Bill? Phil? Bob? Pete? No. Lamar - Lamar Alexander's presidential candidacy - Column - Cover Story

National Review, June 26, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Lamar Alexander was lunching with a few associates whose immediate plan was to schedule an affair in New York City to raise one hundred thousand dollars -- that's one hundred guests, each paying the one thousand bucks that is the maximum contribution. ``What about people who have maxed out?'' one person asked.

``Bring their children.'' Translation: If John Peterson is enthusiastic about the Alexander for President campaign, but has already given one thousand dollars, then tell him to arrive with Daisy Peterson, his precocious 11-year-old daughter, hand her a thou, and she can give it in her own name. Evasion of the law? You try to run a presidential campaign. Witnesses to such mild evasive tactics get mad not at the Yankee traders but at the stupid laws. Jack Kemp bowed out because he figured if he stayed in the race, he would need to raise seventy thousand dollars per day between now and the New Hampshire primary, and he decided finally that he didn't want to spend his life doing that kind of thing. But Lamar Alexander is willing, and he has raised $5.2 million. That is more money than George Bush had raised at a comparable moment in his own decade-long run for the Presidency. It is more, in fact, than Bill Clinton had raised right up to primary season. So he is content with the progress he is making. And that's good, because there is a kind of congruity between contentment and Lamar Alexander. Though he is running precisely because he doesn't believe that the contentment associated with the American experience is in overdrive. This is so in part because Mr. Clinton is not a very good President, in part because America is stalled. Alexander tells us, over lunch, that young people, probed directly on the question, don't believe that the prospects for America -- for them -- are all that reassuring. By nature Lamar Alexander is a Coueist (``every day, in every way, things are getting better and better'') and he feels cheated when things aren't going in the right direction, at the right speed. To get back on the road we need to reform Washington, D.C., and to revive a sleepy ethos in the American people, made sleepy by the sedatives of welfarism and the general chaos of American foreign policy (``. . . after two years of President Clinton we find ourselves in the midst of what might be called a 'new world disorder'''). But everybody wants to know, What are the prospects of an Alexander nomination? He has an experienced cadre. Many of the same people who in other years, in other primaries, were working for Bob Dole are now in Alexander's band. When Jack Kemp pulled out, his closest people went to Alexander; and so was it with Dick Cheney. Forget Dole just for a minute; what about Phil Gramm? When eight years ago first all the Democratic candidates, then all the Republican candidates, appeared jointly on Firing Line, one of my questions to the individual contestants was: What is the weakness in the candidacy of Contestant B? Politicians are reluctant to criticize each other when in cozy circumstances, in the same television studio or auditorium. But it has to be a part of their case. Candidate Alexander cannot tell us that the reason to vote for him, not for Gramm, is the color of his beautiful blue eyes. He has to say more, and he does. Beginning with what hurts least, and going to what hurts quite a lot: To begin with, he says, Gramm is a Washington insider. The American people don't really want an insider: they want somebody who is experienced, sure, but somebody who hasn't lived and breathed the Beltway. Alexander has been a Cabinet member, but that's different from the radiation you get as a year-after-year member of the legislature. What else? Well, the President must do something for the American people. ``It's like when you go to church: You want to feel good. You don't want somebody who grouches at you.'' He thinks Phil Gramm gives off a kind of schoolmasterish austerity. And Dole? ``The man who is elected President next year will wake up in the White House in the year 2000. Dole will win a lot of prizes, and deserves them, like Everett Dirksen. But he doesn't give off the feel of the man to lead America into the next century.'' So what is his short-term prediction? That at the end of the year, Dole will be the favorite, and Lamar Alexander the challenger.