HOW RIGHT THOU ART

By S.C. GWYNNE AUSTIN

Maybe he just can't help himself. Phil Gramm, the Robespierre of the Republican right and a man with a startlingly real shot at the presidency, just can't seem to avoid making people mad. That includes his wife Wendy Lee Gramm, whose first meeting with him tells you almost everything you need to know about the temperament of the senior Senator from Texas.

They met in 1969, when Gramm, then a professor of economics at Texas A&M, was interviewing her for a teaching position. Gramm started flirting with her during the interview, while his alarmed colleagues cautioned him to back off. Gramm persisted. "When she got through with the interview, I walked out the door with her and helped her on with her coat," he says. "And I said, 'As a single member of the faculty, I'd be especially interested in your coming to Texas A&M.' She looked up at me and said, 'Yuk!'" Undeterred, Gramm returned to his colleagues and said triumphantly, "We're going to convince her to come to Texas A&M, and I am going to marry her." Both predictions came true.

In his roughshod courtship of his wife and in his rise to power in the Senate, the essential Gramm is on display. He is driven, instinctive and fanatically goal-oriented; he is often insensitive to appearances and unwilling to listen to his peers, teeming with self-confidence and uncannily able to get what he wants. He has been underestimated at every step of his career. Even as he sits on a political war chest larger than that of any of his opponents, leads the field in endorsements from congressional colleagues, and has won six consecutive Republican Party straw polls--in Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, Missouri, California and South Carolina--many party members, particularly those in the Northeast and Midwest, continue to downplay his chances of winning the Republican nomination in 1996. But the doubters are beginning to wane. "Having known him for 24 years," says longtime Texas political foe Chet Edwards, a Democratic Congressman, "I say anybody who doesn't take Phil Gramm seriously either doesn't know him or is crazy."

Gramm's problem is that unlike early front runner Bob Dole, he remains little known outside Texas and Washington. And though he is considered one of the most skilled manipulators of the media in politics, he is in some ways ill suited to national exposure. He is, by his own description, "ugly." He speaks in a deep drawl that calls to mind the often grating cadences of Lyndon Johnson. Combine that with his certain endorsement by many right-to-life groups, and an image emerges of an ungainly, deep-fried reactionary with little chance of carrying the moderate vote on Election Day. His droning, pedantic keynote speech at the 1992 Republican Convention was, by virtually every account, a disaster.

Gramm sometimes plays up those appearances, especially when he is courting the right-wing vote. A closer look, however, shows that he is squarely in the mainstream of conservative Republican thought in the Newt Gingrich era. He is in favor of a balanced-budget amendment and wants to radically reduce government, toughen welfare and penal codes, utterly remove "quotas, preferences and set-asides" from the workplace, cut taxes and return control of education to the state and local level. He is an opponent of gun control and a stalwart supporter of increased defense spending. Though he is pro-life, he has refused to make opposition to abortion a requirement in choosing his running mate. "Politically speaking, the differences between Phil Gramm and Bob Dole are largely a matter of perception," says former Senator Warren Rudman. He is backing Dole, whose chief political problem is to avoid getting outflanked by Gramm or other G.O.P. candidates on the right. The core of Gramm's appeal in Texas, where he has averaged 62% of the vote in seven general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, is a potent form of middle-class populism. He is the opposite of the elitist Republican, which he demonstrates with his folksy, homespun sound bites. The welfare state becomes a farm metaphor. "We've taken more money than ever from the people who are pulling the wagon," he is fond of saying, "and given more money than ever to the people riding in the wagon."

It would be convenient for Gramm if his life experiences somehow added up to his ideology. Instead, much of his personal history stands in contradiction to his views. Though he has an almost blind hatred of Big Government, he has been subsidized in one way or another by the government all his life. He was born in a military hospital, the son of an Army master sergeant, and later attended college on a National Defense Fellowship. Though he is a resolute defense hawk, he took a draft deferment five times. And the man who rails against government spending is famous for taking as much political pork as he can carry back to his home state, including the superconducting-supercollider project.

Gramm's political career is anchored by four major achievements that pushed him into the legislative limelight. His first was a 1981 bill called Gramm-Latta, which he authored as a second-term Democratic Congressman and which enacted the tax cuts and reductions in government that were the embodiment of the Reagan Revolution. His next feat came after he was accused by House Democratic colleagues of spying for the Republican White House. That prompted the Democrats to kick him off the Budget Committee. Gramm resigned from office and immediately ran for-and won-the same Texas seat as a Republican. After his election to the Senate, in 1985 he co-wrote one of the few pieces of congressional legislation that have become a household word: the Gramm-Rudman law, which tried to force Congress to curb the federal deficit by threatening across-the-board spending cuts. Gramm's most recent achievement was as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which pools money and manpower to help Republican candidates. Though a number of Gramm's colleagues grumbled that he was using his position to advance his own career-which he clearly was-Gramm nevertheless positioned himself perfectly to take credit for the stunning Republican sweep in the Senate in 1994.

Few Representatives or Senators have had so much impact so fast. Along the way, he has made so many enemies and bruised so many egos, he is considered one of the least popular members of the Senate. "A lot of people don't like him," says Rudman. "They find him pedantic, in a hurry, overbearing-all of which is true. The fact is he is extraordinarily able."

But the question persists: Is the rest of America ready for him? He is an effective, if often brutal, campaigner. In his race against Democrat Lloyd Doggett for the U.S. Senate in 1984, Gramm repeatedly attacked his opponent for receiving an unsolicited donation from a gay group. "He pounded and pounded at that, and it took us out of the race," says Clinton adviser Paul Begala, who worked in Doggett's campaign. "I would describe him as vicious and ruthless." But Gramm will need more than a simple instinct for the jugular to win in 1996. Though he has rejected any attempts to soften his image in the past, his latest round of speeches include inspirational stories about his wife Wendy, a third-generation Korean American, who served as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Gramm will have to avoid the sorts of errors in judgment that have embroiled him in controversy over his financial ethics. In 1989 he was fined $30,000 by the Federal Election Commission for accepting illegal corporate donations during his 1984 Senate campaign. Gramm was also investigated, and later absolved, by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics over a land deal in the mid-1980s in which the owner of a soon-to-fail Texas S&L undercharged him for work on Gramm's vacation house in Maryland.

One of Gramm's biggest advantages is his ability to raise money. On Feb. 23, the day before he announced his candidacy, he played host in Dallas to the most successful fund-raising event ever held for any federal candidate, gathering $4.1 million in contributions. Says Gramm: "That ought to make it very, very difficult to breathe in these other campaigns." He will undoubtedly have bucketfuls of such money by the time the 1996 primaries roll around. He just needs to be very careful how he gets it and how he spends it.

With reporting by JACKSON BAKER/MARYVILLE