DOG PEOPLE TEND TO PICK straightforward names for their pets, as with Gus, the slobbery Labrador who has been barking at former presidential candidate Phil Gramm for staying too long on the campaign trail. Lamar Alexander, though, is a cat person, and when his family acquired two new kittens last year, he dubbed them Kato and Ito, a hopeful play on the potential of fame. For the past year, as Alexander struggled to win the attention of Republican-primary voters, he would flash his chin-up smile and explain that he was "encouraged by the experience of Kato Kaelin that it's possible these days to get very well known very quickly."
That's just what Alexander finally did last week, and just in time, surging to a surprising third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and a top-three position in polling just before the New Hampshire primary. With most Republicans rejecting Iowa runner-up Pat Buchanan as too extreme and divisive, Alexander managed to position himself as the electable alternative to front runner Bob Dole--the place where all the other candidates, perhaps including Dole, would like to be.
Alexander, a multimillionaire lawyer whose ruthless intensity is nicely camouflaged by his courtly manner, carries a blue-ribbon resume. He served as Education Secretary to George Bush and earlier won acclaim as two-term Governor of Tennessee for reforming education and attracting high-paying jobs to his state. Alexander's stump speech touts a neopopulist plan to transfer $200 billion in federal programs ranging from welfare to law enforcement back to the states, communities, churches and families that handled those responsibilities before the New Deal.
His pitch for personal and community responsibility last week won Alexander the endorsement of bleeding-heart conservative William Bennett. But that theme is sounded by most of Alexander's rival candidates for President and does not account for his rise. Instead, his trick has been to turn a liability (he has little money for TV ads) into something of an asset (he isn't running those attack ads that voters say they hate.) What's more, Alexander retains this Mr. Clean image even while running a campaign that is subtly negative. As Dole points out, Alexander was the first of the G.O.P. candidates to run an attack ad, back in September, against Pete Wilson, whom he accused of sins ranging from tax increases to flip-flopping on affirmative action. But Alexander had the good sense to stop running such ads before voters in Iowa and New Hampshire turned against them. He has come this far mainly by emphasizing what he is not: not old, not mean, not a "Washington insider" or a "Wall Street insider," not a reckless right-winger or a TV mudslinger.