GETTING SQUARED AWAY FOR BATTLE

By RICHARD STENGEL/CHICAGO

The thing to remember about Bob Kerrey is not that he's an ornery iconoclast (the man will sometimes disagree for the sake of disagreeing), not that he hates being bridled (just try to get him to follow a schedule), not that he's ambivalent about Bill Clinton (and a lot of other things), but that he's a good soldier.

When Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, asked Kerrey to head the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (D.S.C.C.), it was a downright curious choice. The job, which is to raise money for Democratic senatorial candidates, is usually reserved for a partisan loyalist. Kerrey, the only Medal of Honor winner in the Senate, was resolutely bipartisan and a conspicuous Democratic holdout on the President's 1993 budget. Daschle confesses, "I didn't know what to expect." Kerrey himself was divided (nothing unusual there): he was Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Maverick, not Bob Kerrey, Party Guy. But the situation was grim. The Republicans already had a 53-47 advantage, with momentum on their side. In effect, General Daschle was asking Lieutenant Kerrey to take on a suicide mission. Kerrey's former longtime aide, Billy Shore, knows why his old boss signed up: "It's a take-that-hill kind of task."

At a Democratic caucus meeting on the budget a few months ago, Daschle asked Kerrey to say a few words about the coming Senate races. Cosseted in the clubbish ways of the Senate, Kerrey's colleagues were expecting gentlemanly homilies on the need to pitch in. Instead, recalls Daschle, "he began shouting like a drill sergeant, knocking out orders for the amount of fundraising he expected: 'Take it out of your own pocket, take it out of your campaign funds, go and raise it!'" Finally, a female Senator interrupted the barrage, saying, "Look, you don't have to shout at us." Kerrey stared back at her. "This is not a social society," he replied.

From the first, Kerrey saw his role as more than that of a cash machine; he needed to conscript a few good candidates. A record eight Democrats were retiring, and pundits were predicting that the Republicans would increase their advantage. Kerrey wanted Democrats who could win, and to that end he appears to have sought out candidates in his own image: hardheaded businessmen who understood the necessity of reforming entitlements. If the Senate is a kind of state-by-state referendum on the size and scope of government, Kerrey wanted pragmatists the Republicans would have a hard time branding as Big Government tax-and-spenders.

With 33 Senate races in November, there's a limited amount that Kerrey can actually do. In a presidential election year, the Senate is like a fun-house mirror image of the race for the White House. Some races faithfully reflect the top contest; others are distorted versions of it. At the top of the ticket are two politicians moving to the middle who will try to depict the Other Guy as a closet extremist. Such is the situation in many states, including New Jersey, where Democratic Representative Bob Torricelli is trying to tar Representative Dick Zimmer with the Gingrich brush while Zimmer is dismissing Torricelli as an unreconstructed liberal. In North Carolina there is an ideological contest generously seasoned with revenge: Harvey Gantt is once again facing off against Jesse Helms, reprising their liberal- vs.-conservative alley fight of six years ago. These days, in part owing to Kerrey, some Democrats are envisioning what so recently seemed unimaginable: a Democratic take-over of the Senate.

One of Kerrey's first goals was to transform the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from a political backwater to a one-stop shop for Democratic candidates. To that end, he reversed the committee's ban on soft money, the unrestricted kinds of contributions. Hell, if you're going to fight, you need all the weapons at your disposal. When he took over, there was only one person regularly doing press relations; now there are six. He hired a full-time cartoonist who creates at least one political gibe a day, faxed to thousands of newspapers around the country. And Kerrey insisted the committee do its own polling.

His tenure has been controversial among some Democrats for what might be called Kerrey's Merry Millionaires. His enthusiastic championing of wealthy businessmen such as Walter Minnick in Idaho, Tom Bruggere in Oregon, and former Glaxo executive Charlie Sanders in North Carolina (who last month lost the Dem-ocratic primary to Gantt) has caused some Democrats to wonder whether it was wise to link the erstwhile party of the working- man with those perceived as high rollers. Kerrey bristles at this charge. "Who was our most hallowed Democratic politician of this century? Frank-lin Del-a-no Roos-e-velt," Kerrey scoffs, stringing out each syllable for emphasis. "He was a blue-blooded Brahmin born into wealth." Kerrey describes his candidates as "successful," not "rich," but admits that, sure, it doesn't hurt that these guys can write a check.

Kerrey recruited his candidates like a zealous corporate headhunter eager for his 10% commission. In Idaho he tried to persuade Minnick, a former CEO of the construction-products firm TJ International, to challenge first-term Republican Larry Craig. For several months, he called every week, and each time Minnick said no, he was too old, didn't like Washington and couldn't win anyway. Kerrey authorized a $25,000 poll and found out that while Minnick's popularity was just 11%, only one- third of Idaho voters recognized Craig's name, and many were more moderate than he was on issues like the environment. That nudged Minnick into the race.

Still, fund raising is Kerrey's primary mission, and for an ethereal guy, he's pretty darn good at it. He has raised $16 million, up 12% from the same cycle in 1994 (though still far short, as always, of what the Republicans have raked in, about $30 million so far). Put the phone to your ear, and listen to an excerpt of Bob Kerrey dialing for dollars. Kerrey (stern): "Yes, we'll elect a few stinkers, I suppose, but I believe that we'll bring to Washington some people who will use your hard-earned money to help endow the future of this country. And, remember, send your check care of the D.S.C.C."

In person, Kerrey is the antithesis of a party hack. With his macrocephalic head and mesmeric blue eyes, he comes across as a winsome extraterrestrial. Even more exotic among politicians, he actually seems to be thinking while he talks, and given the opportunity, he'll talk about anything but politics. While taking a stroll along Michigan Avenue in Chicago, killing time before a fund raiser for Illinois senatorial candidate Dick Durbin, Kerrey provides a magical mystery tour of his mind: he mentions how much he relishes mathematical constants ("I have a love affair with figures that stay constant, like gravity. Don't legislate against gravity"); from there he skips to drug addiction ("Let's get the drug companies to do something about it--they know a lot about addiction. They call it product loyalty"); to how bad the last scene of the movie of Les Miserables was; to the 1933 assassination of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak ("Some say F.D.R. was the real target, who was sitting next to Cermak"); and finally to presidential politics ("Yeah, I'd like to see a Clinton-Dole debate: Hillary vs. Elizabeth," he says with a laugh).

In the press Kerrey has often been depicted as the Democrat Who Tells the Truth, in implicit contrast to the fellow in the White House, the Democrat Who Doesn't. Kerrey seems resigned to his relationship with Clinton, almost saddened by it. "There is the perception that I'm competing with Bill Clinton, and that's absurd," he says. "I've sometimes made mistakes about what I've said, but I'm not competing with Bill Clinton, I am competing with his ideas."

But as for whether Kerrey's candidates--millionaires or otherwise--should run with the President, the Senator says Hell, yes. "The President will have coattails in November. He's a superb candidate. He can talk to and understand an audience as well as any politician I've ever seen," Kerrey says. As for his own future, Kerrey runs through the calculus in his brain. "Inquiry No. 1: Are you gonna run for President? Inquiry No. 2: Are you gonna run for the Senate (again)? Right now, I don't know the answer to either. I have to decide not long after November. I'm just not making a decision right now."

If he doesn't re-enlist for the Senate, he says, it's not because he's disenchanted with public life. "Look," he says, getting energized, "the current rap on politics is that it's mean-spirited and uncivil, that this country is broke and you can't do anything. That's self-indulgent horse manure. We're the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world. Oh, gee, a politician is disappointed in the process and in what government can do," he says, his voice leavened with sarcasm. "Well, go to a military cemetery on Memorial Day and bitch about how democracy has disappointed you."

During the walk along Michigan Avenue, Kerrey nips into a Starbucks (he orders a double latte) and begins discussing the merits of the Republican proposal to give tax breaks for adoptions. Behind the espresso machine, a tall, crew-cut fellow with a diamond earring eavesdrops and then interrupts the senior Senator from Nebraska. "Anyone earning above $100,000 shouldn't get a break," the fellow says, "but making adoption easier rather than harder is what it's all about." Kerrey nods, sips the foam off his latte, and says to no one in particular, "I love this country."

--With reporting by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Washington

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON