Early Birds on Parade

By Richard Lacayo

Three years ago, prominent Democrats like Mario Cuomo, Richard Gephardt and Bill Bradley practically blanched any time they were mentioned as potential candidates for the White House. With George Bush universally understood to be unbeatable for re-election -- so much for universal understanding -- going for the Democratic presidential nomination seemed a little like taping a sign to your own back that read, "Kick me."

In the closing months of 1994, the Republicans are delighted to discover themselves in just the opposite position. The spectacle of Bill Clinton's tribulations is so irresistible that virtually everyone who ever voted Republican seems to be entertaining the same thought: Hey, I could beat this guy! While there is still not a single announced G.O.P. candidate, the field of likely contenders is already teeming. Some of the likeliest aren't bothering to conceal their ambitions. As Senator Phil Gramm of Texas puts it, "If I had to decide today, I would run." (Pause to indicate that he's kidding here.) "But I may come to my senses."

Big opportunities attract big names. The list of would-bes, maybes and wannabes already includes former Vice President Dan Quayle, Senators Gramm and Bob Dole, ex-Cabinet members Jack Kemp, Dick Cheney, Jim Baker and Lamar Alexander and Governors Pete Wilson of California and William Weld of Massachusetts. (And maybe Pat Buchanan, the two-fisted talking head, but he's given little chance to last beyond the first primary.) Though the real campaign season won't begin until later, some of the big names were on display last weekend for one of the notable pre-season events: the Washington conference of the Christian Coalition, a two-day political strategy session run by the largest single force on the religious right.

Mindful of the clout of a movement that has gained effective control of the Republican Party organizations in as many as 18 states, Quayle, Gramm, Cheney and Alexander all showed up to assure the assembly that they and the coalition had much in common. Though Dole was a no-show -- campaign appearances for other Republicans, he said -- his wife Elizabeth spoke for him and, before the convention, hosted a coffee for coalition state leaders. Wilson, who is pro- choice on abortion, and Baker, who may or may not be a serious contender, were pointedly not invited.

Alexander seemed to be providing an object lesson in trying to strike just the right note. "The concerns expressed by the Christian Coalition are no different from those I've heard from other Americans," he told TIME. "The question for us as Republicans is how we can give voice to those concerns without coming across as intolerant or angry or threatening." Indeed, the trick to winning the G.O.P. nomination is to get at least the grudging approval of conservative Christians while drawing support from the party's other two important bases, neither of which cares much about the main religious-right issues. One consists of neo-Reaganite economic conservatives more concerned with tax cuts and smaller government than with abortion and school prayer. It's in that group that Gramm and Kemp feel most at home. The other, which includes centrist Republicans of the Gerald Ford and George Bush variety, is the camp from which Dole, Cheney, Baker and Alexander all spring.

While performing that ideological balancing act, the would-be nominee also has to master the money game. A campaign chest of at least $20 million will be needed this time to count as a serious contender in the final stretch, the six weeks or so between the Iowa caucuses in February and the California primary in March, when the heaviest TV spending is done. That sort of money flows most readily to candidates like Dole and Gramm who hold a political power base that can be used to promise favors to wealthy contributors.

But while cash and a good organization will always be significant factors, the big question for 1996 is how much of the election will turn upon ideology. Until he took himself out of the running last month, former Education Secretary Bill Bennett was the favorite of the Christian Coalition and some others on the religious right. He was also the candidate most inclined and equipped to turn the election into a debate on values. Bennett's would-be successor in that role is Quayle, who in his keynote address at last week's convention told the whooping crowd of 3,000, "I know it's risky business to discuss family values, but we must. When it comes to standing firm for families, standing firm for our children, we will never, never, ever, be silent."

"I come from a definite philosophical base," Quayle had earlier told TIME. "I will not retreat from it." The image of Ideas Man is useful to Quayle, not only because it sharpens his profile but also because it flies in the face of the perception that he's a lightweight. Having made unwed motherhood a talking point with his Murphy Brown speech, Quayle has the satisfaction of being identified with an idea whose time has come. A new survey issued by People for the American Way, the liberal advocacy group, shows that 51% of those questioned think the most serious social problems stem from a decline in moral values, while just 34% trace them to economic and financial pressures on the family.

The problem for Quayle, as always, is whether he will strike voters as a real articulator of their concerns or a schoolboy turning in an extra-good book report. In his best-selling memoir, Standing Firm, he blamed many of his image problems on the fact that in his vice-presidential campaigns he was hamstrung. "This time around will be entirely different," Quayle says. "If I choose to run, it will be my campaign. It will be my ideas."

For him, the man to beat right now is Dole, the Senate minority leader, this year's best-known Republican and the man most likely to raise the requisite $20 million or more. Unfortunately, his prominence in the Senate also makes him a Washington insider at a time when that's not a nice name to call anyone. "Everybody who's running is sort of an insider," he shrugs. "The fact that I've been here longer won't make the others outsiders." Longer is right -- at 71, he's the oldest player in the field.

While Dole maintains cordial relations with the Christian right, he's not really passionate about the things that move them. But in the maturing of the religious conservatives, a process that has made them more amenable to compromise, he sees an opportunity for himself. "A lot of them have changed their views," he says. "You don't have to be 100% ((in their favor)) to get their support."

Phil Gramm is banking on the same thing. Conservative Christians tend to see the former college economics teacher as a man more interested in marginal tax rates than the antiabortion crusade. That was the Gramm who talked to TIME a week before the convention. "I'm not going to spend my time moralizing about the problems," he said. "I'm going to spend my time changing government policy that has assaulted people's incentives to be productive." But at the convention he was the brusque, twangy Texan who knew how to play on the crowd's utter contempt for Clinton, while sidestepping the social issues they care most about. "Phil gets up every morning, asks himself what he can do to get himself closer to the White House, and then he goes out and does it," says a former House colleague.

Though Lamar Alexander, who is pro-choice, didn't make the same foot- stomping hit with the Christian Coalition, he's been tooling his appeal to a no-less-important group: Perot voters. The former Tennessee Governor has made a name for himself with a bumper-sticker-friendly attack on Congress: CUT THEIR PAY AND SEND THEM HOME. For the past six months he has also been the host of a monthly TV program on Republican issues relayed around the country by a satellite hookup. It may be no threat to Seinfeld, but it's the kind of show that is making him a name to party insiders.

The other major speaker at last week's convention, Dick Cheney, appears for now the least likely to succeed. As a former Defense Secretary and a respected leader in the House, Cheney positions himself as a conservative concerned about America's place in the world. But he has a history of heart trouble, and what may be more harmful to him as a candidate, a personal manner so colorless he can make Al Gore seem like Robin Williams.

Party strategists give the same poor reading to the convention's major no- show, Jack Kemp, who once seemed likely to be the torchbearer of the Republican right. In their view it has been a mistake for Kemp to insist that the G.O.P. must reach out to minorities. "We've got to repeal the old Southern strategy of the 1960s and 1970s," says Kemp. "We need a new strategy based on asking black and minority men and women to vote Republican -- and give them a reason to vote Republican." However laudable, that's not a message to win the hearts of the mostly white and conservative Republican faithful who vote in the primaries. "His cultural politics are out of the Republican mainstream," says one party strategist. "And his economics are out of the Democratic mainstream."

The real G.O.P. contender for 1996 might be yet to arrive. Though he still says he isn't interested in the job, nobody is counting out Pete Wilson, a political corpse just two years ago who is a likely winner for re-election. % And everybody's favorite wild card is Colin Powell, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But the man who is now one of Clinton's designated interlocutors in Haiti still hasn't signaled whether he's a Republican, much less a presidential hopeful. "In my travels I hear a lot of interest in Powell among Republicans," says G.O.P. strategist William Kristol. "There is a hunger for a fresh face, a nonpolitician."

Maybe the new face is one that no one is paying enough attention to yet. Strategists who pride themselves on picking out the dark horses point to Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who is trying to rise to national prominence on the strength of his state's welfare experiments. Or Massachusetts Governor Weld, a political hybrid -- an economic conservative who is pro-choice and supports gay rights.

Politics being the unpredictable game that it is, maybe the real candidate is someone still scarcely imagined. One nationwide poll of Democrats in late 1990 showed that their favorite choices for the party's nomination were Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Cuomo, Jesse Jackson and Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey. And what of Bill Clinton, the man who eventually won it all? The pollsters didn't even think to ask about him.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett and Dan Goodgame/Washington, and Hilary Hylton/Austin