Gramm Finds Iowa Tough Sledding in Effort to Catch Chief Rival Dole

Well into his third trip into the frozen heart of Iowa in a month, Phil Gramm was coming a bit undone.

First, the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate noticed his watch had stopped. Then, as he trod carefully on ice on his way out of a pancake-breakfast chowdown in Council Bluffs, he realized the sole of his right shoe had ripped open.

Quick fixes were in order. A campaign supporter handed him a new watch--a gleaming new Gramm for President model. Another aide found a pair of black rubber galoshes to keep the sub-zero draft off his toes.

What was less clear, as Gramm conducted a grueling two-day foray through the state’s Republican strongholds, was whether the political repairs he needs can be administered as easily as the replacement of a faulty watch and shoe.

Seeking to catch leading rival Bob Dole by next month’s Iowa caucuses, the traditional kickoff of the presidential primary campaign balloting, Gramm first has to distance himself from the rest of the GOP pack.

Up close, Gramm conveys the look and feel of a candidate assured, at the least, of a strong second-place finish: He has a well-padded $6.6-million treasury, a finely honed sense of how to roll with the issues of the hour and enough mulish stamina to endure long, brutally paced campaign days and the tiny, nagging humiliations of the presidential trail.

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Even his speaking style has come alive. Four years ago, he was so droningly professorial that he numbed Republican delegates during a convention keynote address disaster. These days, Gramm eyes audiences greedily, as if about to devour them whole, his speeches stocked with cracker-barrel homilies and self-deprecating cracks about his less-than-handsome looks.

With an organization of campaign volunteers spread through Iowa’s 99 counties, all that remains to be done, a confident Gramm insisted aboard a chartered plane bound for the western part of the state, is to define himself as the only credible alternative to Dole.

“Whoever runs best in Iowa,” Gramm said, “will be the candidate who’s perceived as the closest to the conservative movement. When we get down to the wire . . . that has to be me.”

But if local polls are accurate, Gramm has yet to convince party officials and Republican rank-and-file that he has come into his own as Dole’s chief rival--even though many still count on him to be so by the time Iowa voters gather Feb. 12 on caucus night.

“Gramm’s people are out working hard for him, but he’s just not picking up strength yet,” said Tom Thompson, an uncommitted Republican chairman in rural Jefferson County. “There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm.”

Gramm’s hope is to generate that missing enthusiasm among two strong ideological constituencies--social conservatives and free market-inclined voters. But Gramm himself acknowledges that his operatives need strong gifts of persuasion to accomplish that dual task--siphoning away Christian activists from the campaigns of Patrick J. Buchanan and, to a lesser degree, Alan Keyes, and extinguishing fiscal conservatives’ momentary ardor for Steve Forbes and his flat tax boomlet.

Forbes, not Gramm, has held second place in local public opinion surveys--a ranking Gramm expects Forbes will lose without a strong volunteer organization.

“The trick is to show that there’s nothing to be gained in making a protest vote,” said Kane Robinson, Gramm’s Iowa campaign chairman. “Once you’ve done that, it gets down to Dole and Gramm.”

Gramm already has defections to crow over--the sort of names that mean nothing to a national audience but command attention among local political activists: Guy Rodgers, a top Buchanan campaign aide, joined Gramm’s operation in late December, as did two of Dole’s county chairs, Peggy Hermann and Terri Hall, family activists who were angered by Dole’s refusal to pledge unwavering opposition to abortions.

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And on selected spots along his campaign swing, Gramm found strong pockets of family-issue activists in his corner. Nearly 75 showed up for an Iowa Families for Gramm luncheon in Cedar Rapids, where the senator vowed to “make this country a pro-family country.”

Marveling at the “smorgasbord of conservative candidates” in the 1996 caucuses, anti-abortion lobbyist Samona Joy Smit said Gramm would win the largest share of Christian activists because he had the “fire in his belly” necessary to “bring our issues to the table.”

Gramm’s edge comes in close county-level coordination between old-line Republican workers and the newer Christian-activist ranks--a smooth working relationship Smit has found lacking in Dole’s volunteers.

From the front of the room, Gramm spent much of his road trip this week trying to fire up both the regulars and the believers. Waxing eloquent on the superiority of American products, he found a few guffaws when he reminded them that “half the world doesn’t know the joys of cotton underwear.”

There were moments, though, when the old economics lecturer returned, the “evil eye professor” who turned off one Pottawattamie County Republican matron after she saw him speak recently.

Deep into a town hall speech in frosty Boone, Iowa, Gramm could not resist reaching into his storehouse of economics history and telling his bewildered audience about the economist Thomas Malthus, who, Gramm explained out of the blue, “held that production grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically.”

The room grew forbiddingly still until Gramm had the presence of mind to reel himself in, goosing the audience with a contemptuous dismissal of “Bill Clinton’s Department of Education.”

It was a quick fix in a month when Gramm may need many.