POLITICS 88 : Rivals Seen Crowding Senator Out in Wisconsin : Simon Camp ‘Feeling the Squeeze’

An aide to Sen. Paul Simon was riffling through a new biography of Vince Lombardi, the hallowed super coach of the Green Bay Packers, hunting for the right anecdote to win a Wisconsin crowd to an Illinois senator.

But the most famous of all Lombardi quotes would not find its way into a Simon speech: the one that says “Winning isn’t everything--it’s the only thing.”

If winning were the only thing, Paul Simon, who has rolled up a lone victory this primary season, would not still be running for President, slogging in his black wing tips through the spring mud of Wisconsin for Tuesday’s primary.

Call it implausible. Call it quixotic. But don’t call it quits, says Simon. Making a virtue of necessity, he is billing himself as the compromise candidate, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “passion” without his controversy, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ “managerial skills” but with lovable-uncle warmth.

Sees Himself as ‘Second Choice’

“Paul Simon,” says Paul Simon, “seems to be the second choice of more people than anyone else.”

But prospects for Simon here are more than problematic. “He’s going to do very poorly here in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin should have been a good state for him,” predicts University of Wisconsin national politics expert Mark Fenster. Between Jackson and Dukakis, “there’s not enough room in this for Paul Simon to run. . . . I think he’ll get squeezed out in Wisconsin.”

About 1,600 people gathered in downtown Madison Thursday at a lunch-hour rally to hear Simon and a local rock band--among them a man whose handmade gag sign supporting Paul Simon read: “Loved your album.”

But standing in the largest Simon crowd to date in Wisconsin, campaign director Brian Lunde acknowledged: “We’re feeling the squeeze.”

So Lunde is talking now patience, not primaries. “It doesn’t matter who’s got more delegates than the next guy,” he says; the nominee may be whoever is still “sitting at the table” in Atlanta.

But Atlanta is then; Wisconsin is now. Simon’s pay-as-you-go campaign is being outspent even by Milwaukee’s million-dollar mayor’s race. News stories assessing the race sometimes do not even mention his name.

In spite of Sen. William Proxmire’s praise of Simon as “Mr. Democrat of 1988,” Simon’s campaign sometimes has the look of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” of 1932. His TV spots bill him as “the underdog who fights for underdogs.”

But Wisconsin voters and politics are notoriously quirky, and this gives Simon hope that he will “do well” here and go to the New York primary in two weeks as a respectable candidate.

Dismissing a Milwaukee newspaper’s 9% rating for him, he points instead to the 25% in the poll who were undecided and a capricious open primary.

“Since 1960, the only predictable thing is doing something unpredictable,” declared state Democratic Chairman Suellen Albrecht of the primary.

Wisconsin is the state that sent Red-hunting Joseph R. McCarthy to the U.S. Senate at the same time a “good-government” Socialist mayor served in Milwaukee. Its state Senate voted last week to allow hunting licenses for the blind.

So the stodgily dapper Simon, in a two-week Wisconsin odyssey, has been taking his genial courtliness into bowling alleys, shaking hands over glasses of salted beer--a local delicacy--and even bowling a few creditable frames himself.

Puts Accent on Roots

Running on his roots, as a “favorite grandson” from the state next door, he spent Palm Sunday at the Lutheran church where his father was baptized and ordained, visited family graves and rang the vintage Montgomery Ward mail-order dinner bell that still hangs on his grandparents’ dairy farm in Zachow. In a line that has made bipartisan rounds, Simon wants Wisconsinites to know, “I’m one of you.”

But, like Simon’s grandparents, many of his Wisconsin kin are Republicans. Some, like 80-year-old Mildred Krause, promise to cross over this time to vote for Cousin Paul.

His bow-tied anti-image image and his education policy make college crowds his best crowds--even minus the free bratwurst-and-beer Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. offered on one campus. “I’m gonna vote for him,” declared an Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity man in LaCrosse. “He’s like PeeWee Herman.”

He has also lined up a little union support; his unionists are “not quite as alienated from the system” as some angry Jackson unionists, says Milwaukee carpenters local official Jim Hirsch. “They have a sense of the system working . . . and they believe he (Simon) is steadfast.”