This would seem a marketable quality m our overripe era. But it hasn’t clicked in the early primary states, where Alexander persists in low- to mid-single digits. As he traversed Iowa the week before Christmas, his nonemergence seemed the most popular journalistie question. “People say Lamar Alexander’s a smart guy, good background, makes a lot of sense,” Barry Norris, who runs a popular radio talk show in Cedar Rapids, told the candidate. “So why aren’t you doing better?”
There are several reasons. Alexander even acknowledges some (others he doesn’t). The most obvious is: the press and public have been interested in other stuff. The Republican Congress, and its eternal budget crisis, has seemed far more immediate than the drab herd of presidential candidates scuffling on the hustings. There was the Colin Powell distraction. There is the Bob Dole “inevitability” bandwagon (which Alexander argues, correctly, is a Washington concoction). There are other, assorted annoyances: the big political story in Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks has been the efforts of other states–Louisiana, Delaware–to leapfrog the presidential-primary schedule. The only way for a dark horse to get attention, Steve Forbes has proved, is to buy it. Everywhere Alexander goes, people ask about “facts” gleaned from Forbes’s avalanche of advertising–about the desirability of a flat tax, about Dole’s support for a new subway for senators. Alexander professes to be thrilled that Forbes is aiming his fire at Dole and Gramm; but he can’t be too happy that a zillionaire dilettante has elbowed his way into the spotlight.
One problem Alexander won’t–can’t–acknowledge is that he’s chosen the wrong central organizing gimmick for his campaign. He chose distance over demeanor. He is running as that hoariest of political cliches, the “outsider.” It seems a threadbare conceit, too slick by half for the ’90s. And he is relentless at it. He attempts a flagrant informality, sporting a red-and-black plaid shirt (the same sartorial artifact he affected while walking across Tennessee in his long-shot 1978 gubernatorial campaign). He talks “devolution” to the point of distraction, trying a bit too hard to stuff some interesting ideas into a dim populist straitjacket, lobotomizing himself. A more profitable route might have been to emphasize his low-key style: a calm, smart, reasonable person in a party that seems mesmerized by its lunatic fringe.
Certainly, Alexander’s audiences tend to be mainstream sorts, people like Don Palmer, a Rockwell engineer who came out to hear him in Cedar Rapids. “I was with Dole until about eight or nine months ago, when he began moving to the right and courting the Christian Coalition,” Palmer said. “Anyway, I think Lamar’s our best chance to beat Clinton.” This is a common theme and Alexander’s great hope. A significant number of GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire–perhaps a quarter of them–remain undecided. These are, presumably, people who know Dole and are in the market for someone new (even Dole’s supporters, about 40 percent on a good day, don’t seem all that enthusiastic). The race may be ready for a late-breaking dark horse. The model is Gary Hart in 1984, who moved past better-known, better-financed alternatives (John Glenn was the Phil Gramm of that year) to nearly beat Walter Mondale, the perfunctory heir apparent and sacrificial lamb. With Gramm dissing Iowa and New Hampshire for greener, if more obscure, pastures–he’s the one who’s been promoting the Delaware-Louisiana route–and most of the other candidates too weird to contemplate, it is not implausible to think that Lamar Alexander is an idea whose time is yet to come.
He has begun to position himself cleverly. He is courting the GOP’s smarter cadres, the neoconservatives and “empowerment” activists who cluster around Newt Gingrich and Bill Kristol. He will give a big speech incorporating many of their best ideas, and offering a “New Citizenship” the first week in January. His most radical proposal will be to debureaueratize the welfare system by sending all federal anti-poverty funds–food stamps, AFDC and WIC (Women, Infants and Children)-to local nonprofit corporations that would decide how the money should be spent. This is a very complex, sophisticated–and hot–idea. Even President Clinton is said to be interested in finding new ways to subsidize private charities. It is not, however, an idea likely to move carnivorous primary voters.
Optimism might. And Alexander–who calls Dole and Gramm “Grim and Grimmer”–has belatedly recognized Ronald Reagan’s great secret: Republican primary voters like their severity with a smile. Over the holidays, he ran the cleverest ad of the campaign so far, tweaking Gramm and Forbes for their mudslinging ads and offering a “different” message in rebuttal: “Merry Christmas.” He’s trying to be inspirational. He talks about a “rising, shining America.” One cringes a bit when he does this. It seems so transparent. But not unpleasant. And “not unpleasant” may prove not uninspired as the campaign grows grim, grimmer and grimier.
