A Luckless Lugar Pins Hopes on Vermont

“Good morning, Burlington. It’s 16 degrees and sunny. Another beautiful day.” The driver of the Ford Explorer with Indiana plates clicked off the radio. He turned south on I-89, snow and mountains all about, his journey through the frozen north country part of a lonely, faltering quest.

His passenger in the front seat, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, had been up here for nearly a week, the only Republican candidate for president to pay much attention to Vermont and its 12 winner-take-all delegates, and now when a car with a “Lugar” bumper sticker shot by and honked, Lugar waved back and smiled. Another beautiful day.

No matter that he had been introduced at lunch the day before as the senator from Illinois. Those slips happen. No matter that most days the only journalist traveling with Lugar was a young TV network field producer who wrote a daily memo that never got incorporated into the day’s news. Or that a reception billed as a fund-raiser attracted only six supporters.

In the muddled, wacky race for a GOP presidential nominee, Lugar believes--for the record, at least--that he still has a chance to survive. If he can win Tuesday’s Vermont primary and show strength in four other Northeast primaries--he plans an eleventh-hour swing through New England today--he could emerge, his staff’s reasoning goes, as a viable candidate whose message the media would finally have to start paying attention to.

“We must understand,” he said, announcing his candidacy in April, “that the 1994 elections were not the ‘Republican revolution’ anymore than the Declaration of Independence and the skirmishes at Concord and Lexington were ‘revolutions.’ Revolutions are hard fought and harder won. What lies ahead are Trenton on Christmas morn, the snows at Valley Forge and finally, Yorktown.”

But now, in the snows of Vermont, far from the big-stakes battlefields in South Carolina and New York, where the heavyweights were fighting it out, the Trentons and Yorktowns had become Burlingtons and Montpeliers, and Lugar was carrying his luckless campaign to yet another hamlet, talking about issues, not personalities, stressing the need for a candidate who can heal and unite, ignoring the fact that he has done dreadfully everywhere.

In Iowa, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Delaware, he collected only 12,599 votes and never finished higher than fifth. He goes into the Vermont primary with no delegates, no significant endorsements and hardly a trickle of contributions to supplement the $6 million he has raised. For all practical purposes the media have treated him as a noncandidate since New Hampshire.

Why haven’t people listened? “I think,” Lugar said, “the basic coverage has been on the horse-race aspects of the primaries, and for a variety of reasons I haven’t been as interesting in that area, in part because as a matter of style and choice, I have not been involved in negative campaigning.”

“But I decided early on if I was going to be president, I wanted to win it in the right way.

“Normally you would think President Clinton is vulnerable, yet compared to the Republican candidates, polls show him winning by 12 to 21 points. You say, how could this be? This was going to be a one-term president for sure. Then you look at the slash-and-burn Republican campaigns, the lack of ideas, the poverty of leadership, the nonexistent level of debate and the answer is obvious.”

The irony of Lugar’s campaign--which probably will end in Vermont, where polls show him doing dismally--is that it has been conducted on a lofty level that should appeal to disgruntled voters. Lugar doesn’t attack other candidates. He doesn’t talk in sound bites. He eschews political rhetoric in favor of detailed discussion of issues. He speaks as a conciliator rather than as an ideologue.

And that, in an era of 10-second TV spots, may be Lugar’s gravest liability. “If you’re electing a man for competence, thoughtfulness, intelligence, Dick Lugar is the candidate, no question,” said Garrison Nelson, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont. “But those qualities are insignificant today. That’s the tragedy of the process.”

Lugar, one of the Senate’s leading experts on foreign affairs, kept waiting for people to ask about Bosnia-Herzegovina, the economic emergence of China, U.S. relations with Russia. No one did. He wanted to debate his idea to do away with the IRS and replace corporate and personal income taxes with a 17% national sales tax. Instead everyone talked about Steve Forbes’ flat tax. He hoped to make the environment, nuclear terrorism and farm subsidies part of the national discourse. They never came up.

And so Lugar, who could wear his resume on his chest like a cluster of battlefield ribbons--Rhodes scholar, naval officer, big-city mayor, farmer, four-term U.S. senator--came to this political backwater for his last hurrah. Here he is among farmers and independent thinkers and people who have little use for overheated rhetoric or the Beltway pundits who help set the national agenda.

Vermont, fiscally conservative and socially liberal, is a sort of comfort zone for Lugar. It is a manageably sized place where he can marshal his limited resources, travel extensively at modest cost and, talking one-on-one, make one last push to sell himself.

“I’ll tell you this,” Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont’s Democratic senator, told a group of farmers in Montpelier with the Republican candidate at his side. “Dick Lugar is one of the most qualified, intelligent and certainly honest members of Congress on either side I’ve ever served with. Not a member of the U.S. Senate, asked to pick the four or five best senators he’s known, would not put Dick Lugar on the list, automatically,” Leahy said.

Despite his effort in Vermont and a blitz of radio and TV ads--”He’s Everything a President Should Be”--Lugar appears to have created little real excitement here. Crowds have been warm and respectful but small. Saturday he put in a 10-hour campaign day and was rewarded with not a line in the Burlington Free Press. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas breezed into Vermont the same day for 90 minutes and got a banner headline on Page 1, extensive TV coverage and a big turnout of enthusiastic voters.

Lugar plodded on, saying a good showing in Vermont could provide the money and momentum to carry him to the March 19 primaries in the Midwest, his backyard. His tiny cadre of volunteer loyalists drove off into the night to plant “Lugar for President” placards in snowbanks. But Vermonters clearly had other things than politics on their minds and were treating the primary with not much more than passing interest.

Asked what he thought of candidate Lugar, farmer Ted Yandow said: “I really don’t know much about the fella. I don’t listen to the radio and I don’t have a TV. I’m so busy I hardly have time to sit down with the newspaper.”