Campaign Portrait

By Dan Goodgame, with Babbitt

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.

Babbitt, the only candidate offering a realistic plan for serious deficit reductions, is at once more fiscally conservative than Ronald Reagan and more rigorously progressive than Walter Mondale. Babbitt proposes to shrink the Federal Government to a size Americans are willing to pay for out of pocket: without borrowing, driving up interest rates and choking the economy. He would accomplish this mainly by "needs-testing" social spending so that more goes to the poor rather than to the upper and middle classes, who now consume nearly a third of the federal budget. He would, for example, raise taxes on Social Security benefits for couples earning more than $32,000 a year. "Just as we have had progressive income taxes, we should have progressive Government benefits," Babbitt explains. "Why should the Mellons and the Vanderbilts get the same benefits as a widow living in a cold-water flat?" While cutting entitlement spending, Babbitt would impose a 5% "consumption" tax, basically a national sales tax, which would exempt necessities like food.

On the stump, Babbitt occasionally asks his listeners to stand up if they want their taxes raised or their Government benefits cut. "No takers? Well, let me put it another way," he says, pointing to a young girl in the audience. "How many of you are willing to pick her pocket, just so our generation can consume more than it's willing to pay for?" The line often gets good response, which Babbitt takes as evidence that the "voters know we can't keep spending our children's inheritance."

Babbitt's own inheritance included an expensive and eclectic education and a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Where he grew up, the name Babbitt seldom reminded anyone of the bourgeois conformist of the Sinclair Lewis novel; rather, in Flagstaff, Ariz., it meant roughly what Rockefeller does in New York. Arriving a century ago in Flagstaff, a logging and ranching town south of the Grand Canyon, five Babbitt brothers turned a modest grubstake into a mercantile empire. As Bruce came of age, his family owned the grocery, drugstore and icehouse; a lumberyard and sawmill; and owned or controlled nearly a million acres of ranchland. They were landlords to half the town and employers to half the rest.

They were also Catholic, which in that place and time meant they were not only inclined but well advised to share their bounty with those less fortunate and to wield their power with discretion. A boyhood chum, Bruce Leadbetter, says one reason Bruce Babbitt is uncomfortable addressing crowds is that "his family always emphasized leading quietly, influencing people, not jumping up on a box and talking down to them."

Babbitt studied geology at Notre Dame and as a Marshall scholar in England. On a field trip to Bolivia, however, he got his first look at Third World poverty and experienced an epiphany. "I was doing fascinating research, but meanwhile we were surrounded by this incredible squalor," Babbitt says. Suddenly rocks seemed unimportant.

He enrolled at Harvard Law and marched for civil rights in Selma. He devoted summers to social work in Latin America, developing fluency in Spanish and an abiding interest in the region's politics. Following graduation, he worked for the federal antipoverty program in Texas, then Washington. He found both posts exhilarating, but cultivated a healthy skepticism about "efforts to force social change from the top down."

After returning home to Arizona in 1967, Babbitt practiced law in Phoenix. A former colleague, Anne Bingaman, recalls that "in a firm of young workaholics, Bruce stood out as the one who never ate lunch and came in on Sundays." Babbitt donated many hours to pro bono cases, but was little involved in politics. Then another epiphany. While representing the Navajo tribe in a voting-rights case against the state, Babbitt realized, "My God, the attorney general has the largest law firm in Arizona, and it's devoted to the defense of racial discrimination. What it ought to be is a public-interest law firm!" And so it became after Babbitt's reformist campaign won him the attorney general's office in the 1974 election.

In 1978, Babbitt succeeded to the Governor's office through a fluke: the elected Governor stepped down, his replacement died, and the attorney general was left next in line. Babbitt then won election to two terms in his own right, proving himself a popular and shrewd executive in a deeply conservative state. He balanced his budgets, refused to throw money at problems and avoided fights he couldn't win. He pressed the legislature to improve health care for the poor, while holding taxes down and deregulating business. Says House Majority Whip Jane Hull, a conservative Republican and frequent Babbitt opponent, "I guess he did drag us kicking and screaming into the 20th century."

Unlike such antipoliticians as Jimmy Carter, Babbitt learned and relished the levers of power, including the veto, the initiative, patronage and press leaks. Republicans controlled the Arizona legislature, but it was not veto proof, and Babbitt would threaten to sink the pet bills of legislators if they didn't accept his program. He made good on such threats a record 114 times.

Mostly, though, Babbitt excelled by mastering the details, concentrating on them to the point of becoming something of a policy wonk. Even now, in the crucible of a presidential campaign, he manages to read widely and thoroughly, especially on foreign affairs and economics. Says Rob Smith, a Sierra Club official who has worked closely with him, "In negotiations, he is always the best-informed person at the table, so he usually wins."

Babbitt's finest achievement as Governor was his passage of landmark legislation to protect the lifeblood of Arizona's rapid economic growth: its scarce underground water. This came only after a dramatic charade in which Babbitt enlisted Cecil Andrus, then Secretary of the Interior. The two agreed that Andrus would threaten to cut funding for a major water project dear to powerful economic interests in Arizona unless the state managed its groundwater better. "I went home and called him an overreaching federal hypocrite," Babbitt recalls with a grin. Then, having immersed himself in the arcana of water management, Babbitt mediated eight months of talks among farmers, miners, developers, municipalities and environmentalists, emerging with a plan that the legislature accepted unchanged.

The perennial struggles beween Arizona's copper unions and its union- busting managements have influenced Babbitt's ideas on what he calls "workplace democracy." He believes government should encourage profit sharing and worker ownership of companies and end tax breaks for "companies like General Motors, which lay off thousands of workers while paying big bonuses to executives."

While Babbitt can sound impassioned about creating jobs, his room temperature is cooler than most. Detractors call him aloof and ungrateful for political help, and even many allies describe him with more admiration than affection. Says Alfredo Gutierrez, former Democratic leader in the Arizona senate, "I consider Bruce a friend, but he has never been a warm, inclusive person, and that offends some people in politics."

What warmth Babbitt has to offer seems reserved for his family: Wife Hattie, 40, a Phoenix trial lawyer he met while working in the Texas antipoverty program, and Sons Christopher, 12, and T.J., 10. Ardent naturalists, the Babbitts regularly spent weekends and holidays hiking the canyons and skiing the mountains of northern Arizona before the campaign.

Like Carter, Hart and other once obscure presidential hopefuls, Babbitt is betting his candidacy on its first test: the Feb. 8 Iowa caucuses. Though he is still low in the polls, his organization is razor sharp in both Iowa and New Hampshire, where grass-roots efforts are particularly crucial.

Running a low-budget, long-shot campaign, Babbitt has not been above an occasional publicity stunt. Even before his stand-up routine on the NBC debate, he was the first presidential candidate to appear this year in a Saturday Night Live skit (in which he is caught trying to sneak extra grocery items through the express checkout). Following his disastrous video performance at the Houston debate in July, Babbitt almost daily practiced speaking into a videocamera, sometimes sending the tapes to an acting coach.

What Babbitt has not so easily addressed is his difficulty with the essence of political communication: the ability to reduce complex issues to simple, evocative images that can capture a mass audience and inspire it. This is as important to governing as to getting elected, as Presidents from Ronald Reagan back to Franklin Roosevelt and before have shown. At a Democratic rally in Iowa, however, amid the balloons emblazoned with the candidates' names, hung Babbitt banners proclaiming such slogans as UNIVERSAL NEEDS TESTING! Not exactly a rallying cry. If Babbitt is to coax a few more voters to stand up with him for such tough medicines, he will have to come across less as a pedantic schoolmaster and more as a leader who can make prudence seem inspirational.