The Candidate From Another Time : Paul Simon Tackles Slickness Along With National Ills

Paul Simon is a stalking horse for Mario Cuomo--such was the inside word on the Illinois senator when he announced his presidential candidacy in May. Nobody who looked like Simon--bow tie, glasses, dewlap ears--and thought like Simon--”I’m not a neo-anything; I’m a Democrat”--could possibly run for President in the age of the blow-dry Democrat.

The idea was that Simon would field slates of delegates in the caucus and primary states, make a token run in the early contests and then withdraw from the campaign, calling on his supporters to back Cuomo. The governor, with Iowa and New Hampshire behind him, would go on to sweep the big states and capture the nomination.

Sound implausible? It didn’t at the time. It does now.

Paul Simon is a serious candidate for President in his own right, and his home state is a large part of the reason. Illinois is the fifth most populous state, making its 24 electoral votes critical for any Democratic presidential candidate. Also, Illinois holds its primary in March, early enough to save a slow-starting candidate. And Illinois’ demography is resonant. As Simon told the Chicago Tribune, “We are North and we are South. We have about the same percentage of blacks as the nation. We’re industrial and we’re suburban and we’re rural . . . . If you understand Illinois, you understand the nation.”

Of the seven Democratic candidates, Simon bids strongest to fill the Cuomo gap--the huge hole in the party’s affections left by the governor’s decision not to run. Like Cuomo, Simon is a believer in the old verities of his party, and he, too, has a way of gilding its positions with the rhetoric of virtue. Like Cuomo, Simon has a piquant case of ancestor worship--though in his case it’s directed at the party, not the family. In his speeches he does not stop at paying verbal tribute to the party’s icons--F.D.R., Truman, Kennedy; he frames his policy proposals with theirs as models. His is the spirit of the Southern school principal who did not want foreign languages taught in his school because “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” Thus Simon would bring back Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA to lower unemployment and replace welfare with work; thus he promises to follow Harry Truman’s example and balance the budget by “putting America back to work,” and thus he would emulate John Kennedy by placing education right at the top of the federal agenda.

Simon’s appeal to Democrats who crave the old-time religion--a species, remember, that was sufficiently bountiful to have won the nomination for Walter Mondale in 1984--was recently market-tested. All of the candidates were asked to submit short video-taped speeches to an AFL-CIO convention; Simon’s brought down the house.

Simon’s greatest political asset, though, is neither his state nor his views but himself--his personal quality, his character and, paradoxically enough, his style.

Politicians are promiscuous with the epithet “distinguished,” as in “my distinguished colleague.” Simon genuinely deserves it. One of those rare public men who redeem the vocation of politics from obloquy, Simon is the largely self-taught author of 11 books--among them a study of Lincoln’s years in the Illinois Legislature, a work called “Protestant-Catholic Marriages Can Succeed” and two books on politics and public policy that display detailed knowledge and homely wisdom on nearly every page. His career has combined scholarship with 28 years of public service as a state legislator, a lieutenant governor, a congressman from a down-state district and, finally, a member of the Senate.

The son of a Lutheran missionary, Simon began in politics as the crime-fighting editor of the paper that he quit college to found, the Troy (Ill.) Tribune. In Congress he has championed such apple-pie issues as aid to education, help for the handicapped, foreign-language study, arms control and a bill to toughen inspection standards for amusement-park rides. Listing that among his accomplishments shows that Simon is not afraid of the scorn of the sophisticated. Neither was his model, Abraham Lincoln.

Every time Simon speaks he disproves Andre Gide’s sardonic maxim that it is impossible both to be sincere and to seem so. His voice--deep, rich, intimate--rumbles up from his bowels, gaining force and conviction on the way. If this were the radio age, that voice would make him the odds-on choice to succeed Ronald Reagan. But can a man who looks like Oscar Levant survive on Reagan’s medium, television?

According to Tom Shales, the savvy television critic of the Washington Post, yes : Simon comes across as “the most unassuming of the bunch . . . level-headed, forthright, effortlessly folksy and, best of all, bracingly Trumanesque.”

Any Republican opponent would cast Simon as Fritz Mondale revisited: a big-government, weak-defense liberal. The inevitability of that charge in the general election is Simon’s biggest obstacle in the race for the nomination.

His opponents in the primaries will make much of the apparent contradiction between the cost of replacing the welfare system with a new WPA (Simon estimates $8 billion to start) and a balanced budget, especially since he is opposed to raising income taxes. Simon can square the contradiction: Lowering unemployment by 1%, he claims, would shave as much as $30 billion off the deficit. Moreover, his WPA workers would have Fridays off to seek tax-paying jobs in the private sector. But this spend-now-so-you-can-save-later logic won’t fit on a bumper sticker, and, in the daily demagogy of the campaign, the idea will be caricatured as a crank one.

At 58 Paul Simon is no crank, although he does appear to have parachuted into the race from a different time. He is, I suspect, betting that his utter lack of hipness will make the media fall in love with him. His candidacy is a protest against all that is phony in our national life, and yet his success depends on winning the regard of a medium that created the likes of Jim Bakker and made Reagan look like a commanding figure.

It’s a risky strategy. In the riptides of illusion and disillusion, hope and cynicism that are sweeping across the country as the Reagan years draw to their scandal-pocked end, Simon’s bow tie may come to be seen as shtick ; his plain man’s manner, an affectation; his politics, a relapse into nostalgia. For Paul Simon--who writes his own speeches, thinks his own thoughts, is his own man--is not just running against other candidates; he’s taking on a culture.