THE STATE OF THE QUESTION : The Lives of the Leading Contenders

Anyone seeking the presidency in America needs a solid base from which to launch such an audacious undertaking. But, at some point, the candidate has to go beyond preaching to the choir and reach out to those swing voters who usually decide the election.

These voters are not loyal Democrats or loyal Republicans. They are much more independent-minded, and, in wooing them, the candidate’s credibility and his ability to connect on a gut level become the overriding factors.

Political biographies do not always address these factors, but, in this presidential campaign year, we are fortunate in that new books about or by four men now seeking the White House are to provide insights that should help the swing voter.

Take Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, now a major contender for the Democratic nomination.

Both Dukakis and the Reform Impulse, by Richard Gaines and Michael Segal, and Dukakis: An American Odyssey, by Charles Kenney and Robert L. Turner, dwell extensively on the governor’s role in the Massachusetts economic success story.

Once called “Taxachusetts,” the Bay State has had its taxes cut by Dukakis and has seen its unemployment rate drop to 3% after record-high levels in the mid-1970s. Dukakis is ruthless about cutting waste and long ago took on welfare with some success.

Much of the credit for the “Massachusetts Miracle” has to go to the high-tech entrepreneurs who were attracted to the area by the large number of research labs and such powerful universities as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Related to this has been Reagan’s spending on military projects, much of it connected to high-tech firms with outlets in Massachusetts.

But the new books on Dukakis show that the governor, after a shaky first term and brief political exile, also did his part by insisting that the state bureaucracy cut the flab, eliminate corruption and attract some of the bright young people who had once shunned Massachusetts government because it was so creaky and sneaky.

Dukakis is a reformer. He hates the old politics of patronage, although he has shown some leniency in his second and third terms after learning in his first term that you can turn off even your most loyal supporters if you don’t pass around a few jobs after the election is over.

So, these new books on Dukakis couldn’t have arrived at a better time, documenting as they do Dukakis’ credibility in economics.

Connecting on a gut level is another matter.

Both biographies describe a man who is so disciplined, so demanding of himself and those around him, that he often comes off as self-righteous, and the last guy who did that--Jimmy Carter--saw a sad ending to his phenomenal rise to the White House.

From his days in high school to Swarthmore College to his role in reforming Massachusetts politics as an activist and state legislator, Dukakis has always tried to do the right thing.

He took the subway to work every day in his first term as governor so that he would know the hassles of the average strap hanger trying to make ends meet.

Convinced that previous Massachusetts governors had kept too much from the public eye, Dukakis opened cabinet meetings to the press. This led to comical and chaotic scenes in which people trying to do the state’s business were mugging for the cameras and stumbling over reporters scribbling furiously in their notebooks.

Dukakis’ frugality is legendary--and a bit excessive, at least to me. When legislators came for a working lunch in his first term, he pulled out a brown bag just as they were looking toward the door for a caterer.

He has modified that, but he still does much of his family’s grocery shopping when they are home in Brookline because he thinks his wife, Kitty, is not price-conscious. Is shopping a good use of this man’s time?

Gaines and Segal say that Dukakis, efficient but soulless in the early years, has become more compassionate in later years, and they date the change to his defeat after his first term, in 1978.

When he ran again in 1982 after teaching at the Kennedy School of Government for four years, Dukakis admitted his mistakes from his first gubernatorial term and said, “We’ve all grown through these experiences.”

He began to worry less about assimilation and to speak movingly about his Greek heritage and about how his father came to this country knowing no English and wound up a Harvard-trained doctor.

Today, on the campaign trail, he has an asset that Kenney and Turner think is handy for the modern presidential quest.

“Character has dominated presidential politics since Watergate,” they write. “. . . From the first, Michael Dukakis said character would elect the President in 1988.”

Character Dukakis has got.

What Dukakis is, Kenney and Turner conclude, is a combination of bleeding-heart Walter Mondale and high-tech Gary Hart. He is a man who gets incensed at what he sees as the insensitivity of the Reagan Administration but one with the skill to organize a government on limited resources.

Both books are overwhelmingly positive, but they conclude with what could portend major problems for Dukakis as the presidential race enters the brutal months ahead: He still has not offered a vision of the America he wants to lead.

“Despite his celebrated ability with the details of government, Dukakis lacks a sweeping vision,” write Kenney and Turner. “. . . He conveys little sense of history, philosophy or ideological context in what he says or does.”

Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole has other problems as he runs for President. And The Doles: Unlimited Partners, the new biography he did with his wife, Elizabeth, and with Richard Norton Smith gets right to it.

Dole needs credibility on the average-guy issue. How does he convince swing voters that a man who has been a Washington insider for 20 years and is now worth millions, thanks to help from rich friends, is sympathetic to ordinary folk?

Thus this book, written with the help of Richard Norton Smith, makes much of Dole’s beginnings in tiny Russell, Kan., where the townsfolk collected money in a cigar box to finance his first political race.

Kansas, Dole says, “is a triumph of the ordinary.”

Self-reliance was the credo in the Dole home. Mama Dole said, “Can’t never did anything.”

Dole has supported civil rights legislation, food stamps and financial help for college students, all areas where “country club Republicans” have been suspect.

Republicans always have trouble persuading women that they think in liberated terms, so the Doles go after credibility on this one too.

In alternating chapters, they talk about Bob’s open mind on women’s issues, his willingness to let Elizabeth, his second wife, pursue her own career as FTC commissioner and, more recently, as secretary of transportation.

She recently quit the Reagan Administration to work full time in the Dole campaign, and most political professionals believe she would be a definite asset in the general election as the Republicans try to pull in young working couples.

Funny thing about this kind of biography, though. It makes no mention of other items that have been in the news lately. Namely, that Dole has become a wealthy man with the (apparently legal) help of agribusiness and other groups with regular bills before his committees.

Mrs. Dole, the daughter of a rich wholesale florist from Salisbury, N.C., has a multimillion-dollar trust fund whose dealings in recent years raise some questions about propriety and conflict of interest that led her to fire its manager, a former friend of her husband.

No mention of that either in this book. Oh well, if you write your own biography, you don’t dwell on the downside, right? George Bush certainly didn’t in his first-off-the-blocks campaign biography, Looking Forward, co-authored with journalist Victor Gold and published last October by Doubleday. (Times review, Nov. 8, 1987.)

Both Dukakis and Dole have a good shot at being their party’s’ nominee this year. But it is another presidential aspirant with less likely prospects whose life story stirs the most interest.

He is the former televangelist Marion G. (Pat) Robertson, who switched to the Republican Party in 1984 and now threatens to blast asunder the coalition of moderates, business types and social conservatives that President Reagan forged in 1980 to raise the GOP from the dead of Watergate.

As Pat Robertson: The Authorized Biography, relates, Robertson has a special credibility problem on his hands if he wants to expand his political appeal beyond his religious followers.

The basic question is, would Robertson impose his strong religious and social views on the populace should he somehow wind up in the Oval Office?

And, even if you accept the pundits’ view that there is no way Robertson will ever get to the White House, the question is still valid. You simply change it to: Would he impose his values on the Republican Party?

There is no question that the GOP must reckon with Robertson after his strong, second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses last month--he beat the vice president!--and with the presidential race now moving into Robertson’s home turf, the South.

On the values question, John B. Donovan, author of this authorized biography, writes:

“Though Robertson’s foes chide him for the idea he will ‘impose his morality on others,’ most recognize that moral issues are the ones that seem to take precedence with an America that grows more skeptical as the years go by.”

Robertson, says Donovan, “is diametrically opposed to . . . a political philosophy” that says “morality should not be the main business of government.”

“While some say that it is impossible to legislate morality,” Donovan writes, “Robertson sees the two as inseparable, that in fact legislation is morality.”

And Donovan quotes Robertson as saying, “All law ultimately represents somebody’s values.”

Robertson wants prayer in schools, and, as President, he would fill vacancies on the Supreme Court to, in the candidate’s words, “reverse the incredible interpretation of the establishment-of-religion clause of the Constitution.”

Robertson scares some people, according to interviews and polls done around the country.

But the biography does not portray a monster in the making. It follows Robertson from his birth into a genteel Virginia family--his father, A. Willis Robertson, was a U.S. senator--through some wild high school and college days to his decision to become a minister rather than practice law after graduating from Yale Law School.

Donovan writes that Robertson and his wife, Dede, conceived their first child before they got married and then listed the date of their marriage as much earlier than it was. But there has never been a suggestion that Robertson is a philanderer like his fellow televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. If the biography is to be believed, Robertson has too much self-discipline for that.

The book describes how he quit preaching to the poor in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1959 to go to Virginia Beach to found a religious broadcasting empire with a grubstake of $70. He proved to be a shrewd negotiator, getting station owners in various parts of the country to give his Christian Broadcasting Network their facilities and take the tax write-offs. Meanwhile, he pioneered in the feedback realm of television, getting his flock to call in for advice and inspiration. Many sent money. It was all tax free, and today CBN is a multimillion-dollar empire with satellite power and hundreds of thousands of faithful viewers.

For a fuller account of Robertson’s career as a broadcaster, two sharply conflicting accounts are available: Robertson’s own 1972 book, co-authored with Jamie Buckingham, Shout It from the Housetops: The Story of the Founder of the CBN, published by Bridge Publishing, an Evangelical publisher not to be confused with Scientology’s Bridge Publications; and Gerald T. Straub’s Salvation for Sale, the revealing acount of a religious broadcaster who broke with Robertson. Prometheus Books, which first published that book in 1985, has recently re-issued it in a revised and expanded paperback edition. Since 1985, Straub has come into the possession of a number of Robertson’s videotapes, and his book has been the source for a number of the candidate’s more quotable lines.

Harper & Row’s religious publishing arm, located in San Francisco, is the publisher of another Robertson biography, David Edwin Harrell, Jr.’s Pat Robertson: A Personal, Political and Religious Portrait. Harrell, a University of Alabama history professor who earlier wrote a life of Oral Roberts, contends that Robertson “has used television more effectively for political education than any other person in modern history.”

On the credibility question so crucial in this presidential race, Robertson has one other peculiar problem that no other serious White House aspirant has ever faced.

In 1985, Robertson prayed on television that hurricane Gloria would veer off the Virginia coast.

“He has been willing to say such prayers in public situations, knowing perfectly well,” writes Donovan, “that he becomes the laughing stock among many people. But to him, a complete conviction of the sovereignty of God should brook no exceptions.”

At the very least, Robertson was lucky. The hurricane did indeed bypass Virginia Beach, though later and up the coast a ways it did do some damage to the sinners of Long Island.

Robertson gains some credibility on one matter. He is probably right that people who are out front about their religious convictions risk ridicule and discrimination in our society.

“The world sees nothing wrong with a person carrying a copy of Playboy or Penthouse magazine around under his arm,” Robertson told Donovan. “Yet vast numbers of Christians have been intimidated about carrying a Bible . . . they’re afraid of being categorized as religious freaks.”

Another religious man is also running for President this year, and he has just written his 11th book, which we include here not because it is a biography but because it helps explain why he has been a player in the Democratic race.

Illinois Sen. Paul Simon is the son of Lutheran missionaries who imbued him with a commitment to the less fortunate, and that is what drives him on in the Democratic race even though the political professionals wrote him off after he finished second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire.

“We need a government that cares again,” Simon says on the campaign trail. “We need a government that fights for working men and women and stands up for the less fortunate.”

Despite his slim prospects at this point, Simon’s fund-raising has actually picked up in recent weeks as staunch liberal Democrats have come to see his candidacy as a mission.

Simon never bought the Democratic Party’s panicky move toward the middle after it lost 49 states in 1984.

Instead of joining the revisionists, he sat down and wrote the recently published Let’s Put America Back to Work Again.

It is a blueprint for an old-fashioned WPA jobs program that would attack structural unemployment and welfare.

“We are not going to let people starve,” Simon writes, “so we may as well pay them for doing something.”

He would pay people to clean up litter, repair park trails and other jobs while teaching them to read and write and learn skills and also helping them look for jobs in the private sector.

To those who call him a typical Democratic big spender, Simon fires back that “the Republicans have spent billions on weapons systems we don’t need and created a huge budget deficit, and yet no one calls them big spenders.”

But it is on the financial credibility question that Simon’s book, as his campaign, runs into some problems.

He contends that he would greatly reduce the budget deficit by levying luxury taxes and an oil import fee and by lowering unemployment and interest rates.

But, as someone said, if it was that easy somebody would have already done it.

Simon is deeply religious, but he parts with Robertson. He would not mandate prayer in schools and believes abortion is none of the government’s business. (Robertson, like many social conservatives, believes abortion is murder and would outlaw it if possible, or at least turn the decision back to individual states.)

But, in his book, Simon does sound like Robertson when he turns aside skepticism about his hopeful plans to make America more compassionate.

“Cynics will not build a better world,” Simon writes. “You and I will.”

Not all the candidates are backed (or pursued) by campaign biographies. The offices of Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore, and Jack Kemp confirm that no book about any of them is in print or in the works. The biographies and related books about the other candidates differ in many regards. All of them have one thing in common, however. They trace an ambition to be President that is awesome. Every one of these men entertained this idea years ago and never let go of it. That is what sets them apart from most of us.