BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS

By MARGARET CARLSON/MANCHESTER

After a late night of wooing New Hampshire Republicans, Senator Richard Lugar is up early at the Manchester Holiday Inn for a sensible breakfast of All-Bran and whole-wheat toast. It is part of an unvarying routine that includes yogurt and two apples for lunch daily and meticulous markings on a chart tracking his morning run. Such a creature of habit is now doing the most insensible thing by jumping into the G.O.P. presidential primaries in a way the political oddsmakers see as quixotic: he is already vastly out-financed and out-organized. Until he decided to test the presidential waters, Lugar was best known for being passed over for the vice-presidential jobs taken by Gerald Ford, George Bush and most ignominiously in 1988 by his junior Indiana counterpart Dan Quayle. He survived that indignity with grace. Now he senses there is a hunger in the country for a grownup who excels at foreign policy, a quiet statesman who worries more about the next generation than the next election and who is the most experienced foreign-policy expert in the race. He could have a chance. Says Charles Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report: "I can picture Lugar sitting in the Oval Office--I just can't picture how he gets there."

Lugar believes a strong message trumps early organization, and that voters are offended that $20 million is the cost of admission to the race. His candidacy, which he will officially announce on April 29, rests on two pillars: a President must have the foreign-policy experience to define the role of a superpower lost in a post-cold war, multilateral world; the other is the discipline to cut the deficit.

When he served as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lugar managed a fractious group of Senators through a thicket of contentious issues like aid to the contras. He persuaded Ronald Reagan to get the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos to leave office but lined up votes to override Reagan's veto of a bill imposing sanctions on South Africa. A supporter of the defeated balanced-budget amendment, he is rare among his colleagues in proposing specific cuts that hurt a powerful constituency that happens to be his own: farmers. He is leading the charge against farm subsidies, proposing cuts of $15 billion--a 30% slice.

Lugar is distinguished by his normality. Ambitious but not driven, the squeaky-clean Senator has returned $2.4 million of his personal office budget to the Treasury and rarely uses the franking privilege. He lives in suburban Virginia with Charlene, the college sweetheart he married 39 years ago and with whom he has four sons. The couple met when they shared the presidency of the student body at Denison University. While at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, he volunteered for the Navy, where as an intelligence officer, he occasionally briefed President Eisenhower.

The problem for Lugar is that he may not be heard in the din of a campaign. A cheerful man, he is popular with his Senate colleagues and at home-he won a fourth term in November with 67% of the vote. Nevertheless, he comes across as stiff and bland, with sentences as perfectly clipped as his hair and nails. But his solid, serious nature could serve to distinguish him. An eat-your-spinach campaign helped Paul Tsongas win New Hampshire in 1992; if voters want no-frills straight talk from their politicians, Lugar may be their man.

--By Margaret Carlson/Manchester