COLUMN ONE : Gramm’s Relentless Crusade : As the GOP presidential contest firms up, Texan campaigns as candidate tough enough to finish the party’s attack on big government. Democrats see him as ruthless and hypocritical.

More than 100 Arizona Republicans are listening in perfect silence as Texas Sen. Phil Gramm moves to close the sale. “If you’ll give me your support for President,” Gramm says, in a Southern accent thick as motor oil, “I can promise you two things.”

Tall and slightly stooped, his fingertips pressed together like a banker considering a loan, Gramm is standing in the back room of a downtown Phoenix restaurant one morning earlier this winter. Sitting behind plates of eggs and salsa are the inner-circle supporters of Arizona Gov. Fife Symington, who has already enlisted with Gramm in the race for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.

“If I am elected,” Gramm continues, “I can assure you that no one will write of my presidency, that a presidency is a terrible thing to waste. And second, no one will work harder or be more focused in this race.”

Gramm’s voice drops into the range of a conspiratorial whisper. “There are probably a million people who could do this job better than me,” he says. “But they’re not running. I am more committed to changing America than anybody else running for President.”

Fervor is Phil Gramm’s calling card in the Republican presidential contest now hardening into shape. Ideologically unwavering and often caustic, Gramm is not selling charisma or charm, compromise or moderation. Instead, Gramm offers himself as the champion of Republicans who want their revolution uninflected and undiluted: the one candidate tough, smart and stubborn enough to complete the crusade against big government that the new Republican Congress has begun.

“If you don’t want these things done,” Gramm says, “don’t elect me. But if you elect me, expect me to do it.”

Gramm’s impatient ambition and brusque persistence haven’t made him the most popular man in the Senate. But those same qualities have made him a highly effective senator--and a formidable contender in the presidential contest he plans to join officially on Feb. 24. Now that former Vice President Dan Quayle and former Cabinet secretaries Dick Cheney and Jack Kemp have decided not to run, most Republicans label Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole as the front-runner--and Gramm as the Doberman he must defang to claim the prize.

Gramm, 52, says he doesn’t remember when he first thought about running for President. But he has had at least an eye on the White House since he was first elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1978 from a district centered on College Station, where he taught economics at Texas A&M.; Austin attorney Kent Hance, who was elected to the House with Gramm that year, recalls their conversation the day they were sworn in.

“I said, ‘How many of these guys you think want to be Speaker?’ ” Hance recalled. “And Gramm said, ‘How many of them do you think want to be President?’ ”

In Washington, Gramm burst into national attention by co-sponsoring Ronald Reagan’s tax and spending cuts in 1981. In 1983, angry Democrats retaliated by stripping him of his position on the House Budget Committee; Gramm resigned his seat in Congress, switched parties and won a special election to return triumphantly to the House as a Republican.

Gramm crushed Democrat Lloyd Doggett the next year to win election to the Senate. In the Senate, too, he made an instant impression, co-sponsoring with New Hampshire Sen. Warren B. Rudman, the landmark Gramm-Rudman act in 1985 that sought to force Congress to eliminate the federal deficit over six years.

After he won reelection in 1990, Senate Republicans elected Gramm chairman of their campaign committee--a position he’s used to extend his web of contacts around the country. (His database of people he’s met over the last four years now contains more than 160,000 names.) Under Clinton, Gramm has rivaled Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the most visible symbol of the Republican opposition.

In his brisk progression from the back bench, Gramm has inspired pungent opinions; when allies or adversaries describe him they both use adjectives with teeth.

Relentless is one. In the shadowy early stages of the presidential race, none of his competitors have worked harder in pursuing money, media attention and political support. Gramm is expected to be as strong a fund-raiser as anyone. “On the conservative side of things, Gramm’s people are just everywhere,” says GOP political consultant David M. Carmen.

Ruthless is another. During the Reagan budget fight, Democrats accused him of passing secrets to the White House (a charge Gramm denies); in his 1984 Senate race, he pounded Doggett into rubble for accepting a $500 contribution from a gay fund-raising event that featured a male stripper. Says one senior Democratic senator who has watched Gramm closely: “He’s the kind of kid when you got into a fight, we used to have an expression about: ‘You don’t screw with him even with a sledgehammer.’ ”

No one has ever mistaken Dole for a shrinking violet either, and most political observers expect the two men to conduct their relations over the next year like, say, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. “They hate each other and they will bring out the worst in each other,” says the Democratic senator. “It may be that Gramm on that score is even more effective. Gramm has a much thicker skin.”

Gramm, in fact, has never seemed particularly troubled, or moved, by criticism. The Texas senator has an insinuating sense of humor. But his undisguised ambition rubs many of his Senate Republican colleagues the wrong way--as does his aggressiveness in asserting himself on issues, like crime, health care or the budget, that others have long cultivated.

“Republicans just get sick of listening to him,” says one former GOP leadership aide. “He’s into everything, he has something to say, repeatedly; every little meeting, every little conference, he’s there and he has a strong opinion.” That’s one reason why Gramm, when he sought a second term as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 1993, prevailed by only a single vote.

Interest groups, fund-raisers and even fellow senators all complain that Gramm is so enamored of his opinions, it’s often difficult to get a word in edgewise, much less change his mind.

Despite a strong voting record of opposition to abortion, for instance, Gramm’s relations with anti-abortion groups have been rocky because he has refused to emphasize the issue in his campaigns.

In private meetings with abortion foes in Arizona recently, Gramm firmly refused to make opposition to legal abortion a litmus test for his Supreme Court nominees, according to sources present.

“Gramm has had the personality of a porcupine,” says Bill Price, president of Texans United for Life. “To know him is not always to love him.”

Admirers say that Gramm may seem insensitive, but it’s usually because he’s three steps ahead of anyone else in the room. The adjectives that flow from his backers run to brilliant and principled, independent and determined, icy under fire.

What sets Gramm apart is not only brains, but “sheer guts,” says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), his most enthusiastic supporter in the Senate.

When Gramm co-wrote the spending limitation plan in 1985 that bears his name, not only Dole but even Reagan initially resisted the idea; within days, however, Gramm and his confederates created an irresistible political momentum. McCain says Gramm displayed similar nerve with his Churchillian on-the-beaches, in-the-streets opposition to Clinton’s health care plan, at a time when many Republicans, including Dole, were uncertain whether to fight or deal.

Even anti-abortion activist Price, despite his collisions with Gramm’s sharper edges, says the health care fight convinced him the senator is the nominee Republicans need in 1996: “He’s the one who did the heavy lifting and broke the back of the Clinton health care plan . . . while Bob Dole was sitting there trying to decide if he was going to work with Bill Clinton.”

At a point when conservatives believe the political wind is at their back, that boldness may be Gramm’s strongest selling point. If it took one famously egotistical and headstrong Texan to build the Great Society, Gramm’s supporters reason, it will take another to tear it down. “Phil Gramm would be a Republican Lyndon Johnson,” says Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “He eats rocks for breakfast and he is tough as nails.”

To the audiences where he is field-testing his message for 1996, Gramm promises nothing less than revolution. “I’m not an incrementalist,” he insists.

That’s one adjective rarely applied to him. Gramm passionately supports the balanced-budget amendment, but envisions a government brought into balance in a much-shrunken state. Today the federal government spends about 22% of the gross domestic product; Gramm says that “over time” he would cut that back to 17%. Since defense spending now consumes about 3.5% of GDP, that would mean domestic spending would be scaled back to about 13.5% of national wealth--a level not seen since 1973.

To get there, Gramm proposes to freeze discretionary spending and limit the growth of entitlement spending (except for Social Security)--an approach that puts off the details of many specific cuts into the future. But he’s already putting forward specifics that suggest the breadth of the change he envisions.

Gramm says he would eliminate all federal education programs, sending half the money back to local school boards, and using the other half to fund a $2,000 per child tax deduction. He would merge the Commerce and Labor departments and “take a long hard look at terminating” the Department of Housing and Urban Development by passing its functions back to the states. “Most” farm subsidies would go in a Gramm Administration, and he anticipates substantially squeezing both Medicaid and Medicare by raising co-payments and herding more recipients into health maintenance organizations.

Gramm insists he will not cut Social Security to reduce the deficit. But to keep the system in balance, he says he would appoint a commission to study long-term changes in benefits and eligibility. “I’m not going to be the President who presides over Social Security going broke,” he insists.

Gramm doesn’t talk much about foreign policy. But on social policy he also promises an earthquake. Day One of a Gramm Administration, he says, would inter the executive order requiring federal contractors to pursue affirmative action policies for women and minorities: “I would not let it sit there an hour,” he says. “I am committed to a colorblind society.”

In Gramm’s version of welfare reform, all recipients would be required to work; he’d encourage employers to hire them by exempting welfare recipients from the minimum wage and supplementing their income with government assistance. Eventually, he envisions an even more radical change: the complete elimination of welfare for women of any age who bear children out of wedlock, as conservative social theorist Charles Murray has proposed.

Welfare, Gramm says, would become “a temporary program (for people) who have had a change in their life circumstances, who fall on hard times . . . rather than a permanent way of life that would last three or four generations.”

With such hard-line views wrapped in such a hard-edged personality, it’s no surprise that Gramm ranks with Gingrich on the short list of Republicans who most infuriate Democrats. Democrats who have banged heads with Gramm universally respect him as a skilled and tenacious adversary, but many deride him as both an extremist and a hypocrite.

The latter charge may be the most cutting. Critics like Paul Begala, an adviser to Clinton who worked on Doggett’s 1984 campaign, portray Gramm as hypocritical in his hostility toward government because government has repeatedly enlarged his opportunities.

Gramm was born in a hospital at Ft. Benning, Ga., where his father served as a sergeant. After his father died, Gramm’s mother used GI insurance from the War Orphan Act to send him to a military academy that turned around his life after he had failed third, seventh and ninth grades. The insurance also helped pay for his undergraduate education at the University of Georgia and Gramm won a National Defense Education Act fellowship that subsidized his doctorate in economics there.

After graduation, Gramm taught economics at Texas A&M;, a public university, where he remained until elected to Congress in 1978. Gramm’s wife, Wendy, has served as a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget and chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In college, Gramm worked as a bank teller and in a boat factory; but the only time he has held an adult job that didn’t involve a public paycheck was when he operated a consulting business while at Texas A&M.; “His whole, entire life has been on the government tab,” says Begala.

Likewise, Democrats note that despite his pedigree in a military family, his strong support of national defense and his criticism of Clinton for failing to serve in Vietnam, he too stood aside during that war. From 1965 through 1970, Gramm received two student deferments and then three as a professor, his records show.

In a 1992 television interview, Gramm said: “By the time the draft was at its peak, I had a Ph.D. in economics, I was at Texas A&M; and was in a very competitive field. I just didn’t feel that it made sense for me to go into the military.”

Gramm’s consistency is open to question from the other side of the ideological spectrum too. As fierce as he’s been in his criticism of federal spending, he’s been equally ferocious in defending federal agricultural, space and defense programs that benefit Texas.

He has fought efforts to terminate NASA’s multibillion-dollar space station, and the expensive superconducting super collider Congress finally killed in 1993; he’s repeatedly defended federal spending on overseas advertising of U.S. agricultural products, which aids even giant corporations like McDonald’s, and opposed efforts to trim subsidies for producing wool, mohair and honey.

Even Gramm’s landmark contribution to the budget debate, the Gramm-Rudman Act, has an ambiguous legacy. Originally it required Congress to gradually eliminate the deficit over six years--and impose massive across-the-board spending cuts if the red ink exceeded the target each step along the way.

Conservatives argue it slowed the growth of federal spending in the late 1980s. But it clearly failed at its larger goal of bringing the budget into balance: Congress extended the deadlines, dodged the cuts and ultimately abandoned the law’s deficit-reduction targets in the budget deal of 1990. In 1991, the year Gramm-Rudman initially called for a balanced budget, the deficit stood at $270 billion.

Now, Gramm is ready to stake his presidential ambitions on another run at shrinking the size and scope of the federal government. “I believe people are going to conclude that we need a serious person to deal with serious problems,” he says in a voice characteristically undisturbed by doubt. “I don’t always make a great first impression. But I wear well.”