Going Out in Style You can't say that Lamar Alexander didn't save the best for last in his speech to the 25,000 or so attendees at the Ames, Iowa, Straw Poll the other day. That truly weird extravaganza seems to have pre-empted the primary season and the GOP convention as the determinant of who gets to run for president as a Republican next year. Never mind that this farewell address of sorts the last speech made by any presidential contender at the Ames event came too late to do the cash-poor Alexander any good in Iowa. Virtually everybody had already cast their $25-a-head vote anyway, and it was a foregone conclusion that Lamar, with his $90,000 war chest and his warmed-over campaign, could not compete with the financially supercharged likes of George W. Bush ($40 million raised) and Steve Forbes ($500 million inherited). The sad fact is that, as the final poll numbers indicated, he couldn't even compete with the field at large, save with the likes of Alan Keyes, Orrin Hatch, and the immemorial Dan Quayle. But in his last campaign speech Alexander gave it his best shot. This time he chose not to spin out any more of that threadbare cut-the-government broadcloth that he'd chosen to sport from 1965 on, more or less in the fashion of all those now obsolete Contract-with-America Newt Gingrich types. This time he wasn't spouting such absurd tautologies as his 1996 promise to abolish the Department of Education, the same Department of Education which he'd headed under President Bush. This time he didn't haul out any off-the-wall Freudian metaphors, like his endlessly repeated tale of having taken a pocketknife to school every day as a kid, something as he insisted that no contemporary youngster is allowed to do. (A silver dollar to whichever reader can best explain to us the moral Alexander was trying to preach with that one!) No, what Lamar did instead the other night in Ames was remind people who he was or, once upon a time, had been a conscientious, able man who in 1978 had taken over the reins of government in Tennessee from a corrupt predecessor and restored both honor and honesty to the state's highest office. He had, in short, been in the truest sense of the term a reform governor, and he promised to perform a similar service, as much spiritual as administrative, if elected president. He talked about his achievements as governor and as president of the University of Tennessee and as a businessman, casting it all in the spirit of old-fashioned American Can-Do and coming off, in the process, as the political moderate which he was (or used to be) and which, unfortunately, he had been doing everything possible to disguise ever since. For the first time in years we heard him speak passionately of public education as something for government to reinforce and encourage and we won't even begrudge him his residual back-to-the-states rhetoric about how to do the job. It was too late and too little, but it was something of the old Lamar, the one who truly merited an exclamation mark after his name, and we were glad to have had the reminder. Who knows? He might have done a really fine job as president if elected. It's just too bad, and entirely his own fault, that he never got the chance. Until the other night, he hadn't even given himself and us a fair hearing.