The Longest Shot : An activist runs for president - Gary Bauer

Gary Bauer tells the story of the first time he presented a major argument to Ronald Reagan as a White House aide. "Mr. President, the polls say," Bauer began. "Don't ever tell me what the polls say!" Reagan interrupted. "Tell me if it's good or bad for America." Bauer recounts this story as if it represented the laying of hands upon the anointed successor: "When I'm president, I will never rely on the polls to tell me what to do."

The question is-since it's certainly not the polls-What makes this former Reagan advisor think he can run for president? Bauer responds the way a bemused professor might talk to a curious student who asks an obvious question after class: "If you look at the race so far, it's the congressmen and senators who are dropping out." Rep. John Kasich has just abandoned his stillborn campaign, and Sen. Bob Smith has just bolted from the GOP. "Dan Quayle hasn't made his payroll in two months," Bauer continues, visually confirming that his statement gets written down. (The Quayle campaign denies the charge.)

"The real question," Bauer maintains, "is, Why isn't the political system producing people who make people's hearts beat faster?" And it's a good question. But judging from his "Advancing America's Values Tour" of Iowa, Bauer himself isn't the answer. He typically gets respectful, pleasant, friendly crowds, of a dozen to a few dozen people, most of them very old, or young moms with home-schooled kids, or young couples with even more kids. After a respectable crowd in Dubuque of roughly 50, Bauer's charming 12-year-old, Zach, declares, "Dad, that's probably your biggest crowd!"

Still Bauer is trying his hardest to get hearts beating faster. In Waterloo, Bauer volunteers to join dozens of locals piling sandbags to help fight the recent floods. The humidity and heat and stench from the floods make it feel as if a giant dog were breathing down on the entire crew. Most of the men are wearing as little as possible, but not the Bauer team-they all have their campaign T-shirts on. Bauer himself stays in dress clothes. He has turned into a sprinkler system of perspiration, but he still leaves the scene only when the sand is all gone, to go speak at a church and then sign books at a Christian bookstore.

Whenever the Bauer 2000 bus-a vehicle that has seen better days-pulls into a stop, an aide pops some martial music into the stereo and pumps it out the speakers. Considering Bauer's unimposing presence, it's the equivalent of playing Swan Lake when Mike Tyson enters the ring.

Bauer knows he doesn't physically dominate a room or a crowd. Standing in front of a soapbox that his staff would rather he stood on to speak, he jokes that maybe he should call himself Gary "The Body" Bauer. While he stumps in Vinton (population: small enough to list everybody by name on a road sign), a young boy gives him a stalk of corn as a gift. Bauer proudly stands with it for pictures, even though it is easily three or four feet taller than he. If the cameraman doesn't get far enough back, he can easily make Bauer look like Jack standing next to the beanstalk.

At five foot six, with small features and very blue eyes, he looks like he could be a Dead End Kid made good. And in a sense he is. Bauer grew up in a notorious mobster town, Newport, Kentucky, which is now little more than a suburb of Cincinnati. When he was young, prostitution and gambling were widespread, and the police were owned by the local crime syndicate. His father was an abusive alcoholic. Bauer's grandmother, a devout Baptist, took the young Gary under her wing after his uncle was killed by the mob. She had him baptized at age 12. He then set about trying to bring his own parents into the Church and eventually succeeded. He became involved in politics at an early age by fighting to oust gambling and, by extension, the mob from Newport. (Bauer is still adamantly opposed to legalized gambling, and he is collecting support from the growing anti-gambling movement in Iowa.)

Despite his strong religious convictions (every day begins with a group prayer on the campaign bus), Bauer doesn't beat people over the head with his faith-at least not as much as one might expect. Instead he describes himself as a "Reagan conservative." He invokes the Gipper so much, it's as if he's competing in a contest for who can use his name in as many different sentences as possible.

When it comes to policy, Bauer's two biggest themes are overturning Roe v. Wade and taking a hard line on China. His defense of a litmus test on abortion for Supreme Court justices goes over well with his crowds, and he states it compellingly: "I'm only going to have two rules for my nominees. First, they can't be bigots-I'm a Republican, which is the party of Lincoln. Second, they have to respect human life."

For someone determined to distinguish himself from Pat Buchanan, however, Bauer is still prone to bouts of populism-which in Iowa means promising relief for struggling farmers. "We went to war in Yugoslavia- which I opposed-because the American media showed us the broken hearts of Kosovo," he says at every stop. "When are the media in New York and Washington going to turn their cameras on the heartbreak here in Iowa? When I am president, I will use the bully pulpit to get them to show the heartbreak here!"