Heady Lamar: Lamar Alexander wants to be president; conservatives want to know why

National Review, Feb 20, 1995 by Rich Lowry

Lamar Alexander began his second campaign for governor of Tennessee on January 26, 1978, on the front porch of his parents' home in Maryville. From there, he set out to walk across the state - the long way. At the end of each day he'd stoop to mark the spot on the road with a piece of railroad chalk, and he'd pick up there the next morning after staying with a local family. On the ninth day he was hit by a truck. He picked up his scattered brochures, limped to the town infirmary, and four days later was on his way again. The early weeks saw some of Tennessee's worst weather in fifty years. Alexander trundled through two-foot-deep snow. Finally, five months and 1,022 miles later, he arrived in Memphis, well on his way to becoming Tennessee's second Republican governor since 1920.

The walk comes closer to distilling the essence of Lamar Alexander than anything else in his career. It was a studied reaction to a failure, his first gubernatorial bid four years earlier. It was precisely choreographed. Says Hotline publisher Doug Bailey, then an Alexander consultant: "It was logistically planned all the way. Those families and homes where Lamar stayed were chosen with great care as leaders either of churches or of their communities. Four young men were recruited out of the University of Tennessee for the washboard band that accompanied him, and there served as advance people too." But none of it would have been possible without the Gump-like single-mindedness of the candidate who did the walking.

When he decided to run for President after the 1992 elections, Alexander tried to figure out a way to walk across the United States. He settled for a drive instead. He packed up a red Ford Explorer - which was to be the symbol of his cross-country trek, just as red-and-black plaid shirts were the trademark of his walk - and stayed with families and civic leaders across the nation in the course of a nine-thousand-mile trip. No one paid much attention then. Now Alexander's relentlessness, and the readiness with which he has snatched up conservative talent for his campaign, have Washington insiders touting him as the cream of the second tier of presidential candidates, perhaps the only contender who can hang with Senators Bob Dole and Phil Gramm. No one who knows him doubts that if determination and smarts are what count, Alexander will be a real presence in 1996.

But to what end, aside from the driving (and walking) ambition of Lamar Alexander? That's the question Alexander, whose low-key demeanor sometimes obscures the intensity of his resolve, will be pressed to answer in the next year. After eight years as governor and a two-year stint as education secretary, he doesn't conjure up strong ideological images. Asked what it is about Alexander that attracts him, supporter and fundraiser David Wilson says, "Just good, sound government. ... [He's] not flashy but good, sound, one in whom you can place confidence." You can hear the echoes of that wretched Bush campaign theme, trust. As Alexander campaigns on a radical reduction of the Federal Government, this grey, good-government image is exactly what he wants to shake.

Days after the conservative weekly Human Events ran a feature on Alexander subtitled "But Should Conservatives Trust Him?" he is eager to highlight his right-wing credentials. "We have a way of coming up with issues that categorize people," he complains. Then he goes through the litany himself: school prayer, school choice, tough sentences, the death penalty, opposition to gun control, even a piano-playing gig on the Billy Graham Crusade. He notes that F. Clifton White, engineer of Barry Goldwater's presidential nomination, ran his 1974 gubernatorial campaign. "A lot of the Washington perceptions of me," he says, "are based on very little knowledge."

Boy Governor

Alexander grew up in rural east Tennessee, his father a school principal and then a safety engineer at an Alcoa plant, his mother the head of a private nursery school. His first political stirrings came when he attended Boys' State his junior year in high school. Alexander packed "Let's Go Far ... with Lamar!" posters for the trip and won election as "governor" at the week-long summer camp by four votes. On the way home, Tennessee Governor Frank Clement's prediction that one day one of the campers would become governor of the state rang in his ears. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Vanderbilt and earning a law degree from NYU, Alexander splashed into real politics working on Howard Baker's 1966 Senate campaign. After a century of minority status, Tennessee Republicans were just beginning to work themselves off the mat, and Baker's statewide win was the beginning of the GOP renaissance.

"Baker was and probably still is Lamar's mentor," says Tom Beasley, a longtime Alexander associate. "Above anyone else's judgment, he'd probably look to Howard Baker." Baker, who served 18 years in the Senate and ran unsuccessfully for President in 1980, carved the mold for the Tennessee Republican: conservative in inclination but moderate in demeanor and temperate in judgment. "Tennessee is a border state," explains former Senator Bill Brock, who himself fits the mold. "It's had to live with one foot in the industrial camp, with the other foot in the agricultural camp. It's such an extraordinarily long state, the difference between the east-Tennessee mountain people and Memphis is as great as the difference between Pennsylvania and Texas. It's a state that requires an open mind. You have to have strong convictions, but you also have to be willing to listen."