THE SEARCH FOR ALEXANDER

By DAN GOODGAME AND JOHN DICKERSON

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.

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.

For all the disdain he heaps today on the "arrogant empire" of Washington, Alexander told friends in college and law school that he was eager for a career in government and politics. He clerked for a federal judge in New Orleans, the legendary liberal John Minor Wisdom, while moonlighting as a trombone and washboard player in a jazz band on Bourbon Street. He worked as a Senate aide to his mentor, Howard Baker of Tennessee. And he served a stint as an aide in the Nixon White House.

Returning to Tennessee, he lost his first bid for Governor in 1974 because, he recalls, "I flew around in a blue suit from one Rotary meeting to the next, preaching to the converted." All of that changed four years later, when Alexander donned a red-and-black plaid shirt and walked 1,022 miles, crisscrossing the state, impressing voters with his vigor and intelligence.

During two terms as Governor, Alexander took on the teachers' union to enact merit pay and other education reforms, which sharply improved the state's ranking in national achievement tests but required a 1-c- increase in the sales tax. He also raised fuel taxes three times to expand Tennessee's interstate highways without federal help. Those investments, combined with 11 trips to Japan and scores to Detroit, helped Alexander persuade Nissan and Saturn to build huge new factories in Tennessee, creating thousands of high-paying jobs.

This period revealed the steel behind Alexander's smile. Cavit Cheshire, then executive secretary of the Tennessee Education Association, told the New York Times that the Governor was "only nonconfrontational until you cross him." The public seldom saw this side of Alexander. But friends and family, as well as political rivals, have seen his hard side. By his own account Alexander neglected his family during his terms as Governor. One of his daughters, Leslee, wrote in a 1987 essay, "I characterize my father as an egret, standing on one leg and viewing the world. Although powerful in government, he is withdrawn in family life."

During his time as Governor, while doing good for his state, Alexander did well for himself and his family. Worth $151,000 when he was first elected Governor in 1978, he has increased his wealth at least twentyfold, to more than $3 million. He has released all his tax returns and explains, "When I was in private life, I tried to make money, and I did."

But Alexander made much of his fortune through sweetheart deals, initiated while he was in public office, which could be seen as favors from cronies and people doing business with the state. Should he win the G.O.P. nomination, Democrats will make sure these deals get the same scrutiny given the Clintons over Whitewater. "Lamar is the consummate insider," says Will Cheek, chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party. "That's the kind of guy who gets these deals." Examples:

The Knoxville Journal came on the market in 1981, and Alexander, then Governor, was invited to join a group of investors who had an option to buy it. Alexander paid $1 for his share of the option, which the investors then sold to Gannett Corp. for stock and options that were eventually worth $620,000 to Alexander.

Whittle Communications, a publishing company that planned a chain of for-profit schools, employed Alexander as a consultant in 1987, between his term as Governor and his appointment as president of the University of Tennessee. In return, the Alexanders were given the right to purchase $10,000 in stock, which they did. Company founder Chris Whittle, however, did not cash the Alexanders' check until October 1988, after Whittle agreed to sell part of his company to Time Inc., which pushed the stock price up sharply. Two months later, Whittle bought back the Alexanders' stock for $330,000.

Blackberry Farm, a romantic $200-a-night inn and restaurant in the Appalachian foothills, was one-third owned by Alexander when he became president of the university. Having informed school officials that he had disposed of his interest in the inn, he began recommending it for university functions--14 of them that eventually cost $64,626. What he didn't disclose was that he had transferred his interest in the inn to his wife. Had they known of Honey Alexander's interest in the inn, university officials "would have continued their objections," according to a 1992 state report.

The Ingram Group, run by Alexander's gubernatorial chief of staff Tom Ingram, received $36,472 from the university for a study of ways to sell more football tickets. Those payments were steered to Ingram by Alexander, and when university officials objected, Alexander directed that the funds be routed through a third party.

The Memphis law firm of Baker Donelson Bearman & Caldwell has paid Alexander $295,000 over the past year, even while he has been campaigning full time. He has filed no hourly billings, but instead is paid for "strategic advice" to three large clients. A former partner of the firm, describing the arrangement to the Wall Street Journal, said, "I think it's clearly an investment in case he becomes President."

If so, that investment is looking far better than it did only a week ago. Drawing large and responsive crowds in New Hampshire, Alexander sharpened his "compassionate conservative" pitch, promising to "get Washington off our backs, and us off our butts." If parents don't like their kids seeing trashy talk shows and R-rated movies on cable, he says, they shouldn't just blame Hollywood; they should "turn off the TV and read to your kids." He would abolish the Department of Education (a move he never mentioned when he was running the place) and return Medicaid, the health program for the poor and disabled, to the states. He wants welfare to be administered entirely by nonprofit community groups, with the help of a new $500 tax credit for charitable contributions.

Meanwhile, Alexander has sought to appease the Republican right in ways that are at odds with his moderate record. Since 1994 he has adopted tortured new positions on abortion and affirmative action. He promises a "fifth branch of the military" to patrol U.S. borders for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. And he allowed last week, in response to questions, that if he won the nomination, he would "consider" Pat Robertson, the loopy televangelist, as his running mate.

To assess what he would do as President, one wonders whether to read his lips or his footprints. Would he use government, as he did in Tennessee, to improve the nation's infrastructure and education and to attract better jobs? He says not. He says he would shrink the Federal Government and empower Governors--and ministers and parents--to do what he and the people of his state did.

While Alexander struggled last week to duck the "liberal" label, another danger lurked: that his smooth, smiling, political persona would remind voters too much of that other former Southern Governor now sitting in the White House. The trademark red-and-black plaid shirt, which seemed fresh 18 years ago, now seems to some voters to be as contrived as some of Alexander's new political positions. No wonder he's the candidate Bill Clinton fears the most.

--With reporting by Adam Cohen/Nashville with Alexander and Michael Duffy/Manchester

With reporting by ADAM COHEN/NASHVILLE WITH ALEXANDER AND MICHAEL DUFFY/MANCHESTER