But Campaign Strategy for ’88 Has Been Mapped : Baker Still Isn’t Certain He’ll Run

Two years ago, reporters regularly stood in the White House driveway and awaited Howard H. Baker Jr. after his private meetings with the President, and network producers carried on a running competition to bag him for Sunday morning talk shows.

No public official except Ronald Reagan commanded the public spotlight more constantly and none handled it more easily.

Then in January, 1985, Baker gave up the Senate seat he had held for 18 years and the majority leadership that made him one of the most influential as well as visible American public officials.

With that, he dropped from national attention. His disappearance is not as complete as that of legendary Judge Crater, who left home for the office in 1930 and has yet to be heard from, but it is enough that he is seldom mentioned anymore among the chief contenders for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.

‘A Serious Candidate’

“He tells me that he intends to become a serious candidate after the November elections,” said a longtime political aide and friend, “but I am concerned that he is frittering away the advantages of being a non-incumbent and the opportunity to put an organization in place.”

With the field rapidly forming for 1988, Baker still has not made up his mind whether to seek the nomination a second time.

“I think the chances are 50-50 that he will run,” said Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, a one-time Senate aide who has become the former senator’s most influential political adviser. “His chief problem right now is that most people think he won’t.”

The impression that Baker has dropped out of presidential politics arises from his low profile at a time when many expected that he would be organizing for 1988, meeting with foreign leaders, and using his stature as the most effective Senate leader in years to keep himself in the news.

A Decorous Partner

But with the field rapidly forming for the ’88 presidential primaries, Baker is still ensconced as a decorous partner and “rainmaker” in one of Washington’s elite law offices, consulting with blue-ribbon clients, representing the firm around the country and expanding its business.

He works out of a posh Vinson & Elkins partner’s suite just a tantalizing three blocks from the White House and the Oval Office he has coveted through his whole political career. He travels the Atlantic on the Concorde, takes long lunches with clients, reads voraciously, and gets away for long weekends at home in east Tennessee. Credible estimates put his income at $1 million a year, maybe $2 million.

Baker left the Senate nearly five years after his unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination, ultimately captured by Ronald Reagan. At that time he ran for President while continuing to serve as Senate minority leader, saying that his campaign would show whether it was necessary to be unemployed in order to campaign effectively for President.

Started as a Favorite

He was knocked out of the competition in early March, having started as one of the favorites and the Republican most feared as an opponent by Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. Thus when he announced his retirement, saying he would keep open the option of running for President again, it was widely expected that he would follow the pattern of Richard M. Nixon and Jimmy Carter, who hit the lonely campaign trail quietly and built nationwide support almost unnoticed.

Instead he has delayed focusing on his political plans. Not since Adlai E. Stevenson has a potential candidate for the presidential nomination engaged himself in more thorough or open debate over whether he will or won’t run.

He says he will make his decision before the end of the year. As of now, members of his inner circle say, he still does not know what he will do.

“But he can’t wait much longer,” said Dick Redman, a Des Moines real estate man who directed Baker’s campaign for Iowa delegates in 1980. “We can’t set up an organization until there is a decision to run, but we have to get started soon.”

‘Fire in the Belly’

Baker, who is 60, smarts at the suggestion that he lacks the requisite “fire in the belly” or that his comfortable situation has lulled him into ambivalence.

“It always surprises me when people ask that,” he said last week. “Here I am a man who ran for the Senate in Tennessee when nobody wanted me to run, not even my mother. I had to run twice. I lost the first time, and then I ran a second time, and nobody wanted me to run then either. I ran for minority leader in the Senate three times. My political history and background is not of someone who is timid or afraid to commit.”

Nervousness on the part of supporters and skepticism of the national political press notwithstanding, he contends that he is going down the line with the plan he made for himself when he decided not to seek reelection in Tennessee.

“What I said to the Republican conference when I left and what I have said to my advisers later was that I would focus my political efforts for two years on trying to help Republican candidates for the Senate,” he said, “and indeed I have done that.”

Has Raised $9 Million

His political action committee, the Republican Majority Fund, which has raised more than $9 million since 1981, has contributed to all 34 Republican Senate candidates, and by Election Day Baker will also have personally campaigned for each of them.

Meanwhile in recent days, he has begun to talk more like he is headed for a try for the nomination, stressing the importance of President Reagan’s declaration that he will remain neutral, and telling friends that Vice President George Bush has already missed his opportunity to dominate the Republican field.

“There is more reluctance to nominate him than I had anticipated,” he told reporters at a luncheon meeting last week. “Bush is going to have the traditional difficulty that vice presidents have in running for President, and he is going to have it in an intensified form because he is following a man who is going out of office greatly admired and respected.”

Moreover, Baker said, he has been encouraged by his ability to continue raising money since he has left office and heartened by polls that show him with continued support, though far behind Bush.

Same Base of Support

If he does run, Baker will join Bush in going after the same base of Republican moderate support that they battled for in 1980.

What has changed is that both Baker and Bush, not to mention the Republican Party itself, have been drawn far closer to the views of Ronald Reagan.

On major issues such as building a space-based defense against missiles and tax revision, the former senator is closely in step with the Administration. When he recently expounded on the gravity of the federal deficit problem and seemed to take a slightly divergent course, he hastened to explain that he remains foursquare with Reagan against increased taxes.

In a speech early this summer, Baker left open a possibility that he might entertain the thought of increased taxes, but he acknowledged that he quickly found himself in hot water with some of his former constituents.

Would Cut Spending

“What I said was that the size and growth of the national debt is so great that soon servicing the debt will become the largest item in the federal budget, and that at some point the national deficit will become socially and politically unacceptable. I agree with the President that the way to get it under control is to cut spending and not raise taxes, but the seriousness of the problem is so great that we cannot permanently accept it.”

In the end, however, his decision may be determined by the health of his wife, Joy.

A recovered alcoholic, she has been plagued by a variety of health problems in recent years. In 1982, she underwent surgery for lung cancer. Earlier this year, she was hospitalized several times for treatment of excruciating back pain of undetermined origin, and later found it necessary to undergo extensive intestinal surgery. At one point during treatment of her back condition, she suffered a severe reaction to a drug administered for pain and was near death.

“She is doing very well now,” Baker said. “She does not have cancer; she does not have any other mortal illness, and as of this moment, I think she is going to be well enough for me to run.”

Trips to New Hampshire

Baker has made three or four trips to New Hampshire in the years since he left Capitol Hill, and early this year recruited former state Atty. Gen. Tom Rath to direct an exploratory campaign organization.

Several months ago, Rath and James Cannon, a former Baker Senate aide now serving him as a political consultant, drew up a 1988 campaign strategy calling for Baker to throw his full effort into Iowa district caucuses early in the year and into the New Hampshire primary.

It then envisions Baker’s going into the Southern super primary that follows with a good chance of defeating Bush and supposedly triggering a fatal decline of the vice president’s candidacy.

Sources close to the former senator say he now believes he can beat Bush in New Hampshire, where Rath has been quietly working for nearly a year and where Baker also has the strong backing of Republican Sen. Warren B. Rudman.

The campaign design also calls for Baker to spend nearly all of 1987 raising money, with as much as $18 million adjudged necessary for a campaign all the way to the White House.

World Competition

Still not knowing what Baker will do, the exploratory organization has also begun developing issues under a general theme of the United States’ challenge to meet world competition on a variety of economic, military and political fronts.

Despite the planning, “I have watched him and I have watched the people around him, and I cannot see a trace of a serious campaign,” said a Southern Republican leader who began supporting Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The view that Baker made a fatal political mistake by giving up the Senate seat and the high visibility majority leader’s office is shared in the camp of Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who succeeded Baker as leader and is mounting his own campaign for the presidency.

“Baker may well have learned the wrong lesson,” said David Keene, a Dole adviser. “He saw that Carter didn’t have a job in 1976 and Reagan didn’t have a job in 1980. So he gave up a safe seat and with it, he gave up his ability to shape his own image.”

His image notwithstanding, Baker says two years away from the Senate have better prepared him to move the three blocks west from Vinson & Elkins to the White House.

“Not being consumed by the daily detail of trying to run the Senate,” he said, “I have a different and I think a better perspective on national and international issues today than I had a year and a half ago. I think I feel more secure in my own ideas about where the country ought to go, and where I would like to take it if I were President.”