A phone on the wall twittered, moments before presidential hopeful Gary Bauer was to address 300 restless public high school students in Stillwater, Minn.
It was the school’s principal calling to say that Mr. Bauer could talk about anything he wanted to, so long as he didn’t talk about God.
Bauer, a longtime spokesman for Christian conservatives, had not planned to say a word about God. But the principal’s challenge, like many others in Bauer’s political life, was one he could not resist.
Dropping his prepared speech, Bauer armed himself with a $20 bill and a copy of the Declaration of Independence and went out to battle for the hearts and minds of a group of kids too young to vote.
The obstacles Bauer faced that morning in Stillwater were a microcosm of some of the problems that hang over his long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
To begin with, only a few of the students in the auditorium had heard of Gary Bauer, the 53-year-old former Reagan aide and religious activist.
His passions–opposition to abortion, to judicial activism, to regular relations with China–were not, for the most part, theirs. And standing just a few inches more than 5 feet tall, Bauer looked up not only at the football players, but at most of the chess team.
“I don’t look like a president. I don’t sound like a president. It’s possible for me to walk into a room and nobody notices,” Bauer said later, with a touch of Kentucky twang in his voice.
Bauer is an unlikely candidate in other ways too.
He remains on the fringes of the political establishment, though he has spent his entire career in Washington. His natural base is Christian conservatives, yet evangelical leaders such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson have conspicuously declined to endorse him.
But Bauer has an unshakable faith that if people will hear him out, a speech–indeed, the whole campaign–can turn around in a single, defining moment.
That morning in Minnesota, after a few of his jokes wilted (“Since Jesse Ventura was elected, I’ve been thinking of calling myself Gary `The Body’ Bauer”), Bauer pulled the $20 bill from his pocket and held it high above his head.
He promised the bill to the student who could recite the 36 words from the Declaration of Independence that make up the moral foundation of the country.
There was an awkward moment of silence. Then, quietly, one boy in the back began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .”
Bauer handed over the $20. Moving through the crowd, he told the teenagers that 10 years earlier, Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, not much older than themselves, had waved copies of that declaration even as tanks began to rumble toward them.
Now, he said, not only was the American government cozying up to the brutal regime that quashed that moment of hope, but some schools in the U.S. refused to post the Declaration of Independence for fear of bringing God into the schools.
“It was an amazing thing to see these American kids sitting there, and some of them for the first time thinking about how American values resonate all over the world,” Bauer said. “I would say a third to a half of those students took Bauer stickers on the way out and slapped them on their shirts.”
With primary poll numbers showing support for him ranging from 7 percent to 8 percent among Iowa Republicans to 2 to 3 percent in New Hampshire, Bauer’s campaign needs that kind of boost on the national stage.
Bauer’s only defining moment so far has been a peculiar little anti-scandal in which he called a news conference to deny sexual innuendo that few outside Washington had heard in the first place.
But, like a campaign mantra, members of the Bauer inner circle repeat the names of better-known, more telegenic, more experienced Republican candidates who have not made it this far: Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, John Ashcroft, Bob Smith, John Kasich.
“Defining moments do happen in campaigns,” Bauer insisted. “For that moment to happen, you’ve got to be in the campaign. Every day we’re in, our chances increase.”
One reason Bauer has been able to survive is the grass-roots support and fundraising power he cultivated among Christian conservatives for more than a decade.
Spokesman Tim Goeglein said the Bauer campaign has gathered 110,000 contributions from individuals, second only to Texas Gov. George W. Bush in that category.
Though Bush’s total of $60 million overwhelms Bauer’s treasury, Bauer reported raising $6.2 million by early November. Goeglein said the campaign will receive another $4 million or more in federal funds beginning in January.
Many of those donors have been listening to Bauer on the radio or watching him on television for years.
In 1988, after eight years in the Reagan White House and Department of Education, Bauer took over the Family Research Council, a fledgling think tank sponsored by Focus on the Family and its founder, radio evangelist Dobson.
Under Bauer’s leadership, the Family Research Council became a $14 million-a-year operation with a mailing list of more than 400,000 families across the nation.
Bauer taped daily radio addresses on political issues, was a frequent guest on Dobson’s radio and television shows, and in 1990 co-wrote a book with Dobson, “Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of our Kids.”
Increasingly, the mainstream media turned to Bauer as a representative of Christian conservatives, and in 1996 he spearheaded the effort to keep an anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform, infuriating party moderates and winning attention from conservatives.
The next year he took a leave from the Family Research Council to form a political action committee, Campaign for Working Families. The organization, which raised $5,865,000 in 1998, invested its funds in both winners and losers. Among the winners was Republican Peter Fitzgerald in his campaign for the Senate from Illinois.
But there were high-profile setbacks. In a California House district, Bauer became a campaign issue, and conservative Republican Tom Bordonaro lost.
Even in northern Kentucky, where Bauer was born and raised, the PAC’s money and Bauer’s personal appearances were not enough to prevent an upset loss for the favored candidate, Gex “Jay” Williams.
Nothing seems to come simply for Bauer. By his account and others, his years in the Reagan White House were punctuated by sharp debates in which Bauer and a handful of other advisers argued for action on such causes as school prayer and opposition to homosexual rights, issues that did not interest the fiscal conservatives who dominated the administration.
That gave Bauer credibility as a social conservative, though he often had little to show for it. Over the last few years, as a vacuum developed in the leadership of the Christian right, Bauer seemed a perfect candidate to step into the role.
But as the 2000 campaign geared up, some prominent evangelicals declared it was time for conservative Christians to get out of politics altogether. Others, including Robertson and former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed, have thrown their support to Bush, the kind of moderate Republican they once campaigned against.
Reed will not comment on any candidate other than Bush, but he did suggest that religious conservatives were looking for a less strident, “friendlier face” to advance their agenda.
“They are tired of having their faith viewed as something that is harsh and angry and exclusionary,” said Reed, who is doing grass-roots organization and direct mailing for Bush. “They’re looking for someone who is solid on the core values, but who can also win.”
Even Dobson declines to comment on the campaign of his former colleague. A spokesman said Focus on the Family could not endorse any candidates without endangering its non-profit status.
All of that seems only to increase Bauer’s resolve. His oldest daughter and campaign assistant, Elyse, calls it “principled stubbornness.” Close friend and campaign adviser Jeff Bell says Bauer is a fighter whose best move is the counterpunch.
Bauer actually has some street fighting experience.
While Bush, Bill Bradley, Al Gore and Steve Forbes were raised in the lap of plenty, Bauer grew up the son of an alcoholic steelworker-turned-janitor in the notoriously corrupt town of Newport, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.
He recalls the time in grade school when three kids jumped him in an alley and beat him up. When he got home, his father demanded to know the names of the boys. After Gary told him who they were, his father drove him to the house of each boy, one by one, and demanded that they fight then and there.
He lost the one-on-one fights, too, he recalled.
But in the early 1960s, as a high school student, he joined the biggest fight Newport ever had, a campaign by area reformers to kick out organized crime.
The reformers, known as the Committee of 500, were mostly professionals from nearby towns. But like his decision to commit himself to Christ at First Baptist Church of Newport, the teenage Bauer’s decision to join the reformers was his alone–irritating to his father, mystifying to his friends.
“He wasn’t a zealot. He had really made his mind up that he wanted to do something to make a difference,” said Tete Turner, a high school classmate of Bauer.
After a tough battle in which the tires were slashed on the Bauer family car, a reformer sheriff was elected and drove the mob influence out of town.
Early memories of Newport pop up in Bauer’s campaign speeches. But Newport does not remember Bauer so well.
At First Baptist Church, secretary Rosella Henson knew of Bauer when he was teenager, but didn’t form a strong impression of him until she saw him in recent years, back in town to visit his mother.
“When he comes back here, he always is so gracious and sincere. That’s why it’s so unfair to a fine young man,” she volunteers. The “it” Henson refers to is the scandal of the closed doors.
On Sept. 29, Bauer called a news conference to deny he was having an affair with a young woman on his campaign staff. Beforehand, few had heard such rumors. Even afterward, nobody would accuse Bauer of actual misconduct, at least on the record.
What former Bauer campaign chairman Charlie Jarvis, who defected to the Forbes campaign, and a handful of other ex-staffers say is that Bauer spent too much time behind closed doors with the staffer.
Jarvis said that as a representative of Christian conservatives, Bauer had to hold himself above any appearance of wrongdoing. Bauer defended his right to meet privately with staffers, but had a glass door installed on his campaign office.
The rest of the world shrugged.
“I don’t know what the ultimate effect of all that will be, but for (wife) Carol and I and our families, it was a relief to stop boxing ghosts,” Bauer said.
What he really wants is to go toe-to-toe with the GOP front-runners. In the first televised presidential debate last month in Durham, N.H., it was Bauer who broke through the politeness, attacking Forbes for vagueness and calling Sen. John McCain’s response to a question on abortion weak.
It was not a defining moment, but a few hours later, on an early-morning flight back to Washington, Bauer was riding high.
“There was a moment when I looked over at the other candidates and it became evident to me that they were more nervous than I was,” he said. “It was fun to be able to mix it up. And even to be able to bring up Tiananmen Square and the sanctity of life in a forum like that–that’s an incredible thing for a janitor’s son.”
CANDIDATE PROFILE
Gary Lee Bauer
Republican from Virginia
Age 53
BACKGROUND
Since taking over as president of the Family Research Council in 1988, Bauer has become a leading spokesman for the religious right. In 1997 he formed the Campaign for Working Families, which quickly became the nation’s second largest political action committee. During the Reagan administration, he spent five years as a top official in the Department of Education, and eventually became the director of the White House Office of Policy Development.
PERSONAL
Raised in a blue-collar family in northern Kentucky, Bauer joined a Baptist church as a teenager and earned scholarships to get himself through Georgetown University Law Center.
FAMILY
Bauer met his wife, Carol, when they both worked at the Republican National Committee in 1973. They have three children: Elyse, 21; Sarah, 17, and Zachary, 12.
MESSAGE
Bauer mixes a traditional social conservative’s message-strong opposition to abortion, to judicial activism and to government control over education-with more populist economic stances and a foreign policy that takes a hard line against China because of human-rights violations.
