After Strom; can a cracker-barrel fabulist capture South Carolina's Senate seat?(Democratic candidate Alex Sanders)

"Do you want to know what I do all day?" asked Alex Sanders, who is the Democratic candidate seeking to replace Strom Thurmond as United States senator from South Carolina this year. "I sit at a desk with a telephone. A woman named Ashley Newton sits across from me with pieces of paper called focus sheets and a stopwatch. She hands me a focus sheet, which has the name and phone number and some vital information about a potential contributor. I call the number. She starts the stopwatch. I have six minutes to make the sale. I'm supposed to make ten calls per hour. So I start out like this: 'Hello, my name is Alex Sanders, and I'm running for the United States Senate. Have you ever heard of me in your whole entire life?' Then I chat with him for a moment about life at his horse farm, or whatever. I tell him that I know about the horse farm because I have this focus sheet with all his information. And then I say, 'I'm not calling to ask for your vote. It'd be a waste of time to make a phone call for a single vote. My purpose is far more humiliating. It's the chemotherapy of a political campaign. It's painful.' " He paused. " 'Wouldja give me some money?' "

Sanders is sixty-three, but his sensibility seems much older -- from the time before radio, when people entertained each other by telling yarns. He is a burly, deliberate man, with heavy-lidded eyes that appear to require some miracle of physiological hydraulics, perhaps involving support from his eyebrows, in order to remain open. He has a weathered, scratchy voice and a thick, juicy Carolina accent. Every word he utters is carefully unpacked, inspected, reassembled, and inflected, usually in the service of drollery. "Chemotherapy," for example, comes out something like this: keh-moh-THER-peh, with a chuckle embedded in the middle. He is considered an underdog in the race to replace Thurmond; his opponent, Representative Lindsey Graham, is formidable. South Carolina is a Republican state. But Sanders's success or failure hardly seems the point -- and Graham is almost an afterthought. The real contest here is between an American archetype, the cracker-barrel fabulist, and the consultant-driven sterility of the current political system.

Sanders ambles through his campaign paces, amazed by practically everything he encounters, gratified by the vast bounty of new material he can use to entertain his friends; he seems a fly on the wall of his own candidacy. And yet it is a serious campaign. Sanders is an estimable man, the former chief judge of the South Carolina Court of Appeals and, most recently, the president of the College of Charleston. He is well known and quite popular in the state. Lee Bandy, who has covered South Carolina politics for the State newspaper for thirty-six years, says that Sanders is doing surprisingly well and that the race may turn out to be a dead heat. Given the bare majority that Democrats enjoy in the Senate -- and the fact that South Carolina may stage the earliest Presidential primary in the South in 2004 -- the Sanders campaign seems likely to become a fund-raising magnet for ambitious national Democrats. (Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, and Senators Joseph Lieberman, Christopher Dodd, and John Kerry have already visited.) But the attraction of the Sanders campaign is even more theatrical than it is political.

Indeed, we've left the Democratic candidate only halfway through his disquisition on the vagaries of fund-raising. "If they say yes," Sanders went on, "I tell them, 'I have two more questions, and these are far more humiliating than the last. First, I am so sor-ry to have to ask, but . . . When you gonna send the money? Can you send it today?' And then I say, 'Now, this last question is so embarrassing that I can't hardly even bring myself to say it, but . . . How much?' And before they can think about it I jump in and say, 'How 'bout a thousand bucks?' " Sanders, who was wearing the straightest political uniform imaginable -- blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, striped tie -- leaned back in his chair and laughed devilishly. "That's a good trick, jumping in like that. They usually say, 'Well . . . O.K. I'll give a ...