The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The Midwest's best political reporter, David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register, is poised and waiting for the first 1992 Democratic presidential prospector to jet across the Mississippi into Keokuk or come stealthily by Hertz into Council Bluffs. His early-warning network, tuned to the Iowa caucuses that will kick off the next presidential season two years from now, is unerring.

But these days Yepsen looks out over the rolling fields greening in the spring sun and sees nothing. "Strangely quiet," he says. Last October, Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen showed up and added his weight to a notably leaden fund raiser. A couple of months ago, Colorado's voluble Congresswoman Pat Schroeder came around for two eminently forgettable speeches at Drake and Iowa universities. Since then nary a candidate.

With no bona fide contender to write about, Yepsen lobbed in a column two weeks ago on the virtues of neighboring Nebraska's telegenic Senator Robert Kerrey. In the great political quiet, the piece created a sonic boom. Kerrey, 46, an adequate Governor and untested Senator, is now the toast of political pundits and television interviewers. They dwell less on his vague achievements in government than on his travels, his Medal of Honor from Vietnam, his mastery of a restaurant business and the fact that he lured Hollywood's sexy superstar Debra Winger to his bachelor quarters in Lincoln. Those credentials play well in a party that has had trouble defining its patriotism and gender.

But Kerrey, like other Democratic mentionables, has not formed a political- action committee to raise funds, set up an exploratory committee, hired a pollster, secretly gathered a brain trust or assembled any of the normal paraphernalia of political conquest. At a similar point in previous election cycles, John Kennedy had barnstormed the U.S.; George McGovern, Gary Hart and Walter Mondale had functioning organizations; and Jimmy Carter and Richard Gephardt had wandered purposefully through Iowa's byways.

Jesse Jackson is out and about, of course, but he is a shooting star in search of a constellation. New Jersey's Senator Bill Bradley, Georgia's Sam Nunn and Tennessee's Al Gore are all up for re-election and have pledged their loyalties to their constituencies -- for now. So have Governors Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Mario Cuomo of New York, Senators Charles Robb of Virginia and George Mitchell of Maine, and such congressional possibilities as Schroeder, Gephardt and Speaker Tom Foley.

All but the most hopelessly addicted political junkies -- and even a few of them -- welcome the respite from the ceaseless campaigns of the past. "I'm glad of it," swears Democratic Chairman Ron Brown. "The American public cannot take another three-year campaign." But the main reason for the Democrats' hesitation is not to give the electorate a break. Says election analyst Richard Scammon: "Bush is so high in the polls, '92 is so close, these people may have decided to pass it by."

In the end the Democrats must run somebody -- and they will. Not long ago, a retired Senator walked into the office of Robert Strauss, former Democratic chairman, and urged him to announce his candidacy. Strauss, 71, declared himself too old. The prominent whisper now is that the Democrats should field the soothingly sensible Bentsen as a sacrificial lamb and put Kerrey beside him to position the Nebraskan for the big Quayle bash in '96. Trouble is that neither Bentsen nor Kerrey has said he would go along with the plan. It may be a while before Dave Yepsen sees anything on his far horizons but Washington's trial balloons.