Campaign 2000 III: A Bore for Gore? The prospect of Sen. Dick Durbin - possible vice-presidential candidate

He's a fiftysomething career pol with a youthful head of dark hair, a tendency to earnest dullness, a vocal antipathy for the tobacco industry, and a willingness to defend Bill Clinton through thick and thin. Al Gore? No, Dick Durbin.

If you're asking "Dick who?" you're not alone. A longtime fixture on Capitol Hill, the senior senator from Illinois could go unrecognized walking down the street in any city outside his home state-or, come to think of it, in his home state. Among the high-stepping thoroughbreds who make up the Senate, Durbin is a workhorse, known not for flash but for diligence and reliability. He's the logical choice to get the second spot on the Democratic ticket if Gore passes on the more eye- catching prospects in favor of a safer one-and, perhaps, a kindred spirit.

Durbin's most obvious asset is Illinois, a swing state with 22 electoral votes that voted for the losing presidential candidate only twice in the last century. Durbin thrashed a well-funded conservative Republican in the 1996 race to fill the seat vacated by liberal darling Paul Simon, and he ran particularly well among the independent-minded suburban voters who generally hold the balance of power in the state. As a Catholic midwesterner, he complements Gore without creating the prospect of personality or policy clashes. And as a scandal-free team player who doesn't need a Chevy Suburban to carry around his ego, he has no obvious strikes against him.

Durbin would appeal to a tiny but close-knit ethnic bloc found mostly in Chicago: Thanks to his immigrant mother, he apparently would be the first Lithuanian-American on a national ticket. If he's chosen, the Democrats would combine Tennessee and Illinois at the top of the ballot for the second time in 50 years-Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver did it in 1956. Kefauver got the vice-presidential nomination that year by beating out another Tennessee senator: Albert Gore Sr.

If Durbin has a weakness, it lies in his anonymity and unassuming demeanor. One asset in a vice-presidential nominee is plausibility as president-like Lyndon Johnson in 1960, George Bush in 1980, Al Gore in 1992, or Jack Kemp in 1996. All had run for the top job before. But it's not likely that any of Durbin's Illinois constituents ever thought of him as a future leader of the free world. If Gore is sober and stiff enough to pass for a Secret Service agent, Durbin could be lost in the crowd at a conference of CPAs. Shortish and built for comfort, with looks that are telegenic without being handsome, he's the political equivalent of those Holly wood character actors whose faces are familiar and whose names are unknown. He can fill a role capably without ever threatening to upstage the star. Presi dential timber? Not by a long shot. But if there is such a thing as vice- presidential timber, Durbin is it.

He's made his name (such as it is) on the kind of soccer-mom issues Gore plans to exploit this year, chiefly tobacco and gun control. He counts his anti-tobacco crusade as his proudest achievement, having sponsored the first ban on smoking on domestic airline flights back in 1987, and pushed to make the proposed (and failed) tobacco settlement more punitive. He takes pride that, upon arriving in the upper chamber, he got the Senate to restrict smoking in all public areas-the first restrictions it had ever approved. He has something in common with Gore: a close relation (in Durbin's case, his chain-smoking father) who died of lung cancer. But Durbin isn't known for making shameless political use of his personal loss.

He saves his grandstanding for gun control. By the time the 1996 Senate campaign was over, most voters probably thought his opponent's name was Assault Weapon Salvi, thanks to Durbin ads flogging him for opposing the absurd cosmetic ban enacted in 1994. Among Capitol Hill reporters, Durbin is notorious for holding a press conference or making a floor speech in response to every school shooting. After the attack in Jonesboro, Ark., he rushed to introduce legislation making it a federal offense for parents to store a firearm in such a way as to permit access by a child. Never mind that in Jonesboro, the youthful killers broke open a locked gun cabinet. The measure showed his Clintonesque talent for turning policy placebos into political gold.

This aptitude comes from spending his entire adult life in politics and government. He got his start in college as an intern for Illinois Democratic senator Paul Douglas, and worked as an aide in the state senate before joining the staff of then-Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon. In 1982, he was elected to the first of seven terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, before ascending to the Senate in 1996.

Along the way, he acquired the ability to appeal to voters who are more conservative than he, which includes most Illinoisans. Salvi ran commercials deriding him as a "big-taxin', big-spendin', pay-grabbin' liberal," but like George Foreman pummeling Muhammad Ali, he found his best punches ineffectual. At the same time, Durbin showed something that doubtless would come in handy against George W. Bush: an ability to attack his opponent as a right-wing extremist without ruffling his own choirboy demeanor. That's one reason the Senate Democratic leadership often deploys him to battle Republican initiatives on the floor.