IF REPUBLICAN SEN. Phil Gramm of Texas makes it to the White House, the country will need a new set of rules for future presidential cycles.
Gramm would cancel out the recent vogue for photogenic, friendly candidates who could pass for chat-show hosts. On the stump, he shows no false modesty, nor does he pander to please the many.So if Gramm is elected, would future candidates need time in workshops where consultants plane the jagged outcroppings of ideology and sand the rough edges of personality?
In recent presidential cycles, we have understood that candidates had to raise millions of dollars, but we preferred them to do so discreetly. It was elementary that a candidate needed a military record and was better off without a doctorate (or a wife who had one, too).
But then along came this onetime economics professor from Texas with his distinctive Georgia talk and his jarring sense of confidence.
This is a man who reacted to losing a House committee assignment by resigning, going home, switching parties and getting re-elected as a Republican in a yellow-dog Democratic district. When he came to the Senate in 1985, Gramm's definition of paying his backbencher dues was to propose and press to passage the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law in his first year.
Gramm shatters the shibboleth about media charm with one squinty scowl or a display of his astringent world view.
Gramm prides himself not on flexibility but on uncompromising conservatism. He told a group of Texas glitterati shortly before declaring for president that "there is no give in me." And he has made a no-excuses pledge to balance the federal budget within four years.
Late in 1994, Gramm began started declaring that GOP candidates must have $25 million or more raised in 1995 "to be taken seriously."
The assertion is partly self-serving, in that Gramm knows only he and perhaps Senate GOP leader Bob Dole of Kansas can live up to it. But it also shows Gramm's willingness to defy the critique that says money is a corrupting force.
In some respects, the presidental candidate Gramm recalls most is not a Republican conservative but a Democratic liberal, Alan Cranston of California, who ran unsuccessfully in 1984.
Like Gramm, Cranston was an unlovely presence on television but a savvy inside player in the Senate. Like Gramm, he was closely associated with issues at the cutting edge of his party. Both men were marked as world-beating fund-raisers who enjoyed the activity most senators found most loathsome. And both put a priority on trying to prove early organizational strength.
Many liberals then thought Cranston too much to their liking to succeed, and some conservatives have the same fear about Gramm. They would prefer one of the more genteel Republican senators or governors, any number of whom would like to be president without having to ask.
But others, such as "Dead Right" author David Frum, have suggested that backing Gramm is the best chance for a great leap forward in conservative politics. When Ronald Reagan won on conservative ideas in 1980, the argument was raised that the voters liked Reagan but not his ideas. If Gramm wins, the credit will likely go to the ideas.