Political Grapevine 1986

Backstairs maneuvers, as well as front-parlor debates, shape a campaign. Here are some late, private dispatches from the political front:

Nunn's tentative endorsement. Georgia Senator Sam Nunn has decided to endorse fellow Southerner Albert Gore right after the Iowa caucuses -- unless Richard Gephardt wins that contest. In that event, Nunn will wait and watch for a while. Gephardt, who is from Missouri, has support among moderates in the South and could be Gore's greatest rival on Super Tuesday.

Scenes from a Marriage. They have endured scandal and relentless scrutiny. But after 20 days of campaigning, almost all of them side by side, the question now is: Can Gary and Lee Hart survive this election without driving each other insane? Lee often interrupts her husband's interviews with rambling elaborations of his answers, causing the testy candidate to cut her off. While he was chatting with a group of locals in a New Hampshire diner recently, she bombarded him with questions about what he wanted for breakfast. "Anything," Gary said. "Porridge or doughnuts?" she asked. "Anything, babe," he replied tersely. At O'Hare Airport that evening, Hart became hopelessly lost while searching for the right baggage-claim carrousel. As the couple and a small group of reporters wandered aimlessly around the terminal, Lee could not resist taunting her husband, "You're not showing leadership, Gary." She even repeated the wisecrack for the reporters' benefit. Later, in South Dakota, Lee's interjections caused Gary to ask her to hold her peace until she had an interview of her own. "O.K.," Lee retorted. "I'll wait until I run for President."

Holding their fire. In Iowa last week, the Dick Gephardt camp was poised for battle as rumors spread that Paul Simon's team was about to run nasty TV spots. As it turned out, Simon rejected deployment of the negative ads. His aides, however, laughed about the Gephardt campaign's "paranoia." For the moment there is a tentative accord. Simon Campaign Director Brian Lunde got a call from Gephardt's chief, Bill Carrick, proposing a "no first use" agreement. Says Lunde: "Carrick offered that they wouldn't go negative if we didn't."

Lowballing. Some of Pat Robertson's organizers are employing a sly gambit to help their man in the Iowa expectations game. Supporters have been told to tell pollsters they might not attend a caucus. Since nearly all Iowa surveys , are discarding "unlikely attenders," Robertson will end up with an artificially low figure in the polls. Thus his finish on caucus night is more likely to produce a p.r. boost by being better than the polls indicated.

Road Warriors. Riding his campaign bus last week, Pat Robertson boasted to a San Francisco reporter that because he found the Washington Post's coverage so biased, he had banned the paper's correspondents from the bus. "But I just left a Post reporter," the journalist said. "I was sitting next to him." Robertson angrily summoned a press aide, who explained that the reporter on board, Bill Peterson, had not written anything offensive about the televangelist; it was T.R. Reid who had been blacklisted for his articles. "I don't care," Robertson retorted. "Get him off. I don't care if Katharine Graham tries to get on. Throw her off too." Nevertheless, Peterson was allowed to stay the rest of the day.

Other motorcade news. During a ten-minute Bush stop in Alden, Iowa, a Secret Service agent halted all traffic at the main intersection. Knowing Iowans' impatience with such inconveniences, Bush Aide Rich Bond furiously urged the agent to allow the traffic to flow freely. The agent refused. At last report, he was being transferred off the V.P.'s security detail.

Meanwhile, a conscientious Iowa state trooper flagged down the entire four- car Gephardt motorcade and gave every driver a speeding ticket.