AUSTIN, Texas -- Gov. George W. Bush is performing a new old-fashioned trick these days. While keeping his feet planted securely on his front porch, he's running rings around the competition in the 2000 presidential contest.

The Texas Republican has yet to join the parade of candidates trudging through Iowa and New Hampshire and other key primary states, and doesn't plan to anytime soon. Instead, he's content to stay in Texas and let the campaign come to him.

His strategy has kept him atop the polls and made it more difficult for his rivals to gain national attention. But Bush says he didn't set out to rewrite the playbook for presidential politics.

"You play the hand you're dealt," he says in an interview at his office here. He never considered hitting the road this early, he says, since the Texas Legislature meets for only five months every two years, and he knew he'd want to be in town during the session, which ends in May.

His legs slung casually atop his desk, the 52-year-old governor seems coolly confident, though not cocky. He knows he's a blank canvas on which victory-starved Republicans are projecting their hopes for someone who can unify their party and win back the White House.

Among the misperceptions: that he is fluent inSpanish (he's not) and that he has never lost an election.

"I was undefeated in the '80s," he says with a chuckle. Bush didn't run for office in that decade, but he did lose a bid for Congress back in the '70s.

Bush says he finally made the decision to run for president around the time of his inauguration to a second term as governor in January. But he has tried to avoid making his intentions public, delaying the scrutiny that a full-fledged candidacy attracts.

Today, Bush will officially announce the creation of an exploratory campaign committee, which will allow him to begin raising and spending money for the 2000 contest.

He doesn't plan to formally declare his candidacy until late summer or fall. But the Harvard Business School graduate has been quietly gearing up for months, and he may actually be further along in his preparations than most, if not all, of his rivals.

It was only recently, when elected officials began flocking to Austin to urge him to run, that many Republicans discovered the elaborate preparations under way in the Texas capital.

"I have been stunned," says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who is advising Arizona Sen. John McCain's presidential effort. "It's only been in the last week that people have awoken and said, 'Oh my God, George Bush is running a national campaign.' "

McInturff likened Bush's low-profile activity over the past few months to President Clinton's early TV ad campaign in 1995, which turned out to be a key factor in Clinton's re-election victory the next year. Both were conducted outside Washington and largely escaped the notice of the national news media, while at the same time reaching their desired audiences.

"He's redefining campaigning, in a way," says Steve Grubbs, former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, who got a peek inside the Bush organization when the governor's advisers talked with him about running their Iowa campaign.

"Any time someone can rise to a strong front-runner position without formally campaigning, that's a smart tactic," adds Grubbs, who signed on with publisher Steve Forbes' campaign instead.

If Bush were to make it all the way to the White House, he would break a political mold that dates from Jimmy Carter's marathon campaign of the mid-1970s, which consigned a generation of presidential hopefuls to a mind-numbing ordeal on the road.

After Carter, candidates concluded that "the way to get elected was to go to Iowa three years early and live in Howard Johnson motels," says Bush supporter David Beckwith, a former press secretary to Vice President Dan Quayle.

At the moment, Bush's campaign is a throwback to an even earlier age. In 1896, William McKinley stayed at home in Canton, Ohio, welcoming delegations of party leaders and occasionally delivering speeches from his front porch. Warren G. Harding did the same thing in the early 1900s.

"This is a little bit like McKinley's front-porch campaign, but in a modern sense, because we all flew," says William Schuber, the Bergen County, N.J., executive, who had lunch with Bush at the governor's mansion last month with other Republican leaders who jetted in from New Jersey.

Lunch at the mansion

Inside the Bush camp, these meetings with out-of-state delegations are known as "front-porch lunches." But few beyond the Bush inner circle have been privy to the details of the gatherings, which take place almost every day.

The guests include potential fund-raisers, policy advisers, social thinkers, grass-roots activists, party leaders, elected officials, corporate executives, big-time lobbyists and others. The guest lists have not been made public, and the events do not appear on the governor's public schedule.

At the lunches, according to guests and Bush aides, the governor speaks informally for up to two hours, answering questions about himself and his political plans.

The meetings have helped him bulk up his organization for the campaign's first big test: fund raising. They have also allowed him to sharpen his message, literally in the privacy of his own home, out of sight of the press.

Often, the lunches begin with a tour of the mansion, either by an aide or the governor, who may show off such highlights as the Sam Houston bedroom. Then the group gathers in the formal dining room for a lunch of Mexican food or crab cakes.

"I talk. You eat," Bush likes to say, before launching into his pitch.

"I just talk frankly about why I'm running," the governor explains in the interview.

For those from out of state who would like to know what he believes in and what he would do as president, his agenda of education reform, lower taxes and limited government in Texas gives "a pretty good go-by," he says.

According to an aide, 650 people have attended the lunches, either individually or in small groups. The initial meetings began seven months ago, while Bush was running for re-election.

Among those who have come to take the measure of the former president's son are media moguls such as Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time Inc., who had lunch last year at the white-columned governor's mansion in downtown Austin, close by the Capitol.

Other guests have different agendas. Consider, for example, the case of Grover G. Norquist, who flew to Texas in November, one week after the Republican Party took a beating in the 1998 election.

A bearded political activist from Washington, Norquist has carved out a role that makes him both a celebrity and a power-broker in Republican circles: He's the party's tax-cut arbiter.

If Norquist blesses a candidate's fiscal agenda, it can mean support from economic conservatives. Reaching out to Norquist made obvious sense for Bush, whose father's broken "no-new-taxes" pledge remains a bitter memory for many on the right.

The governor himself knew, from personal experience, about Norquist's bothersome criticism. In 1997, the anti-tax crusader ran a radio ad campaign attacking a Bush tax-shift plan that would have imposed higher taxes on businesses.

Norquist also sent a barrage of faxes to conservatives in key presidential primary states, alerting them that Bush was off the tax-cut reservation. By the end of that year, Norquist had reportedly told friends he could never support Bush for president.

Today, Norquist says he can't remember making that statement. He emerged from his unpublicized meeting with Bush impressed by the quickness of the governor's mind and full of praise for his fiscal agenda.

"He could lead the Reagan coalition," Norquist concludes. To underscore that point, his organization, Americans for Tax Reform, recently presented Bush with their "Taxpayer Hero Award."

Show of strength

Over the past few weeks, a campaign by Bush and his strategists has produced endorsements from leading Republicans, including a dozen governors. More than 80 elected Republican officials have visited Austin to express support since the first of the year.

Political veterans are in awe of how adroitly the Bush team has arranged a show of strength on behalf of someone who was publicly claiming that he had not decided whether to run.

"It's out of Florentine politics," says Chris Hennick, former executive director of the Republican Governors' Association. "Machiavelli would marvel."

Bush advisers say the effort they kindled has burst into a prairie fire. Spontaneous offers of support are pouring in, along with petitions from groups of state legislators from at least 10 states, including Maryland.

The small private lunches have mushroomed into larger group sessions of up to 30 or more, as Republicans from around the country clamber aboard. Foreign dignitaries, from Argentine President Carlos Menem to the Israeli ambassador, who visited the other day, are now making the pilgrimage to Austin as well.

Bush says that courting potential supporters on his home turf has convinced him there is enthusiasm for his candidacy that ratifies his high standing in the polls.

That, he adds, helped persuade him to run. "If there hadn't been any steam behind the phenomenon, I probably would not have," he says.

Except for a couple of out-of-town trips, including a stop in Virginia to meet with Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, the governor has stuck to his self-imposed quarantine. He doesn't plan to emerge until early June, when he'll finally begin traveling.

High expectations

With some Republicans ready to crown him the nominee even before the voters have a chance to see or hear him, Bush knows it will be extremely difficult to live up to his advance billing.

"Expectations are out of sight in all kinds of ways," says Bush, who is eager to define himself before his rivals can. He may begin doing that as early as today, when he holds a news conference here to unveil a committee of key supporters from around the country.

He has been boning up on policy questions, with the help of an array of conservative experts, many with ties to the Reagan administration. They include his new domestic policy adviser, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis, and his economic adviser, former Federal Reserve Board Governor Lawrence Lindsey.

Bush isn't ready to get too specific about issues. But he'll start laying out the broad principles that would guide his campaign and his presidency, which, he says with emphasis, won't be "George H. W. Bush Two" but "George W. One." For instance, on international affairs, an area where his resume is thin, Bush says his decisions will be guided by one question: "Is it good for America and good for American workers?"

Clearly buoyed by his prospects, Bush says he's eager for the next phase of his front-porch campaign, when his candidacy no longer has to be treated like a state secret.

Some months back, Bush said he "felt like a cork in a raging river," swept along by the almost crazed enthusiasm for his candidacy. "Now," he says, "at least I've got an oar."

Pub Date: 3/07/99