strategy centered on telling people who he is.
''If you don't know me, you're not going to be for me,'' he said. ''It's going to take a lot to break through, particularly in this competition. But we're going to keep methodically building this grass-roots organization. And then hope we have a breakthrough.''
