PERSONALITY IN THE NEWS : Education Nominee Could Jump to Head of the Class

In an Administration where most of the power and glamour have been focused on foreign policy, President Bush’s choice to head the Department of Education is likely to emerge rapidly as a major force in shaping the domestic side of the agenda.

Lamar Alexander is also likely to join the already long list of Administration figures who are talked about as potential presidential candidates when Bush leaves office--a list that includes Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Vice President Dan Quayle.

All that will be quite a change for the Education Department, whose former leader, Lauro F. Cavazos, was virtually never heard from prior to his resignation under fire last week.

As a Republican, Alexander is a self-described “activist” who has consistently prodded his party to support an expansive problem-solving role for state and local governments.

In his own eight years as Tennessee governor, Alexander focused on two interrelated problems--education and jobs. He won applause for an ambitious program to improve the state’s schools and attract major new employers, particularly General Motors’ huge new Saturn plant.

Alexander commented on the two during a brief appearance with Bush at the White House on Monday morning. The two questions employers ask when looking for a place to relocate, Alexander said, are: “Where can I get good schools for our children?” and “Where can I go back to school?”

“If we’re going to be competitive, if we’re going to keep our good jobs, we’re going to have to answer those questions,” he said.

A lawyer by training, Alexander, 50, married and the father of four, has spent much of his adult life in politics. At 26, he signed on as an aide to another attorney, Howard H. Baker Jr., who was then running for the Senate.

When Baker won, Alexander went with him to Washington. A few years later, he moved to the White House as executive assistant to Bryce Harlow, President Richard M. Nixon’s congressional relations adviser.

In 1974, immediately after the Watergate scandal, Alexander’s Nixon connection helped sink his bid for Tennessee’s governorship. But four years later, after another stint as an aide to Baker, then Senate Republican leader, and a job as a television commentator on a Nashville station, Alexander won easily.

As governor, Alexander anticipated the current movement among Republican conservatives toward establishing a “new paradigm” for the party to fill the vacuum left by the loss of anti-communism as an issue and the weakening of the party’s stand against taxes.

His ideas, now reflected in the “empowerment agenda” pushed by Bush Administration conservatives, were intended to help Republicans match the Democrats’ focus on dealing with the problems of schools, highways, public health and other nuts-and-bolts programs.

In 1985, Alexander convened a little-noticed meeting in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains. In attendance were three other Republican governors--John H. Sununu, then governor of New Hampshire, now White House chief of staff; Dick Thornburgh, then governor of Pennsylvania, now attorney general; and James G. Martin, then as now chief executive of North Carolina--and a group of conservative GOP House activists led by Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich.

The purpose of the meeting was to lay the groundwork for what the participants called the “Reagan Revolution, Stage Two,” which was intended to help Republican candidates in the 1986 elections. One big theme: making the United States more competitive through state and local efforts at improving school systems.

Alexander chided GOP activists at a March, 1986, Southern Republican leadership conference in Nashville, suggesting the party was failing to focus adequately on those issues.

“Washington issues”--foreign policy, the federal budget and welfare--are “tremendously important and so fascinating,” Alexander said. “But when we get together, that’s all we talk about, and the Democratic governors are running down the street proposing programs to improve the schools, clean up the garbage, fix the roads and make the children more healthy--and they get elected.”