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His new success, though, has inspired rivals to work overtime to define who Alexander is. They have been collecting "opposition research" on him for months, and are wielding it, in ads and speeches as well as leaks to reporters, to take advantage of his soft, blurry image and to define him their way: as a hypocrite posing as a folksy, plaid-clad "outsider" while pocketing millions of dollars in profits from insider investment deals not available to the average American; as another slick Southern Governor who repeatedly raised taxes and now dares to run as a conservative. Alexander's communications director, Mark Merritt, retorts, "Bob Dole is desperate, and now that we're gaining, he's taken up Steve Forbes' mudslinging mantle."
In fact, campaign sources told TIME, Dole is taking up the mantle of the Bush campaign, which mortally wounded Dole's candidacy with negative ads in 1988. Late on a snowy Friday in February of that year, Governor John Sununu, running the Bush campaign in New Hampshire, personally delivered to WMUR-TV an ad called "Senator Straddle," which detailed Dole's flip-flops to devastating effect. Late on a snowy Friday last week, Governor Steve Merrill, a Sununu protege, personally delivered to WMUR an ad that attacked Alexander as "too liberal." The ad reminded voters that Alexander once proposed a state income tax for Tennessee, which, like taxophobic New Hampshire, does not have one. The income tax that Alexander proposed, his supporters explain, would have allowed him to cut other levies while keeping Tennessee a low-taxed state. But without money for TV ads, his defense might not get widely heard.
While one such skirmish can sink a campaign, both supporters and rivals will find much more to debate in the character and record of Lamar Alexander, from his idyllic Appalachian boyhood through a public career driven by a steel-willed, bland-faced ambition.
ANDREW LAMAR ALEXANDER was born in 1940 in Maryville, Tennessee, an aluminum-mill town beside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His parents, both educators, saw that their son and two daughters were reading before they entered kindergarten. When Lamar was a schoolchild, his days began at 4 a.m., the hour he rose to deliver newspapers. He had piano practice at 6 a.m., plus after-school sports and choir practice. Weekends were for church and Scouts and chores.
Young Lamar, a natural leader, was elected Governor of Boys State--just as Bill Clinton was. His high school principal, J.P. Stewart, remembers once paddling Lamar for making whooshing noises in class, but was so impressed with "his ease and eloquence in public speaking" that he predicted to the faculty that Lamar would enter national politics.
By the accounts of Alexander's childhood friends, Maryville was pretty much as he describes it in his speeches: a town where the schools and churches were busy and crowded well into the evenings; where nosy neighbors kept kids out of trouble. Though Alexander constantly invokes "the challenges of the next century"--a riff mainly designed to paint Bob Dole as a fossil--the vision he offers is one of middle-class village life in the 1950s.