MANCHESTER, N.H. -- On paper, Richard G. Lugar should be a formidable contender for the Republican presidential nomination. In his three terms in the Senate and earlier as mayor of Indianapolis he has earned a reputation as a heavyweight on a variety of issues.
But whether the Indiana senator has the knack for presenting himself aggressively and succinctly enough for an electorate that relies on television sound bites is still an unanswered question as he approaches a final decision on whether to run.
The one thing that is clear is that Lugar is taking a distinctly different approach. If you ask him to name the critical issues facing the country, he talks -- sometimes at length -- about nuclear proliferation and the dangers of nuclear terrorism.
Back home in Indiana, he says, "people are very concerned about nuclear problems across the board." But he concedes that he may have given the issue whatever salience it has there. "If I hadn't brought it up," he said here the other day, "it wouldn't have come up by itself."
Here in the first days of the New Hampshire primary campaign, the problem of nuclear proliferation is not at the head of any lists and may be a genuine MEGO -- for "makes eyes glaze over" -- issue.
Lugar, however, sees the problem quite differently. This is one of two issues that he identifies as peculiarly presidential in the sense that they are "areas in which only the president of the United States can be effective."
The other is the problem of balancing the federal budget. Only a president, says Lugar, is in the position to set priorities for the nation while achieving that balance. "And," he says, "unless you do so with a great deal of skill, you're likely to wreck the economy."
Other issues -- welfare reform or health care, for example -- are not so peculiarly presidential because, although the president would have a major role, they could be dealt with legislatively in Washington or perhaps through the states.
So Lugar is asking the voters in the New Hampshire primary to go through a two-step process in making their judgments about the candidates who will be seeking their support here over the next year.
First, they must understand which issues are presidential and then decide which candidate is capable of dealing most effectively with them.
The messages of the candidates leading the pack here right now are markedly simpler and more direct. Bob Dole is saying it's all about "leadership," and that he is, after all, a leader. Phil Gramm is declaring himself the genuine article among all these people claiming to be true-blue conservatives. Lamar Alexander keeps talking about the fact he doesn't live in Washington.
This sloganeering may be bordering on the mindless but it is the kind of politics Americans have come to expect and, more to the point, seem most able to understand. Dick Lugar is proposing to make it a bit of a chore, apparently on the theory that a primary campaign can be an educational as well as political process.
Other candidates with similar approaches have found the going difficult. In the competition for the Republican nomination in 1980, for example, Senate Minority Leader Howard H. Baker Jr. wrote and delivered a classic speech on "the nature of the presidency" in which he argued that candidates should be judged by such things as the people around them, rather than against some checklist of issue positions.
The problem with the latter, he contended, is that no such list could anticipate the kind of situations that would confront a president once in office. It was a thoughtful argument that made a lot of sense but was largely ignored by the voters. Shortly after finishing a distant third to Ronald Reagan and George Bush here, Baker was out of the race.
It would be premature, of course, to suggest Lugar's priorities won't succeed here or, for that matter, in the Iowa precinct caucuses.
Republican voters in both states will have the opportunity to come to know the candidates better than those anywhere in the nation, and the Indiana senator may wear well over time. That has clearly been the case back home in Indiana, where he is taken much more seriously by many Republicans than his one-time colleague in the Senate, Dan Quayle.
But right now Dick Lugar is not making it easier for voters to identify with him. Nuclear proliferation is, as he says, a serious problem requiring serious attention. But campaigns are not always serious exercises.