He's Proud He's a Politician

But Howard Baker faces long odds in his presidential bid

"I'm proud of Joe because he is a politician and I'm proud that I'm a politician." Thus Senator Howard Baker, 53, sounded one of his main campaign themes last week at a dinner given by New York's Nassau County Republican Chairman Joseph Margiotta. Hands in his pockets, exuding an easy sincerity, the Senate minority leader gave an apt demonstration of the down-home-style politics that he hopes will carry him to the presidency. Last week he became the ninth Republican to declare his candidacy.

In making his formal announcement in the Senate Caucus Room, Baker stressed the need for a "President who knows Washington well enough to change Washington," because "surely we cannot withstand still more Washington inexperience." He billed himself as the candidate "who can win in the South and in the North, on the farms and in the cities, with the whites and with the black Americans, with the old and the young." He talked tough about the Soviets. Approval of SALT, he declared, would "guarantee to the Soviet Union the margin for error that used to be ours." He said the nation must have a President who will "face up to the realities of a Soviet foreign policy that probes every weakness and fills every vacuum."

Baker has politics bred into his bones. Born in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, a pocket of Republicanism since the Civil War, he is the third generation of his family to go into politics. (His grandmother succeeded her husband as sheriff; his stepmother followed his father into Congress.) After graduating from the University of Tennessee College of Law, he became a spellbinding courtroom attorney. Following an unsuccessful attempt in 1964, Baker was elected to the Senate two years later. He demonstrated his independence by opposing his own father-in-law, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, on Dirksen's effort to block the U.S. Supreme Court's one-man, one-vote decision. Baker was twice re-elected with large pluralities.

Watergate, which ruined so many Republican reputations, added luster to his. As a member of the Senate Watergate committee, he appeared daily on television, sharply probing the President's men with courtroom techniques. Occasionally, his pronouncements lighted up the murky scene. "There are animals crashing around in the forest," he once remarked. "I can hear them, but I can't see them." Though some critics grumbled that he was too friendly with the Nixon White House early in the hearings, he emerged as a national figure and a front runner for Vice President on the 1976 Republican ticket. But Gerald Ford chose Senator Robert Dole, much to Baker's disappointment. Rumor had it that Baker was rejected at least in part because of the alcohol problems of his wife Joy, who had stopped drinking six months earlier.

Feeling he had been misused, Baker bounced back fast. He made a dramatic entry into the race for Senate minority leader in 1977 and beat out the favored Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan. He proved surprisingly effective in a generally thankless job, welding the independent-minded Republican Senate barons into a cohesive opposition without making enemies. Says Nevada's G.O.P. Senator Paul Laxalt, Ronald Reagan's campaign chairman: "Nobody has a bad word to say about Howard."

In the Senate, Baker has aimed with a Tennessee marksman's instinct for the middle of most domestic political issues. He favors a constitutional amendment to achieve a balanced budget, but he also wants a provision to authorize deficit spending by a two-thirds vote of Congress. He backs the Equal Rights Amendment, but he voted against extending the deadline for ratification. He supported most civil rights legislation and sponsored clean air and water bills that created extensive new Government regulations. Today he is a staunch opponent of Big Government and excessive regulation. In foreign policy issues, Baker has taken independent and indeed courageous stands. After much soul searching, he backed the Panama Canal treaties.

Baker's Republican critics say that he compromises too much for his own good, that he is not partisan enough to rally the party faithful or to damage the Democrats. As a skilled photographer, Baker realizes that he must get his sometimes fuzzy political image into sharper focus. During the uproar over the Soviet brigade in Cuba, he attacked Carter for not responding vigorously, but then refused to say what action he felt should have been taken. "He doesn't want his hands tied," says his campaign manager, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar. "He will have to do better in getting across his point of view in a shorthand statement."

Running considerably behind Reagan and neck and neck with John Connally in the polls, Baker hopes to break away from his rivals in the primaries in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. Since surveys indicate that he arouses less hostility than either Reagan or Connally, he thinks he can emerge as a compromise candidate. But he is not as well organized as fellow moderate George Bush, and his staff, led primarily by Tennesseans, is inexperienced in national politics.

At week's end, Bush also demonstrated that he may be a better stump speaker than Baker. Both candidates showed up at a G.O.P. forum in Portland, Me., where Bush won so much support with a blood-stirring campaign speech that he narrowly upset Baker in a presidential straw vote. The Tennessean had been expected to win because he had the backing of the state's popular Republican Senator William Cohen. Baker cannot afford many more such defeats if he is to build the kind of national consensus that he has so skillfully crafted in the Senate's smaller world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.