Lamar Alexander's post-non-presidency.

In certain towns in Scotland, there exist museums filled with relics of the rebel Bonnie Prince Charlie--pieces of his tartan, portraits, goblets, scraps of things he once touched, and rings inscribed with king charles iii, as if he really had become King of England instead of dying in exile in Rome.Unbeknownst to most local tour guides, a similar kind of museum exists in Washington. It's tucked away on the fourth floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building: the museum to the not-quite-presidency of Lamar Alexander. Here, in quarters otherwise known as his Senate office, you'll find the red plaid shirt that the journalists covering Alexander's 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns disdained, now hanging proudly in a gallery case, both shirt and case on loan from the Smithsonian. To its right is a giant map of Tennessee marked with the 1,000-mile route Alexander walked to become governor, a caper he then tried in New Hampshire in 1996, where he came in third behind Pat Buchanan and Bob Dole. Walk down the long hall staffers call the "West Wing," past a couch upholstered in red plaid, and into Alexander's personal office. There stands the curator of this Almost-Presidential Library himself, smoothing his fingers along a hand- painted chess set. "An Iowa supporter made this for me in 1999," Alexander explains. One side's king reads "Gore"; the other's reads "Lamar." In the annals of U.S. history, Alexander's presidential ambition wasn't so outrageous. As a highly successful governor of Tennessee, he was certainly qualified. Besides, he only ran twice; Henry Clay ran for president five times. But his love of exclamation marks, his claim to be a radical outsider, and his relentless branding--sometimes even the dogs on the trail wore plaid--earned him indifference from voters and laughter from the press. But, since he took over Fred Thompson's Senate seat in 2003, Alexander has been quietly remaking himself. Not, it seems, by altogether rejecting the career arc he had in mind, but by bypassing the presidency and going directly to post-presidential healer. Like Jimmy Carter, the senior President Bush, or Bill Clinton before Hillary's campaign, Alexander's mandate now is to get the warring factions in the Senate to beat their swords into plowshares. But today's Senate is hostile territory for a prophet of peace. "He's basically dealing with a political dynamic [in which] the strategy of Republicans is to throw molasses in the way of everything," says veteran Congress-watcher Norm Ornstein. These days, Republican leader Mitch McConnell fires at Democrats with a record volley of filibusters and an insurgent group of new conservative senators, led by South Carolina's Jim DeMint and Oklahoma's Tom Coburn, fires at McConnell from the right on earmarks and immigration. Alexander wants it to stop. "We have so many practical solutions on things like health care, if we stop complaining," he remarks. Friends suggest that Alexander's incarnation as elder mediator suits him. "I think he's evolved into a statesman kind of role--he's older now. Lamar fits that [ex-presidential] mold now," says Bob Davis, a former Tennessee GOP chair. But it may turn out that, like so many other well-meaning and harmony-seeking ex-presidents, Alexander will find he also lacks the power to stop the bloodletting. When Alexander was elected chairman of the Republican Conference last December, the third-highest leadership position in the Senate GOP, he won the nasty job of burnishing the public image of a party in private turmoil. His first chance to sell his vision was to be at a mid-January retreat to which all Republican senators were invited. But, just weeks after Alexander occupied his office, DeMint and Coburn announced that they would hold a press conference the day after Alexander's retreat to put out their own "Conservative Agenda to Secure America's Future." This ten-point legislative plan, which was to demand that the United States withhold dues from the United Nations and end earmarks altogether, laid down the foundations for a rebel Republican message shop, and it was a slap in the face for Alexander. But it didn't come out of nowhere. Amid the post-defeat despair last year, DeMint and Coburn--bomb-throwers fresh to the Senate from the House--saw a sweet chance to pull the floundering Senate GOP to the right. DeMint flexed his muscles on immigration, blowing up the spring compromise bill nearly single-handedly, while Coburn flexed his on earmarks. Their talent for rousing support among bloggers and talk-radio hosts and their disdain for bipartisanship--"I didn't come here to make friends, and I haven't been disappointed," DeMint told me--made them powerful. "You can only pass bills if you clear it with the two of them!" hisses a senior Democratic aide. "We need to calm down around here," Trent Lott begged DeMint on the Senate floor this summer. Alexander--who still speaks proudly of his ability, as governor, to find common ground with Tennessee's Democratic legislature--was horrified by what he calls the Senate's escalating "playpen politics" on both sides of the aisle. He decided to try to teach Republicans to lay down their guns. When the Republican senators gathered inside the Library of Congress for his daylong retreat, he projected on a screen a slogan that threw a bone to both conservatives and moderates: rally republicans, attract independents. He showed them examples of bipartisan bills Republicans were already co-sponsoring. And, in an effort at dialogue, he had moderates like Maine's Susan Collins give the speech she would give in Lewiston, to help deep-red senators understand the pressures the purples were under. ("We needed that--we get in a bubble around here," raves one Republican aide.) De-escalation is always a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of process. During the retreat, from deep inside the Library of Congress, somebody e-mailed out a nasty report on Alexander to the conservative blog RedState, which promptly posted that Alexander wanted the Republicans to simply "Pass Democrat legislation," setting off a flurry of angst within conservative blogs and Senate offices. "The first thing he did was go over and meet directly, individually" with the conservative senators who were complaining, recalls Senator Bob Corker. To mollify Coburn, Alexander helped McConnell create a special earmarks commission, in which Coburn could confront the party's premier earmarker, Thad Cochran, face to face. To Richard Burr, another in the conservative faction, Alexander gave the opportunity to help roll out a spring health care initiative that would include parts of an Every American Insured Act that Burr floated last year. "The frustration comes when a senator is isolated," says Alexander. "We have to give them a stake." And, indeed, in a phone call with Alexander, DeMint agreed not to hold his competing-agenda press conference, for the sake of unity. To explain his aims in the Senate, Alexander speaks passionately of evangelical guru Rick Warren, whom he heard speak in late January at the National Cathedral. Warren called for a "second Reformation" in which mainline churches, evangelical churches, and Muslims would "learn to get along" and join together to do good works. This role of post-presidential peace-broker seems a much better fit for the friendly, centrist Alexander than were his stints as a hardcore conservative and a radical populist presidential candidate. But, like so many elder statesmen before him, Alexander may find he's wandered into a war with much deeper roots than he imagined. The battle between the conservatives and the moderates in the Senate is a fundamental one over how to understand their 2006 electoral demise: Did it happen because they sold out the values of the base, or because they ignored moderates on Iraq? The moderate faction loves Alexander, who, among other things, sponsored a centrist Iraq bill with Democrat Ken Salazar last year. But, when I ask an aide to one of the conservative senators, "Can Alexander's efforts to reach out to you guys have success?" he just lets out an incredulous laugh.