Fund-Raising, Straw-Poll Success Aid Gramm Quest : Politics: Questions linger. But GOP presidential contender believes only he can beat front-running Dole.

The workers were waiting, the news photographers were in place and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was just about to begin his tour of the Sturm, Ruger gun factory here when suddenly he paused.

Turning to his advance man, Gramm said: “Let’s spend more time looking at the older guns. They make more interesting pictures.”

Given Gramm’s near-obsessive drive to gain the Republican presidential nomination, no detail is too trivial to command his attention. “Listen, I want this job,” he told The Times after rising at dawn one day last week to fly from Washington to campaign in New Hampshire. “And I’m willing to work for it.”

At the start of his candidacy seven months ago, Gramm had to overcome doubts about whether he could be a convincing enough conservative to win the hearts of his party’s right wing. That question still lingers, along with concerns that his sometimes overbearing manner will turn off more voters than he can win over.

Yet at the moment, aided by a disciplined message to go along with his boundless energy and prodigious fund-raising talents, Gramm can make a plausible argument that he is better positioned than any of his rivals to overtake the front-runner in the GOP race, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

“In the end, either Sen. Dole is going to be the nominee or I am going to be the nominee,” Gramm said during a two-day sweep through the New Hampshire countryside, interrupted by a quick trip to Boston to raise money. “I don’t see another viable alternative.”

This assertion is based largely on two factors. One is Gramm’s fund-raising success--his $14.2 million in contributions this year ranks only behind Dole’s $19 million among the GOP candidates, and well ahead of all the rest.

The other is his strong showing in straw polls among Republican activists. After shocking Dole by tying him for first in the much-publicized Iowa straw poll in August, Gramm has won similar contests at a meeting of the National Republican Women and at Minnesota’s GOP convention.

Gramm’s Pledge

Although the number of participants in such competitions is relatively minuscule, Gramm contends the results have far-reaching implications.

“In a primary and caucus process, what is more significant than who gets the support of party activists, who after all have information about candidates now that you hope voters will have on Election Day?” he asked. “These are the people who are the ground troops, who do work that win primaries and caucuses.”

The heart of Gramm’s appeal to conservatives is a pledge stark in its simplicity, particularly by comparison with Dole’s often meandering rhetoric. Nearly everywhere he goes, he promises “to finish the Reagan revolution” by shrinking the size and power of the federal government. The result, he promises, will be to give middle-class families--”who do the work and pay the taxes and pull the wagon in America”--more control over their lives.

Judging from their stands on a host of issues, Dole and Gramm would wind up in the same place. But Gramm seems determined to get there sooner.

“I’m going to get the government out of your cash register,” Gramm promised the owner of Hubba’s coffee shop here, as he bounded into the premises during a brief hand-shaking stop.

“He and Dole are about the same when it comes to philosophy,” said Alvin Rousseau, one of the Hubba patrons whom Gramm greeted. “But Gramm’s more outspoken than Dole. If he has something to say, he says it.”

But Gramm’s efforts to reconcile his goal of shrinking government with the concerns of voters who have come to depend on its services to help them over rough spots don’t convince everyone.

“I think he gave me a runaround,” said Christopher McPherson, a Sturm, Ruger worker who asked Gramm how he was going to balance the federal budget without cutting programs that benefit the middle class. McPherson said he gets federal assistance to help pay his ailing young son’s medical bills.

Gramm tries to soften the sharp edges of his speeches--and of his sometimes abrasive personality--with large doses of folksiness drawn from his humble roots in the rural South. It is an effort replete with frequent references to his “momma.”

“He’s not a country club Republican; he’s what I call a country music Republican,” said Sen. Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire, Gramm’s highest-ranking backer in the state where the nation’s first primary is held.

A once-desultory student who went on to earn a Ph.D in economics and teach the subject at Texas A&M; University, Gramm is thought by his peers to possess one of the keenest intellects on Capitol Hill. But some say they believe that one reason Gramm’s negative poll ratings frequently outweigh his positives is his impulse to remind his listeners just how smart he thinks he is.

Recalling a bitter public argument over Social Security with the late Democratic Rep. Claude Pepper of Florida, Gramm told a high school social studies class in Manchester, N.H., that his mother phoned him afterward to take the side of Pepper, a longtime champion of the elderly. According to Gramm, she said: “When that sweet Claude Pepper is speaking, you shut up and listen to him.”

But Gramm quickly added: “If we had listened to him, Social Security would have gone broke. That was a case where I was right and we won and where the country benefited.”

Gramm’s smart-aleck tendencies also came to the fore when a student asked him about his proclivity for capturing federal funds for his home state, despite his determination to end the federal budget deficit.

“As a member of the Senate, I represent my state,” Gramm said. As an example, he said that if the Senate debated building a cheese factory on the moon, he would oppose it with all his might. “But,” he added, “if the Senate in its lack of wisdom voted to build a cheese factory on the moon, I would fight to see that the company that designed it was a Texas architectural firm, I would want the milk to come from Texas cows and I would even propose that we build a celestial distribution system in College Station, Tex.”

Ultimately, Gramm’s best chance for success in the GOP race probably derives from his total commitment to the task at hand, a trait demonstrated dramatically when he converted the Iowa straw poll from a near disaster into a major boost.

As the contest approached, Dole was expected to win it easily while Gramm found himself in a close fight for second place with two other candidates--former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who had made a substantial investment in television advertising, and conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan. In fact, some party leaders expected Buchanan to finish ahead of Gramm, a result that would have been a severe setback for the Texan’s campaign.

Maintained Pressure

Alerted to the peril, Gramm stumped the state heavily himself and poured money and troops into the competition, keeping up the pressure even as 10,000 GOP activists gathered in the city of Ames for the vote.

“The Gramm people knew how to play the game,” said Drake University political scientist Hugh Winebrenner, author of a book on the Iowa presidential caucuses. “They had the best food, the best tent and the best entertainment and they spent a lot of money getting people out.”

When Gramm tied Dole for first, he gained a moral victory that he has been exploiting ever since. The most obvious rewards have come in Iowa, where a Des Moines Register poll two weeks ago showed Dole’s support dropping to 40%, from 57% before the straw poll, while Gramm climbed to 18%, from 11%

On the surface, such movement has not occurred in New Hampshire, where some polls show Gramm still in single digits, trailing not only Dole but also Buchanan and Alexander. Gramm argues that Buchanan benefits from his focus on New Hampshire when he challenged then-President George Bush in the 1992 primaries. Alexander has spent about $200,000 on television advertising in the state, far more than Gramm’s investment to date. Starting today, however, the Gramm campaign begins airing its first commercial in New Hampshire, a biographical ad that aims to introduce him to voters.

Ripple Effect

At any rate, Charles Black, the Gramm campaign’s senior adviser, claims the Iowa victory has had “a tremendous ripple effect” among GOP activists--those who are political fund-raisers, donors or contributors and pay close attention to presidential politics at this stage.

“We are where we need to be,” Black said. “Until Ames, I think it was fair to question who was the leader of the second tier of candidates” behind Dole. “Now, it’s Gramm.”

Black concedes that Gramm must still worry about another charge by Buchanan, whose vociferous rhetoric gives him more visceral appeal to many conservatives. “We have to get across to people who are for Buchanan that Gramm is electable and Buchanan isn’t,” Black said.

As they plot their strategy, Gramm’s advisers are counting on the Ames victory paving the way for him to run well in the Iowa precinct caucuses, where the 1996 delegate selection process begins on Feb. 12. A strong Iowa showing, in turn, should boost him in the New Hampshire primary eight days later.

After New Hampshire, by Black’s reckoning, “the political calendar gets real Gramm-friendly.”

Black is referring to the slew of early March primaries in the South, the heartland of Republican strength and a region known for its conservatism, where Gramm is expected to enjoy ideological as well as geographical advantages.

That proposition will be tested next month in Florida in yet another straw poll of Republican activists, an event that has taken on particular importance because Dole has labeled it “the big political event of the year.”

Gramm, willing to let Dole build up expectations for his own performance, said only, “we hope to be competitive” in the Florida contest. “We are going to work hard and I feel good.”

Meanwhile, he is content to wait, convinced he is in charge of his own destiny. Regardless of the fluctuations in other candidates’ fortunes, “I’m going to win or lose based on what I do,” Gramm said. “If I do my job, if I define my vision, if I deliver my message, I’m going to win.”