Sen. Gramm Announces His Candidacy for President : Politics: Texan is first in GOP to make it official. His focus is deficit reduction.

Vowing to redeem “the American dream” and balance the federal budget, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas on Friday became the first Republican to officially announce his candidacy for the presidency.

“If we don’t change the policy of our government . . . we’re not going to be living in the same country that we grew up in,” Gramm warned in a 30-minute speech on the campus of Texas A&M;, where he taught economics for 12 years prior to launching his political career in 1978.

Gramm later flew on to his hometown of Columbus, Ga., for a speech at Wynnton Elementary School, where he flunked the third grade. “What I learned here is there is always a second chance in America,” Gramm said.

At his announcement speech in Texas, Gramm stood with his wife, Wendy, and their two sons and decried what he called a “30-year spree” of federal spending.

“Are we going . . . to squander our future, or do we . . . ensure the survival of the American dream?” he asked. The 52-year-old former Democrat vowed to “make balancing the budget my No. 1 priority and I won’t run for reelection unless I get the job done.”

Gramm’s hard-core conservatism has won him acclaim from some Republicans as the logical heir to the leadership of Ronald Reagan. Those views were very much on display Friday before the sign-bearing crowd of about 2,000, most of them A&M; students.

He said the federal budget could be balanced by freezing government spending at current levels for three years. But he said that he would adopt a more flexible approach that called for setting priorities and making choices, and relied ultimately on what he called the “Dicky Flatt test.” This standard is named for a hard-working printer in rural Texas whom Gramm often cites to exemplify the average taxpayer, and who came here Friday to introduce Gramm.

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As President, Gramm promised he would examine every program the federal government funds “and ask a simple question: Will the benefits to be derived by spending money on this program be worth taking money away from Dicky Flatt to pay for it. And let me tell you something: There are not a helluva lot of programs that will stand up to that test.”

But he said later at a brief news conference that Social Security benefits would be out of bounds so far as deficit reduction is concerned. He said he would appoint a blue ribbon commission to look at Social Security’s long-range actuarial problems. “I am not going to let Social Security go broke on my watch,” he said.

Gramm also accused President Clinton of having a “blame society first” view of crime. “If I have to string barbed wire on every closed military base in America to create the prison space, I will put (criminals) in jail and keep them there,” he vowed.

He promised to pursue welfare reform and to end a number of procedures now used to implement affirmative-action programs.

Gramm said welfare “has denied millions of our people access to the American dream” by robbing them of their self-respect. “And because we love them we will help them get it back,” he said. He said he would require able-bodied recipients to work and would “stop giving people more money to have more and more children when they’re on welfare.”

As for affirmative action, Gramm said: “As President, by executive order I will end quotas, preferences and set-asides. I will fight for equal and unlimited opportunity for all, but there will be special privileges for none.”

In the relatively brief section of his remarks devoted to foreign policy, Gramm said that “in just two years the Clinton Administration has squandered the prestige” won overseas by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Gramm said the United States could be neither “a passive observer” on the world scene, nor “the world’s policeman.” But in order to be “the world’s leader” Gramm said the United States needed to be strong. He promised to stop cuts in defense spending, and provide pay and benefits needed to increase recruitment and ensure that the country has “the best training and finest weapons. . . .”

Gramm is opposed to abortion rights, but did not highlight his position in his announcement. Abortion is a potentially divisive issue in the coming Republican primaries.

Gramm’s nascent campaign was euphoric Friday morning as a result of a mammoth fund-raising dinner Thursday night at the Dallas Convention Center. The organizers said the dinner grossed $4.1 million for Gramm’s campaign, the largest sum ever raised at a single event for any candidate for federal office, including sitting presidents.

In a comment reflecting his hardheaded approach to politics, Gramm declared: “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, ready money.”

After speaking here and in Columbus, Gramm flew on to New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first presidential primary. Later in his two-day swing he will visit Iowa, where precinct caucuses begin the delegate selection process, and to Arizona, another early primary state.

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Gramm will not have the Republican presidential field to himself for long. Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander is scheduled to announce his own candidacy on Tuesday. Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas has slated his announcement for April 10, and conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan has told reporters he hopes to declare that he is running in mid-March.

In the end many analysts feel that Gramm’s key to success will be muting the aggressive, hard edges of his personality. His intellectual prowess is respected by friend and foe alike. But the pride he takes in his own brainpower sometimes antagonizes others.

“He’s like the kid you knew in grade school who was smarter than you and every day found a way to remind you of it,” one Senate colleague told David Keene, GOP strategist and a Gramm admirer. “And that was a senator who liked him,” Keene said.

Gramm also faces another potentially harmful issue: his lack of military experience and use of deferments to avoid service in Vietnam.

Profile: Sen. Phil Gramm

Background on the Texas Republican:

* Age: 52

* Education: University of Georgia, Ph.D. in economics.

* Experience: Taught economics for 12 years at Texas A&M; University. As a Democrat, lost 1976 U.S. Senate race to incumbent Lloyd Bentsen. Won 1978 6th Congressional District seat, reelected in 1980 and 1982. In 1983, he resigned from Congress, switched to the Republican Party and was reelected in a special election. In 1984, he won the Texas U.S. Senate seat and was reelected in 1990. He serves on the Budget, Appropriations and Banking committees and was twice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

* Family: Married to Wendy Lee Gramm, former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Two college-age sons.

* Quote: “I didn’t come to Washington to be loved and I haven’t been disappointed.”

Source: Associated Press