Back to Basics : Simon Pins His ’88 Hopes on Tradition

People used to call Paul Simon, Democratic candidate for President, an “extremely long shot.” Not anymore. “They’ve dropped the extremely,” he says.

Six weeks into his candidacy, the bow-tied, bespectacled junior senator from Illinois has climbed in some national polls significantly enough to stoke his politician’s optimism, if not to still the snickers of some strategists who see his race as a fool’s errand.

“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” one derisively labels his candidacy, drawing on Simon’s resemblance to Pee-Wee Herman, the quirky character in the movie of the same name.

While some pollsters predict the popularity of younger, more vibrant candidates, Simon is running as the eldest, at 58 a vision of tradition in his conservative blue suits, black wing-tips and low-key manner. While some competitors promote new ideas and a high-tech economy, Simon unapologetically backs brick-and-mortar basics, the “concrete things” of America’s old-time industrial might.

While others say Ronald Reagan’s thunderous election victories are evidence that traditional Democrats are passe, Simon stands convinced that he can ride the same wave that swept Franklin D. Roosevelt into office more than half a century ago, one of working-class Americans hungry for an activist government.

It is not merely for their shared partiality to bow ties that, at virtually every campaign stop in this crucial state, Simon reminds his audience of Harry S. Truman, another Midwesterner who ignored the odds to win the presidency in 1948. For his is a formidable task.

Simon possesses neither the oratorical flair of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson nor the momentum of Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. He has not the money of Joseph R. Biden Jr. or the early start in crucial Iowa of former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt and Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt.

His recent Iowa appearances have been alternately stirring and dull, and sometimes ill-attended. Occasionally, when asked to outline specific answers to national ills, he answers with a blunt but unenlightening, “I don’t know.”

High Marks for Debate

Still, Simon did well in the first televised debate of the Democratic candidates last week. A group of 87 Iowans assembled by two opinion research companies to judge the debate gave him high marks for demonstrating experience and qualifications to be President.

And as the most-often elected candidate in the Democratic field, he carries a reputation for pulling out unexpected victories, the latest in 1984 when he took the Senate seat of three-term veteran Charles H. Percy. In elections spanning 34 years--from the Illinois Statehouse to the U.S. Senate--he has lost only once: a race for the governorship.

Simon’s success hinges on whether he can make his plain-spoken, earnest, Middle-America image stand out in a forest of slicker personalities. Trolling for votes, he is not above boasting about his “unvarnished” style. That style hides a determined, ambitious self-confidence.

“Paul has been shooting for this for a long, long time,” said his friend and Senate colleague, Dale Bumpers of Arkansas. “He doesn’t feel he’s a long shot and neither do I.”

Studied Journalism

The son of Lutheran missionaries, Simon grew up wanting to be a newspaperman. He studied journalism at the University of Oregon and at Dana College in Blair, Neb., a tiny Lutheran school set in the rolling hills outside Omaha. He left there, at 19, to take over an abandoned weekly newspaper in Troy, Ill. He would spin it into a profitable chain of 14 weeklies before selling out.

Simon won his name by publishing articles detailing the corruption of government officials in Madison County, a practice that did not endear him to the Democratic power structure. They got their revenge in 1953 when Simon, after a tour of duty in the Army in Europe, declared his candidacy for a southern Illinois seat in the Statehouse.

“I announced my candidacy on Dec. 17, and on Dec. 18 the executive committee of the Democratic Party met in Madison County, Ill., and unanimously went on record against me,” he said. “That was my start in politics.”

But he shook enough hands and cajoled enough voters to win. The election launched him into a Statehouse career marked by an aggressive, sometimes preachy approach. After eight years in the Illinois House, he moved to the state Senate in 1962 and served there six years.

‘Brash, Moralistic’

“He came to the Legislature a very brash, moralistic young man, and he took on all kinds of good government causes,” said Samuel Gove, a University of Illinois political science professor who has watched Simon since his first election. “He never got into the leadership. . . . Paul Simon was never in that crowd in which the game was patronage. He never played that game.”

His crowd was dubbed the “Young Turks,” and one of its members was a Democratic representative from Cook County, an outspoken and engaging lawyer named Jeanne Hurley. The two were married in 1960--she lost her seat when she moved into his district--and have since had two children, Sheila and Martin, now grown.

Simon won the lieutenant governorship in 1968, but in 1972, he suffered his only elective defeat, a close loss in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. A senior aide says Simon lost for one reason: He was not tough enough.

He resumed his political career two years later, winning a congressional seat that he held until 1984, when he beat incumbent Percy in a sometimes corrosive Senate campaign.

Hewn to Liberal Track

In Congress, Simon has embraced a clutch of issues--from education funding to the plight of spouses divided by the Iron Curtain. He has generally hewn to a liberal track, except for his vocal support for the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law and the proposed constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

The latter irked many of his fellow Democrats, who generally see such measures as ill-disguised attempts to gut domestic programs. “I thought he hadn’t thought it out,” said Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose). “It’s one of his weak spots.”

Simon entered the presidential race after his first preference, Bumpers, took himself out. “There were people whose judgments I trusted who urged me to get in,” he said. “Those kinds of things . . . you don’t reject.”

Although he still ranks low in some national polls, he recently rose to third in others--well behind Jackson and Dukakis but ahead of other candidates who have been stumping for months longer.

But those results are dismissed by many pollsters as the product of a mixed-up electorate that confuses Paul Simon the politician with the other Paul Simon, the singer/songwriter whose recent album, Graceland, thrust him into a storm of publicity.

Cites ‘Confusion’

Washington-based pollster Peter Hart calls the politician’s surge “an indication of just how well Graceland has sold. There is direct confusion there.”

Other Democratic strategists likewise believe that Simon’s chances are slight.

“No one honestly believes he can do that,” said William Schneider, a political consultant for The Times. “He doesn’t have the stature, he doesn’t have the presence. . . . He’s kind of a still small voice speaking for the old politics.

“Simon is distinctive, in that he is boldly attempting to be the traditional old-faith Democrat. But that requires oratorical skill I don’t believe he has. The only one who could have done it is (New York Gov. Mario M.) Cuomo.”

The Simon campaign scoffs at such notices. Campaign manager Floyd Fithian, a former Indiana congressman, ridicules the so-called Graceland factor as “extraordinarily uninformed and . . . not even very smart.”

“If it were a spin-off, Paul Simon would never have been (as low as) 1%,” Fithian said.

Simon himself, with the barest hint of irritation, is certain that his campaign--which bills itself as “Leadership in the Great Democratic Tradition”--will prevail.

“I’m certainly not doing it for the exercise,” he said recently, huddled in the back seat of a campaign car en route to an Algona, Iowa, farmhouse, where 50 people waited in 100-degree heat to hear him speak. “Every election I’ve seriously contested, people said I wasn’t supposed to win.”

Simon’s campaign strategy is simple--to do well enough in Iowa to stay alive nationally. Money is a particular concern to some longtime Simon observers--the senator has been a reluctant fund-raiser, by his own admission. The campaign has so far collected $800,000, an amount that Simon terms “fairly respectable” but a figure well off the multimillion-dollar pace set by Biden, Dukakis and Gephardt.

His organization is likewise galloping to catch up with longer-established candidacies. Simon’s staff includes 14 people in Iowa, most of whom arrived in the last month. Simon also has a handful of workers gearing up in New Hampshire, site of the first primary of 1988, but no organization in the critical Southern states.

Before Iowa audiences, Simon stresses his desire for “sensible” arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, increased education funding, decreased military aid and increased humanitarian aid to other nations, a move he says could assist troubled farmers seeking new markets for their products.

Calls for ‘Trade Czar’

While his competitor Gephardt stresses hard-line retaliation against unfair trading, Simon proposes a less-antagonistic package that would include the anointing of a “trade czar” to oversee policy, establishment of government-insured loans for exporters, increased incentives for U.S. firms to conduct research and penalties against companies that move their manufacturing sites outside the United States. He plans to formally announce an expanded trade program later in his campaign.

Simon also emphasizes his longstanding concern about the budget deficit, noting his votes for Gramm-Rudman and the proposed constitutional budget-balancing amendment and against tax reform. He would attack the deficit largely by limiting defense spending, particularly for the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” Although he does not mention it frequently before voters, he commonly tells reporters that he has “not hesitated” to support a tax increase as a deficit-fighting tool.

The most distinctive element of his platform is his long-pushed, never-passed jobs program, which would give minimum-wage, public service jobs to anyone unable to find private-industry work after five weeks of unemployment. The program, modeled after the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, of Roosevelt’s era and a Simon staple for years, would include job training.

Puts Cost at $8 Billion

Simon said its price tag of up to $8 billion annually would be partially offset by defense cuts, and he suggests that, by increasing the number of working, taxpaying Americans, the plan would also reduce the deficit.

Simon emphasizes what he says is his commitment to “use the resources of government more.”

“Government is a big part of the future for everyone,” Simon tells his listeners.

More than any one issue, however, Simon must sell himself. Those who know him say he is even-tempered, personable, stubbornly independent, intellectual and most definitely opinionated--a man whose vices are limited to a workaholic streak and a fondness for Pepsi.

The results of Simon’s sales job have been mixed.

With small groups he can be folksy--almost hokey--and appealing. Rarely does a speech pass without Simon pulling his flattered audience into it.

“Denny and I were just chatting a minute ago about crime,” he noted recently in a Fort Dodge, Iowa, living room. A few seconds later, it was, “Tillie, you and I are old enough to remember when Social Security passed. . . . “

Can Be Compelling

Occasionally, even with large audiences, Simon can pull together his admittedly plain rhetoric into a compelling speech. It happened one blistering, humid night in Des Moines, before more than 200 members of a statewide arms control advocacy group.

His speech ended with a story about Hubert H. Humphrey, another traditional Democrat and a Simon hero, and the dying senator’s last visit to Congress.

“He knew he was dying and we knew he was dying,” Simon said, his voice still and low in a church auditorium.

“Hubert Humphrey got up. He had no prepared text, but in a very real sense it was his last message to the nation. One of the things he said, that I shall never forget: He said that, ‘So far as we know, in this whole vast universe, the only place where God has given life is this small plant of Earth. And you and I are engaged in an experiment--whether we can have peace and freedom and justice and opportunity on that small planet.’ ”

Simon paused. “And that, my friends, is what the ballgame is really all about.”

The audience roared. But the rousing cheers that greeted that speech contrasted sharply with the stilted, merely polite applause given him two days later in Nashville, when he spoke at the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Discards Prepared Text

Simon, given a huge forum before hundreds of politically astute, prospective backers, and following on the heels of nationally reported talks by his Democratic competitors, dispensed with a prepared text and instead delivered a dull, disjointed rendition of his stump speech.

Even on the best rhetorical nights, he can stumble profoundly. Before the Des Moines arms control group, he defended his vote for the cruise missile system, saying those missiles “happen to be slower, more easily recalled.”

Later, when asked what he meant, he admitted: “I don’t know what technically we mean by recallable.” In fact, according to the Pentagon, operational cruise missiles cannot be recalled, or even blown up short of their targets.

Another day, Simon repeatedly insisted that attention to America’s elderly--and programs to deal with their long-term care--would be hallmarks of his Administration. But, when asked to outline those programs, he said: “I don’t know how we get there. We have some people researching it.”

Despite such moves, Simon wins generally positive marks from his audiences, although few are prompted to march out and join the campaign.

Cuts in Nuclear Weapons

At a stop in a trendy Omaha restaurant, Francis Moul, a former Gary Hart activist, and owner of a Syracuse, Neb., printing firm, nodded his head in rapt agreement as Simon outlined plans for step-by-step cutbacks in nuclear weapons.

“He seems friendly,” Moul said. “Gary Hart was not a friendly person. . . . He (Simon) likes people, that comes through. A lot of people you meet on the candidate’s trail, you get a feeling they’re phony. I don’t think he’s a phony.”

Carol Kelly, a kindergarten teacher from Agency, Iowa, caught Simon at a luncheon in nearby Ottumwa, after having seen other candidates. She illustrated the Simon campaign’s fondest hopes and worst fears.

“I would feel comfortable putting our future in his hands,” she said. Then she sighed.

“Each time I see one, I feel this might be the one,” she said. “But they all kind of blend together.”