Senator, Do You Take This Senator . . . ?

For the man who asked the pointed question during the Senate Watergate hearings--”What did the president know and when did he know it?”--could his focus on romance be any less laser-like?

After all, when you are former Tennessee Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. interested in dating outgoing Kansas Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, you don’t just take a deep breath, dial her up and hope she’ll go out with you.

“He said he had questioned some of his Senate colleagues and others who were close to him and fairly close to Sen. Kassebaum, just to know more about her before making his first move,” says Pat Butler, onetime aide to the ex-Senate majority leader. “Having done his homework, he proceeded in his usual way, which was in some respects as a 70-year-old teenager.”

In a town where secrets are impossible to keep, word of their amour finally leaked out in October and Kassebaum was forced to go public.

“This is harder than announcing how I was going to get out of the Senate,” she told the Associated Press.

Now, the Capital is all atwitter over these lovebirds, who will wed on Dec. 7.

“Everyone who knows the two of them are just thrilled about this,” Butler says.

“You couldn’t find two cuter people,” says Missy Tessier, press secretary for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).

“I remember going home telling my wife that we have a new romance blossoming,” says former Republican House leader Robert H. Michel.

Kassebaum, 64, a three-term senator, is so popular back home that the Kansas City Star declared her a state treasure in an editorial bemoaning her decision to retire in January.

Baker, who finished three Senate terms in 1985, is such a straight shooter (and onetime presidential aspirant) that President Reagan, mired in Iran-Contra in 1987, hired him as chief of staff.

The pedigree of the Kassebaum-Baker match couldn’t be better.

She’s the daughter of Alf Landon, former Kansas governor and onetime GOP nominee against Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the presidency. Kassebaum’s first marriage ended in a 1979 divorce. She has four children and six grandchildren.

His father was a congressman, his mother was a sheriff and his first wife was the daughter of the late Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Baker has been a widower for three years. He has two children and four grandchildren.

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So stuffy is Washington that when cupid bags a power couple like this pair, news leaks out and sightings occur in the quirkiest places.

Michel got wind of it at a strategy meeting for the Bob Dole presidential campaign last summer. Baker was there. “Somebody said something about Howard was going to [leave and] pick up Nancy and then made some little aside about ‘You know, they’re dating now,’ ” Michel recalls.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) had an early sighting last April when she spotted the ex-Senator and ex-Senator-to-be together at a Washington memorial service for the late Sen. Ed Muskie. “I said, ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if they were going out,’ ” Snowe says.

And it is not every blushing bride whose wedding date is unmasked by the presidential nominee of her political party on the eve of his election disaster.

Late Monday, a tired Dole was on one of his final campaign swings through Knoxville, Tenn. While attending a rally with Baker, the candidate blurted out to the audience that the couple would marry on Dec. 7. Kassebaum had wanted to keep it secret at least until after the election. Dole lost Tennessee the next day, though no one suggests it was on account of a lack of discretion.

Still, despite leaks by a presidential nominee, gossip at political strategy sessions and romantic sightings at memorial services--love does find a way.

Baker could have used flowers or poetry or maybe a candlelight dinner to charm his new lady friend. But in this case, he carefully polished some remarks he was to deliver at a recent farewell tribute to retiring Sen. Mark Hatfield, Republican from Oregon. She was there, and beyond Hatfield and President Clinton and all others present, Baker especially wanted to make an impression on Kassebaum, a friend said. And it paid off.

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Other congressional sweethearts can attest to the capricious nature of romance in the nation’s capital.

When Snowe and her husband, John McKernan, were dating in the ‘80s--when both served as Maine’s only two representatives (they later married when he was governor and she was senator)--they had their special evenings at favorite restaurants. But more often than not, because of marathon work sessions, they found themselves standing in line at a supermarket late at night buying Lean Cuisine.

“It was far from the glamorous lifestyle,” Snowe recalls.

If dreamy-eyed moments were confined to the checkout line, at least no explanation was necessary, Snowe says. “We understood each other’s work pressures, time schedules and the demands.”

Rep. Susan Molinari agrees. After her first marriage foundered on the shoals of Mount Washington, the New York representative found happiness only with another New York representative, Bill Paxon. They dated in Congress, married in 1994 and had a baby girl last year.

“Being a politician is an entire lifestyle,” says Molinari, who was keynote speaker at the Republican convention in August. “It’s feeling great about yourself one day and feeling really bad about something that happened the next day.”

Compatibility is crucial, she says. “You need to be with somebody who understands the passion, and even more importantly, who appreciates it.”

When Kassebaum and Baker tie the knot at St. Alban’s Church near the Washington National Cathedral, it will be the first wedding of a senator and a former senator in American history. Among those officiating will, of course, be another ex-senator, John Danforth (R-Mo.), who is also an Episcopal priest.

Perhaps out of a healthy respect for the life-draining nature of the city that brought them together, one of their first acts will be to leave Washington.

They plan to share time between Tennessee, where he practices law, and Morris County, Kan., where she has a ranch so remote that the television antenna pulls in only one station.

And it’s not C-Span.