NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- There are some questions about Lamar Alexander as he enters the competition for the Republican presidential nomination.
Is he smooth and polished or just slick? Is he "focused" on the campaign ahead, as his friends like to say, or is he obsessed with winning? Most to the point, is he conservative enough for the Republican Party in the age of Newt Gingrich or is he a closet moderate trying to reinvent himself?
The one thing that is clear about Alexander is that he is a candidate being taken far more seriously within the political community than his "asterisk" showing in public opinion polls might suggest. Some Democratic professionals, for example, consider him the single most menacing threat to President Clinton among the Republicans now in the field.
On paper, the 54-year-old Alexander lacks the party credentials to match Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. Nor does he have a claim on a particular constituency of Republicans similar to that Sen. Phil Gramm may have on the hard-line far right of the party.
But as a former two-term governor of Tennessee and Cabinet secretary, he has political credentials every bit as strong as three of the last four men elected to the presidency -- Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. And he has a running start organizationally in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
His greatest asset at this point, however, may be the single-minded determination he has displayed. He began his de facto campaign after the 1992 election and has assembled a formidable group of professionals to run his operation.
But candidates win nominations and elections by using clear messages to establish their identities with voters as national leaders. And here Alexander still has miles to go.
The notion that he may be too moderate for his party is probably the single most imposing obstacle for him to overcome in the months ahead. He is delivering a devoutly conservative message -- that many functions of the federal government should be either abolished or returned to the states -- but his image as a moderate persists.
To some degree, this is a question of his associations and history. He is another protege of former Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., whom he served as a staff assistant 25 years ago before spending two years as a junior member of the Nixon White House staff. He served two years under George Bush running the Department of Education he now says he would eliminate. He spent several years as president of the University of Tennessee, not the kind of career stop usually associated with the far right.
Some of Gramm's supporters are quick to identify Alexander as a taxer because he raised sales and gasoline taxes as governor. Alexander replies that he balanced his budget for eight years and made his state more attractive to industry with reforms of the school system and better roads. But that won't be good enough for those conservatives who see any tax as anathema.
Alexander also has a problem with the abortion issue. He describes himself as pro-life, but he doesn't support a constitutional amendment to forbid abortion and he frequently says he would like to keep the federal government out of the issue entirely. That may be an attractive position in a general election, but it raises eyebrows among the extreme cultural conservatives in his party.
Alexander has spent most of the last year trying to establish his conservatism by urging not only that federal programs be dismantled or moved out of Washington but also that Congress should be put on a part-time basis. "Cut their pay and send them home," he says.
That message sounds a little different to Republicans now that they control Congress, however. And Alexander has yet to find an equally crowd-pleasing formulation to define his candidacy other than to keep repeating that he is the only candidate out there now who does not live in Washington, which hardly qualifies as enough of a platform even in today's political climate.
So it may be true that Alexander has his work cut out for him. But it would be foolhardy to write off anyone with his skills, personal force and, most of all, drive.
When he walked into a news conference here, a reporter asked him jokingly if he intended to play the piano as he often does at social occasions, to which he replied: "If that's what I have to do, I'll do it." To those who know Lamar Alexander, that was no joke.