For Alexander, It’s Like 2000 Already

On a still and hazy afternoon here last week, former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander was doing what he’s been doing most days for the last five years: running for the Republican presidential nomination.

More precisely, Alexander was sitting in the basement of a Super 8 motel about two hours southeast of Des Moines, in a meeting room with an overmatched air conditioner and a splotchy purple carpet, listening to an earnest but toneless Republican state Senate candidate deliver a 20-minute disquisition that sounded more like a quarterly report to the board of directors than a campaign speech.

Then Alexander got up and attempted, with some success, to rouse a crowd of local activists wilting as visibly as the eagle-shaped ice sculpture converting itself into a puddle next to the peeled shrimp. Half an hour after his speech, Alexander was still shaking hands. “Is there anybody else I still need to meet?” he asked as his aides moved him toward the door.

There are many criticisms that can be leveled against the American system of selecting a president. But it does one thing exceedingly well: it weeds out anyone who is not willing to give everything he has to the chase. No one will accuse Alexander of failing that test. “I don’t know any kind of human activity you pursue at the highest level that doesn’t require a lot of focus,” he says.

The 58-year-old Alexander, who was elected to two terms as Tennessee governor (from 1979 through 1987) and later served George Bush as Education secretary, has been pursuing the presidency almost without interruption since the spring of 1993. In the 1996 Republican presidential primaries, he finished third in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but that wasn’t enough to generate either money or momentum, and he left the race in early March without winning a single state.

Straddling the line between persistence and compulsion, Alexander almost immediately set his sights on 2000. Since 1996, he’s traveled extensively; raised nearly $5 million for a political action committee that supports other Republicans; and burrowed into Iowa, enlisting outgoing Gov. Terry E. Branstad as his key local supporter. Through a second PAC, he began airing television ads this week in Iowa, New Hampshire and a dozen other states.

That could all strengthen Alexander’s position. But his principal problem last time was less a lack of organization than an inability to explain exactly why he wanted to be president. At various points in his campaign, Alexander--a slim, soft-spoken man who looks like he might be comfortable in elbow patches--talked about shifting authority from Washington to the states, reforming education and encouraging more voluntarism. But the package never entirely fit together; by campaign’s end, he was better known for showy tactics (like walking across New Hampshire) than compelling ideas.

This time, though, Alexander has already settled on a potentially more engaging and distinctive message: an agenda “to put government on the side of parents raising children.” Under that umbrella, Alexander is once again promoting education reform--such as ending tenure for teachers and converting most federal education programs into $1,500 vouchers for low- and moderate-income students that could be used either to pay private school tuition or to help fund additional services in public schools.

He’s also talking about discouraging violent and sexually explicit movies and video games and encouraging changes in the workplace and the school day to provide more flexibility for parents.

But the heart of Alexander’s retooled agenda is a new “family friendly” tax cut that he expects to unveil in a speech Sept. 8 at Harvard University. In that plan, Alexander will call for tripling the exemption for children under six (and eventually all children) to $8,000 per child; eliminating the marriage penalty; doubling the deduction for charitable giving; cutting capital gains taxes; and gradually rolling back income tax rates to the two-tier structure--with a top rate of 28%, compared to 39% now--established in the 1986 tax reform act.

With that blueprint, Alexander is consciously picking a fight with the single-rate flat tax touted by likely 2000 rival Steve Forbes. “There is a second rate that acknowledges that Mr. Forbes and I ought to pay a little more because we earn a lot more,” Alexander says. “I’m perfectly willing to pay more so parents with children can pay less.” For his part, Forbes dismisses Alexander’s proposal as “a way station” on the road to real tax reform.

It remains to be seen, of course, if this focus on families will lift Alexander from the Republican presidential pack. Both intellectually and politically, he is marking out crowded terrain; Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft (another likely 2000 GOP contender) is completing his own family oriented tax plan. And if Texas Gov. George W. Bush enters the race, he would be a formidable competitor for the same moderately conservative voters Alexander is targeting.

Alexander isn’t worrying much yet about any of that. He’s on track to officially announce his candidacy early next year. In the meantime, he is methodically collecting names in Iowa. And Thursday, the permanent campaign takes Alexander to New Hampshire, where he will be hosting a lobster bake for more than 1,000 Republicans--and marking another mile on the long road to 2000.