THEY’RE OFF!

The Gingrich troops are trying this hard because their man is giving his reputation a cross-country carwash during the late-summer congressional recess. He’s been everywhere, even back on the Tonight Show. And he’ll be everywhere some more before it’s over, hoping to get his personal disapproval number down below 60.

There’s another reason the Friends of Newt have rolled into Indianapolis in such precise formation. There are almost three times as many Republican activists here as attended the last such regional meeting, in 1995. Among them are an unusually large contingent of Republican national, state, county, and district officials. They are here in such force, absurd as it sounds, to witness what has become the first big event of the next Republican presidential campaign.

Months ago, Indiana state GOP chairman Mike McDaniel began inviting the presumptive candidates to come give a talk about the party’s future agenda. Dan Quayle agreed immediately — a “new indoor record,” McDaniel’s top aide says. Lamar Alexander and Jack Kemp were also quick to say yes. And as more acceptances rolled in, holdouts were gently encouraged to worry that their absence might be taken to mean something. “That’s how I played it,” McDaniel told me by telephone earlier in the week. He had just locked up his final featured speaker. Steve Forbes, who initially declined, had called to say he would interrupt a family vacation and make the trip.

A surprising number of Republicans in Washington already expect Newt Gingrich will run for president, too. He might, this scenario goes, declare for the office after next year’s mid-term elections — and resign from the House, thus sparing himself an almost certain speakership challenge. He would probably then get knocked out of the 2000 presidential primaries early — and retire from politics, thus sparing his party the burden of running a third successive federal campaign under a barrage of Democratic “anti-Gingrich” ads.

At the start of this Indianapolis conference, it really doesn’t matter whether Newt is go or no-go on the presidency. It matters only that he still dominates the Republican party’s mind and body. This domination made sense in 1994 and 1995, when Gingrich designed the campaign and platform for partisan revolution in Congress. It was already unnatural in 1996, however, when the party’s overarching agenda should have been determined not by its top legislator, but by its presidential candidate. This year the party has nearly suffocated under Gingrich. But it cannot throw off his grip. No one yet dares talk about any aspect of the Republican future until Newt lays down his marker. If these other fellows are going to speak in Indianapolis, the speaker must speak first.

And speak he does. Gingrich brags about the budget deal he’s engineered. Though every specific achievement he mentions has been signed into law by Bill Clinton, they all somehow lead, the speaker insists, to “a very clear choice between two teams” in the House and Senate races of 1998. Next, Gingrich proposes to bring back welfare reform as a “major national issue” this fall.

Gingrich is just getting started. He asks the crowd to “imagine a triangle” of contemporary political issues. The triangle has, by my count, four sides and six goals and “no more than five really big items” — these last constituting a “Second Contract” for the year 2000. Gingrich will design this contract himself, presumably, and the GOP’s “presidential nominee, Senate candidates, and House candidates” will be pressed to embrace it.

He likes the LoJack anti-car-theft device. He wants a “21st-century veterans health care initiative” with satellite hookups to all the world’s medical experts. He says people in Washington still use manual typewriters and carbon paper. He says a whole lot of stuff.

When he’s done, the speaker hustles into an adjacent hallway, where his essential character is instantly on display. He is not “talking to supporters” in this hallway, as a New York Times photo caption subsequently indicates. He is talking to reporters, which is quite a different thing. Jeanne Cummings of the Atlanta Constitution asks Gingrich a perfectly sensible question about a line in his speech unmistakably endorsing a “flat tax with virtual elimination of the IRS.” He denies he said that. And while he’s denying, he gets that classic pinched smile on his face, as if to say he cannot believe how much blind stupidity he must put up with. La verite c’est moi.

His conference audience hasn’t seen or heard this unpleasant exchange. They have only seen and heard his speech. And they have given it a standing ovation. Because, for all his warts, Newt Gingrich remains a very effective wordslinger — when he’s talking to people who don’t get to talk back. And also because, in the Republican party, Newt Gingrich still seems to be The Man.

But he will not seem so much The Man by weekend’s close.

Later in the day, the conferees listen to a polling report by Bill McInturff and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies. POS has just conducted a national survey of 800 registered voters. Some of the questions it’s asked concern the presidential race in 2000. Gingrich, it turns out, is the first-choice nominee for only 5 percent of likely Republican voters — and the results are bad for a number of other famous people who’ll trail through town this weekend. So rather than embarrass anybody, the pollsters do not reveal their horse-race data in Indianapolis. They concentrate on national mood and issues, instead.

The mood of the country is good. Clinton’s approval rating is the highest of his presidency. Approval of Congress is the highest it’s been since 1974. All of which, McInturff and Newhouse say, suggests a status-quo election in 1998, with low turnout and a bunch of reelected incumbents. But, they warn: Economics has receded in political importance; social and cultural concerns are ascendant. And on a number of these non-economic issues, as they are typically debated, voters now lean toward the Democrats. If Republicans are to take full advantage of an incumbent-friendly atmosphere, the pollsters advise, they had better recast some of their rhetoric.

As it happens, most speakers on this weekend’s schedule will ignore this advice and stick to a familiar script. Except in one fairly consistent — and important — respect. The exceptionalism begins almost immediately, with former-Vice President Quayle.

The pre-primary struggle for any Republican presidential nomination usually includes a single Mainstream Conservative, and Quayle clearly believes he deserves that prized tag. His speech is a fluid review of the conservative landscape: school choice, legal reform, science-based environmentalism, term limits, and — of course — family values. Quayle even conducts a mini- seminar on foreign policy and national security, which are subjects Indianapolis’s other would-be presidents scoot right over. But before he gets to any of this, early in his talk, he announces that he “must share with you a concern I have.” And then he launches an attack on Newt’s budget deal.

He says the deal is bad on taxes and spending and welfare. He complains that Republicans got a “grand photo opportunity at the White House,” but “the taxpayer once again got the shaft.” He says the child tax credit has degenerated into “social engineering at its worst.”

At first, Quayle’s thrust at Gingrich makes his audience — party regulars, not anti-Beltway insurgents — uncomfortable, unsure how to react. Then a remarkable thing happens. They start to enjoy it. By the time Quayle demands “a contract with America, not a contract with Bill Clinton,” the room is cheering. “I never mentioned Newt by name,” Quayle will later remind me. He didn’t have to.

After he leaves the stage, the ex-veep is mobbed by well-wishers. It takes him 15 minutes to move all of 10 feet, and he doesn’t get out of the hall for at least half an hour. But before he escapes, reality intrudes. A reporter from the television tabloid American Journal asks Quayle a snotty question about William Figueroa, the infamous “potatoe” kid from 1992. Figueroa is now 17 years old, a high-school dropout, the unmarried father of a 14-month-old girl. Did Quayle have Mr. Potatoe in mind when he bemoaned the decline of American morals?

Quayle stuffs this guy. Onlookers clap. Then a local NBC affiliate does a live stand-up. Looking directly into the vice president’s eyes, the NBC reporter says he is surprised Quayle used a lot of facts and figures in his speech — and spoke without notes. “Is this a new Dan Quayle?” In other words: When did you stop being a moron? Amazingly, this appears not to bother Quayle. He seems totally inured to such insults, and oddly confident that he can overcome his own cartoonish image.

He is in the race, all but announced. He finishes a respectable third in the POS poll, the first or second choice for 24 percent of GOP primary voters. He has formed a PAC. For the time being, that PAC is managing to raise and spend money at a healthy clip. Quayle seems to think that he knows what he’s doing. And whatever that is, he’s pretty good at it. A couple hours after his speech, Quayle hosts a “Hoosier Hospitality Barbecue” at the Indianapolis Speedway infield. Delegates line up for more than an hour to have their picture taken with him — 646 of them in all. It’s a largely home-state group, of course. But not entirely. I fall into conversation with Don Grothe, a party official from Wisconsin. What does he make of the conference’s first day? I wonder. Grothe says: “The budget deal’s not all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

Day two begins with a Lamar Alexander breakfast. Alexander has been running for president almost continuously since 1993. Nineteen months ago, with help from the finest campaign staff in the party, he came within five days of winning the New Hampshire primary — only to be denied by a Bob Dole television blitz. Already, for next time, he is recruiting field operatives. He has a PAC — and ostensible commitments from many of the GOP’s leading fund-raisers. On paper, Alexander is formidable.

He is also the most supple thinker in the emerging pack. The speech he delivers is a sophisticated, general analysis of the state of the union, emphasizing two questions he knows cold: education and race relations. It is well received; he gets plenty of applause.

And yet. Two hours after Alexander is finished, I quiz a few random delegates in the convention center lobby. They’re fuzzy on what he said. It’s a puzzling thing, Lamar’s lack of bite (he polls a nearly invisible ninth place in the POS sample). He is very smart. But Alexander has always seemed a man who can’t convince himself smarts really count for much in electoral politics. He seems convinced, instead, that groundgame mechanics are everything.

The most widely derided gimmicks of Alexander ’96 are gone — the plaid shirt, the cornball slogans, the line about “cut their pay and send them home. ” But the memory of those gimmicks is ubiquitous in the political world, all of whose denizens remain on hairtrigger alert for their return. When, early in his speech, Alexander makes reference to “those of us in the private sector,” I steal a glance at my colleagues on the press platform. Most of them are rolling their eyes.

Ordinary Republicans harbor similar suspicions. When you ask them what they think of Lamar, two words come back with alarming frequency: “moderate” and — worse — “phony.” He has the conservative issues down pat. But he largely ignores their details, the day-to-day disputes that give those issues life. Alexander throws only a few random punches at President Clinton in Indianapolis. He doesn’t mention the budget deal. This disengagement makes what should be his greatest strength — undeniable command of substance — seem like simply one more clever act.

Disengagement isn’t Alan Keyes’s problem. You need know only a few things about Keyes’s appearance in Indianapolis. First, nobody takes him seriously as a presidential candidate. Second, he is “divisive,” which is to say he is someone pro-choice Republicans really love to hate. As soon as Keyes is done speaking here, a conference delegate from North Dakota named Chris Dueker starts from way across the ballroom and makes a beeline for Rick Berke of the New York Times, sitting directly beside me. It’s as if she had special Times radar. And she gives Rick an earful about how Keyes alone is ” enough to make me vote Democratic.” Third, the man’s divisiveness is not actually why nobody takes him seriously as a presidential candidate. Nobody takes him seriously as a presidential candidate because he is temperamentally unpresidential. He has an electric intensity. The electricity is always on, never off — even, I suspect, when he is asleep. This is scary; it has the vague feel of megalomania about it.

Fourth, it’s a fair bet that Alan Keyes is the world’s greatest living orator. He has a spellbinding, almost superhuman eloquence: If you can make your way past his weakness for the deliberately outrageous turn of phrase, you find serious ideas, expressed apparently off the cuff, in always precise and frequently gorgeous prose. Fifth, virtually the entire Keyes address — it runs 50 minutes — is a spectacular broadside against Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress he commands. Not just the budget deal. The whole kit and caboodle. And, sixth, more than 1,000 run-of-the-mill Republican shmoes absolutely adore him for this ballsiness. They stand, they shout, they get goosebumps. By the time Keyes finishes, Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment – – “thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” — is totally out the window.

Keyes is hot; Fred Thompson is cool. It’s not immediately clear why the senator from Tennessee is here, participating in a semi-official audition for wannabe presidential nominees. True, there’s lots of low-level GOP static about him just now. He “would be good” in 2000, you hear. If he got in the race, he would “hurt Lamar” by tapping the same donor barrel. He is “an outsider.” He “has no gender gap.”

But this is guesswork, not a rationale for a candidacy. Moreover, none of this talk can reliably be traced back to Thompson himself. He flatly denies ever having thought about running for president. He has no PAC. He has no campaign staff-in-waiting. He polls, according to POS, down there in the weeds, somewhere between Gingrich and Keyes.

Even more impressive, in a backwards sort of way, Fred Thompson doesn’t bother to pretend that he has a comprehensive plan for America. At least no hint of such a plan appears in his noontime speech. The meatiest section of the talk is a strategic argument about how campaign-finance reform is not ” antiRepublican.” He urges the GOP to “take the lead here.” The delegates applaud only when Thompson adds a word about what Democrats must do: “come out against workers’ union dues being coerced to go [to] candidates that they don’t even support.”

But the crowd applauds more lustily for the rest of the senator’s remarks. Especially when, consistent with the plain spirit of this conference, Thompson criticizes the budget deal, which he voted against. Fred Thompson may not be running for president like the others. But he is at once comfortably “one of us” and not mechanically “on message” for the congressional GOP. So he is perfectly at home in Indianapolis today.

He is also a Big Star, something you can’t fully appreciate until you see his effect on a live audience. People are mesmerized by him. At the end of the lunch he spends a quarter of an hour standing to the side of the podium, answering impromptu questions from anyone who approaches. Too many delegates and camera crews do approach; I can’t get close enough to hear him. But I can see eight-month-old Chad Hiltuman of Indianapolis get shoved into Thompson’s arms at one point, the only actual baby-kissing moment of the entire weekend.

If we set Alan Keyes aside for a moment and judge only the mortals, Steve Forbes gives the best speech of the Midwest Republican Leadership Conference. No, really. He is still for the flat tax. There are echoes of last year when he first takes the stage: the nervous kid with the propellered beanie and memorized book report. But they are only echoes; he is a vastly improved performer. And he has remade the rest of himself, as well. The new Forbes is impressive.

Gone is the futuristic wonderment of his original economic message. Forbes has found something to be angry about in the present — which always helps in politics. The budget deal, he announces, is an “abomination.” There are no doubters in the hall once he’s finished explaining why. He is funny at the start: “I’m surprised they didn’t come up with a tax credit for kids who clean their rooms once a week.” He is interesting in the middle; his text is not loosely stitched together sound-bites, but actual information. And he is convincingly righteous in conclusion. The audience listens intently. They’re with him.

Forbes gets a spontaneous, standing ovation a few minutes later when he ends a long, moving passage on working families with a demand for sweeping tax relief. You would expect him to be this engaged with the “growth agenda.” You would not expect him to be much engaged with the rest of American domestic politics. But he is. He talks about school choice and illegal drugs and tort reform and term limits. He talks about abortion and euthanasia: ” Life begins at conception and ends at natural death.” These are not just cheap mentions. Forbes sounds like a man who’s been doing a lot of reading. And doing it pretty well.

Forbes does not have a PAC. He does have something that probably suits his style and purpose better, though — an issue-advocacy organization called ” Americans for Hope, Growth and Opportunity.” Over the past six months or so, the group has spent several hundred thousand dollars on radio and television ads boosting favored legislation and initiatives in a bunch of different states. And Forbes is picking up further chits, though few people know about it, through service as finance chairman of the national Republican party’s senatorial campaign committee.

He is now the first- or second-choice presidential nominee for 15 percent of Republican primary voters, according to McInturff and Newhouse. No man without experience in elected office has been nominated for president by a major American political party since Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, and he won World War II. Forbes isn’t going to make it, most likely. But before his campaign dies, the old book on him — “Who the hell does this rich guy think he is?” — will have to be thoroughly rewritten.

There are probably 1,500 people in the Indianapolis convention center on Saturday evening. Gov. George W. Bush of Texas is the biggest draw of the entire conference, and the most talked-about presidential possibility in the GOP. He is said to be an excellent governor; his 70 percent approval rating in Texas says so, too. He is said to be flirting with Ralph Reed over a top political consulting job, and Ralph Reed is said to be flirting back. Bush is said to be nailing down foot soldiers farther down the organizational chart, as well, and his father is said to be writing letters in support. Gov. Bush is even supposed to have settled on a primary strategy for 2000. He will largely ignore Iowa and New Hampshire. On Super Tuesday the following month, Gov. David Beasley will deliver South Carolina, Bush’s brother Jeb will deliver Florida, and Texas is already in the bag.

George W. Bush is the leading first choice in the McInturff and Newhouse survey. He is the leading second choice in the McInturff and Newhouse survey. Victory.

But he has to stay home and run for reelection next year first. This is only his fifth out-of-Texas political trip in 1997, and Mike McDaniel really had to press to get him here at all. Bush will be in and out of Indianapolis in less than five hours. He will not talk to reporters. And his staff will only say that his planned remarks are a standard stump speech.

True enough. There’s extensive material about the governor’s accomplishments in Austin. It’s surrounded by pedestrian, anodyne flourishes about what the Republican party stands for. The speech is a dud.

At a restaurant an hour later, a bunch of reporters decide that Bush, as a candidate, is for real, but that the current Bush boomlet is hollow, a function of name identification and the wish for a logical successor to Bob Dole. Later for you, Junior.

And later, too, with fewer qualifications, for Jack Kemp. On Sunday afternoon, Kemp closes the conference bill in Indianapolis. Kemp has lots of soft, residual popularity in the GOP; he finishes second in the POS survey. He has a PAC. He’s traveling around. He has clever friends who know how to manage a national campaign, and his body language indicates he wants to run.

But last time out, seconding Bob Dole, Kemp was an appalling candidate: lazy, undisciplined, selfinvolved. Introducing Kemp to the delegates, Ohio GOP chairman Bob Bennett mentions the 1996 vice presidential nomination. There is an awkward silence. Then a couple people clap. But only a couple. And then you can hear murmurs throughout the ballroom.

Kemp knows he has a problem. About last year he will acknowledge “there are some things I would do differently.” But he doesn’t do any of them today. I have heard him give this speech a dozen times before. You probably have, too. He has changed the words around a bit. He has updated his anecdotes. He says he would have voted for the budget deal if he were still in Congress. Kemp speaks for just under 40 minutes, and he is warmly received. But he is deeply boring.

On the way out of the hall, I notice that everybody’s stopped wearing his ” Newt’s Friend” lapel sticker. I run into someone whose name you would recognize were I at liberty to print it here. He tells me, a propos of nothing, that he has “figured out what Newt’s problem is.” What’s that? I ask. “He’s an a — hole,” comes the reply.

Yes, it is ridiculous (though quite a lot of fun) to tart handicapping the Republican primary campaign of 2000 now, two and a half years out. The basket of potential candidates is enormous. Along with the Indianapolis contingent, there are a couple of people who’ve already gone out of their way to say they’re thinking about the race — senators John Ashcroft of Missouri and Bob Smith of New Hampshire. Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma has told Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal that he might think about it. And there’s a longer list of mentionables, some of them preposterous, some of them not: Trent Lott, John McCain, Pete Wilson, John Kasich, Liddy Dole, Terry Branstad, George Pataki, Christie Whitman, Bill Bennett, fill in the blank. The next Republican presidential campaign is wide open, in other words, as wide open as any in 50 years. There is no “safe” choice for the GOP

Which is one reason the race seems to be starting so early. But it is not the only reason. And the mere fact that its outcome cannot be predicted does not make the entire process absurd, as the wiseguys have it. It is not absurd at all, it turns out, judging from the evidence of Indianapolis. Republicans are beginning finally to recognize that Gingrich is not the world. They are hungry for an agenda that is not generated by Newt, or approved by Newt, or influenced by Newt, or signed by Clinton in a deal with Newt. When they get a taste of such an agenda, even notionally, they like it.

Legislative parties legislate. Presidents — and presidential candidates — lead. Newt Gingrich is in eclipse. The race for 2000 has begun.

David Tell is opinion editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Indianapolis The Republican Presidential Race in 2000 Begins. No, We’re Not Kidding.