GOP’s Alexander Opens Campaign for Presidency : Politics: Ex-Tennessee governor calls Washington arrogant. He vows to help shift more power to states.

Surrounded by images of small-town America, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander announced his bid for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination Tuesday with a rhetorical blast at Washington’s “arrogant empire” and a promise to complete “the people’s revolution” against government.

Wearing a red flannel shirt and standing outside the county courthouse in his hometown, Alexander offered up the concept that rolling back the federal government is the central challenge now facing Americans--the spiritual successor to the long struggle against the “evil empire” in the Soviet Union.

“In every neighborhood in America, the government in Washington is stepping on the promise of American life,” Alexander declared under gray and misty skies. “The New American Revolution (is) about lifting that yoke . . . and giving us the freedom to make decisions for ourselves.”

In a speech that never strayed far from those themes--he called Washington “arrogant” six times--Alexander promised to shift to the states control of as much as $200 billion in federal education, welfare and job training programs and to “lead literally a revival of the American spirit the old-fashioned way, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block and family by family.”

Everything about this first turn in the limelight was meant to underscore Alexander’s portrayal of himself as the outsider in a race whose two most prominent figures are senators: Bob Dole of Kansas and Phil Gramm of Texas.

In contrast to the military precision of Gramm’s Texas-sized announcement ceremonies last week, Alexander’s proceedings, though also carefully planned, had an agreeably ramshackle feel.

Just as in 1978, when he walked across the entire state in a trademark red flannel shirt en route to his election as governor, Alexander began the day at the front porch of his boyhood home here. Together with his wife, he led a procession of supporters and reporters on a leisurely mile-long march to the county courthouse.

Along the way he stopped to listen to the high school band, chat with a local minister and accept encouragement from supporters, some of whom wore red flannel shirts that matched his own. (By the time he arrived in New Hampshire later Tuesday, Alexander was back in a suit and tie.) After his speech--delivered in loose, unceremonious cadence--Alexander took a brief turn at an electric piano with a bluegrass band that had joined him on stage.

“This is where I am most different from the other candidates who will be seeking the nomination,” Alexander said. “They are from Washington. I am from Maryville.”

As soft-spoken and opaque as a small town banker, Alexander, 54, is an incongruous revolutionary. He first entered politics in 1974 when he lost a bid for the Tennessee governorship. After four years in a Nashville law firm, he returned in 1978 with a carefully scripted populist appeal--built around his hike across the state--and won the first of two gubernatorial terms on the same day that Bill Clinton first was elected governor of Arkansas.

After leaving office, Alexander served as president of the University of Tennessee and founded a corporate child care business, before then-President George Bush named him education secretary in 1991. After Bush’s defeat, Alexander returned to Tennessee and almost immediately began organizing his presidential campaign.

If most Republican professionals now consider Gramm and Dole the race’s front-runners, Alexander generally is given the best odds among the remaining candidates of challenging them. Though little-known nationally, Alexander has assembled a well-regarded campaign team, laid down organizational roots in the critical early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire and attracted support from an array of prominent Republican fund-raisers.

But he could find his prospects clouded if California Gov. Pete Wilson joins the race--and voids Alexander’s claim to be the one candidate in the field from outside Washington. (Before his speech, Alexander mildly jabbed Wilson, saying: “I don’t know how after you’ve just been reelected that you run for another office.”) And the Republican takeover of Congress has blunted the appeal of the message that dominated Alexander’s appearances through 1994: a call to convert Congress to a part-time citizen legislature.

On Tuesday, Alexander fleetingly said that he would “encourage” Congress “to spend six months at home with the people they represent.” But conspicuously absent in his announcement speech was the seven-word bumper-sticker slogan that drew wide applause from Republican audiences before the GOP landslide last November: “Cut their pay and send them home.”

“ ‘Cut their pay and send them home’ lost a lot of its luster last November when the they became us,” said former Republican National Committee Chairman Richard N. Bond.

With that weapon defused, Alexander has shifted his focus from running against Congress to more broadly challenging the concentration of power in Washington that traces back a century to the Progressive Era. His core argument is that in an age of accelerating information technology the central government has become “increasingly irrelevant,” as he put it Tuesday.

Here, and in his midafternoon speech to a handful of supporters in Hopkington, N. H., Alexander promised to give states complete authority over welfare and job training programs, to convert most federal education programs into block grants and shutter the Department of Education that he once headed, and ultimately to turn over to states authority for running the Medicaid program that provides health care to the poor.

He endorsed term limits, school vouchers, the balanced-budget amendment and a cut in the capital gains tax, all consensus positions among Republicans.

More notably, in his announcement address Alexander pointedly criticized Republican congressional initiatives that he argued infringe on local autonomy.

Although Alexander said that he supported time limits on welfare recipients, he said it would be a mistake to require all states to cut off benefits after recipients have been on the rolls for two years, as House Republican legislation would do. And he criticized a GOP bill that would condition prison construction grants on the adoption of tougher state sentencing policies.

“The greatest danger that we Republicans have is this: Now that we have captured Washington, we must not let Washington capture us,” he declared.

In both speeches, Alexander said almost nothing about foreign policy and avoided any mention of abortion. (He describes his position as “pro-life” but has confounded anti-abortion activists by saying that he would not support a constitutional amendment to overturn the federal right to abortion.) In a signal of one issue bound to receive more attention later, he briefly reiterated his opposition to federal programs that confer benefits by race.

But on this day, everything took second place to the drive to “help put a little humility into the arrogant empire”--an argument on which Alexander’s presidential hopes will likely rise or fall.