Bruce Babbitt always seemed a most unlikely politician, even at his tiny high school in the mountains of northern Arizona. An A student with thick glasses, he dressed plainly and paid no heed to the '50s fashion for ducktail haircuts. He took piano lessons, served as an altar boy, and was voted "most courteous" in his 1956 yearbook. A friend recalls that Babbitt was too small for football, so he worked as the team's equipment manager, "and you know what kind of turkey that can be."
But Babbitt proved more fox than fowl. He dated the prettiest cheerleaders, while quietly befriending everyone from chicano gang members to red-necks and jocks, some of whom he tutored in their problem subjects. Despite his gawkiness and good grades, Babbitt was elected student body president.
Ever since, Bruce Edward Babbitt has made a remarkable career of being underestimated by his political opponents. His wife once described him as a "shy, skinny intellectual with little public-speaking ability." Yet he pushed himself through successful campaigns for student president of Notre Dame, attorney general and Governor of Arizona and now, at age 49, into the biggest race of all.
Gary Hart's reappearance has eclipsed the rest of the Democratic field just as it came Babbitt's turn to capture 15 minutes of fame. But despite being stuck at near asterisk levels in the polls, Babbitt could in the end be helped by Hart's claim to have re-entered the race because the other candidates were avoiding substantive issues. Babbitt, with his rumble-voice lectures about the need to raise taxes and restrain entitlements, has long staked his claim as the brave knight of substance. Relentlessly propounding specific proposals and coherent themes, Babbitt offers as many new and bold ideas as Hart does, but without the personal baggage.
Babbitt's most noted campaign moment was his stunt during the NBC debate in December. "I'm going to stand up," he declared, and did, "to say we can balance the budget only by cutting and needs-testing expenditures and entitlements and by raising taxes." Only a long shot with little to lose, of course, can easily indulge in such bravery (and can ill afford not to). But it was no gimmick: Babbitt has for months been the most courageous candidate in trying to persuade average Americans that hard-nosed policies are the price they must pay to assure prosperity for their children.
In the age of imagery, however, Babbitt has problems selling. With a bobbing and twitching face that folds all over itself, Babbitt seems as comfortable on television as a moose being pelted with buckshot. On the stump he is earnestly plodding and uncharismatic. Nor is his product an easy sell. His austere economic prescriptions are the political equivalent of bran flakes with skim milk: good for what ails the bloated body politic, but not the thing a liberal Iowa Democrat is likely to choose over the buttered and honeyed comfort food that others are promising. If Babbitt advances, it will mark an unlikely triumph of ideas over imagery, of candor over pandering.