The roller-coaster ride of Frank Luntz has momentarily paused at a downtown Washington lunch spot and the star passenger has disembarked, hungry and not exactly satisfied.
He likes red meat and searches the menu for a burger. But he settles for soup. Then he digs into the main course -- himself, whom he describes as the new breed of Republican.
"I act like a Democrat. I don't act like a conservative in my dress or the way I speak. I'm shy, but I'm not stodgy. I don't have the half-a-million-dollar beach house, even though I could," says the 31-year-old West Hartford native. "I'm a Republican in my ideology."
One month after advising the successful campaigns of New York Mayor-elect Rudolph Giuliani and Canada's conservative Reform Party, there is no denying that the controversial pollster has cut a new figure in the establishment ranks of Washington.
Luntz, a professor and a pollster, is revered by most of his students and clients and reviled by competitors and some in the GOP who think he has made it too big, too fast.
And while his recent receipt of The Washington Post's Crystal Ball Award -- for the closest-to-the-final-result prediction of the 1992 presidential campaign -- has driven up his stock price, at least for now, his persona is not exactly well-received by all those in politics and academia.
"They both reject me," he says. "Political people think I'm too academic. Academic people think I'm too political."
Fingering his baggy blue shirt buttoned to the top -- no tie -- and pinching his equally baggy olive pants, Luntz stressed that he dresses for comfort. Republicans, who he says wear suits to Saturday morning breakfasts, don't know the first thing about dressing -- "or communicating."
The style thing came up again the next day, during a C-Span panel discussion.
Wearing a suit this time, and speaking to a room jammed with Republicans eager to hear his tips from Giuliani's triumphant New York mayoral campaign, Luntz sliced the still air with his hands as he admonished listeners for their ritzy style of dress.
"We don't know as Republicans how to communicate because we're still so stuck up -- we're still so damned formal," he exploded.
Which is not to say Luntz is above concessions: He wore shoes, not sneakers, when he met with Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour.
And he was eager to please when he met recently with other party regulars on political trends. In the past year, he had defected from the GOP mainstream to poll first for presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan and then for Ross Perot.
It was with trepidation that Luntz -- who has been described as "impetuous" and an irritant by Republican campaign consultant Edward J. Rollins, among others -- took both of those jobs, fearing as he did that the Bush Republicans might never welcome him back to the fold. "I was scared to death."
But fear for his professional future didn't stop Luntz. It doesn't seem to ever stop him.
Luntz's message to the Republican strategists was typically blunt, confident and professorial: Dump negative campaigning. The poor voters are just going to stay home, because they can't decide between two evil people, he warned. It's a message many disagree with.
Toward the end of the campaign, when New York Mayor David N. Dinkins was running negative campaign ads, Giuliani was wondering whether to strike back or to remain positive, said Kay van de Linde, president of The Garth Group, Giuliani's political consultants.
"Frank encouraged us to stay positive, and we did."
With fresh wins in New York and Canada, Luntz is being quoted by some of the nation's largest papers. He enjoys the attention, but it rankles some of his peers.
"I'd kind of like to take him by the back of the neck and say, `Frank, calm down. Earn your political spurs,' " Rollins said.
That goes double for academia, where the perpetually irreverent Luntz has thrown barbs at senior colleagues and lambasted administrators at schools such as the University of Pennsylvania for, he says, being unwilling to accept criticism.
While teaching at Penn, he was known for his ability to bring in the biggest people in politics and for taking his students with him to conventions and campaign stops. During one of those stops in New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton accepted an impromptu invitation from Luntz to have lunch with 11 Penn students.
Among those who have met with Luntz's students: Democratic strategist James Carville, journalists Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., and former Rep. Vin Weber, R-Minn., now president of Washington-based Empower America, a foundation that promotes conservative ideas.
If he was this vital and involved, why was Luntz dismissed by Penn? Richard R. Beeman, associate dean of Penn's School of Arts and Sciences, said it was because of a money crunch and a plan to eliminate Luntz's department.
Although Beeman disputes it, Luntz, who offered to work free of charge, said the publication of a poll in U.S. News & World Report was the reason.
Luntz oversaw the student-run poll of 3,119 Ivy League undergraduates on their knowledge of history, current events and the political system. The scholars didn't know much, and Penn students knew the least of all.
Like any roller-coaster rider, Luntz takes the downs with the ups.
"I was a little worried when it made Penn look bad. But if the students saw me afraid of what would happen because the data wasn't positive, that would send a message to them to be afraid about telling the truth in the future."
At 25, Luntz was the youngest in his class to earn his doctorate at Oxford University. He honed his speaking skills there by debating in the Oxford Union Society.
Later, as an associate for the Wirthlin Group, a Washington-based polling and political consulting firm, he advised Israel's right-wing Likud Party and brought a unique vision to the firm with his vast academic knowledge of people and events, President James Granger said.
But Luntz also stirred acrimony in the firm when he pitted vice presidents against each other over his claims of internal false-cost estimates for clients, Luntz said.
The clients were not overcharged, Luntz said. Rather, the research arm of the firm sometimes overestimated the profit the company could expect, in order to placate the accounting arm, he said. He said he exposed the discrepencies out of loyalty to Richard Wirthlin.
But Luntz wasn't the only employee of the company who questioned the company's cost-estimating formula, said Mary Ellen Jensen, senior research executive at the Wirthlin Group.
"Frank came in and saw something and he was quite vocal about what he saw. But he didn't entirely understand what he was criticizing and in fact it didn't warrant any criticism," Jensen said.
When he set up his own consulting firm, Luntz polled for Puerto Rico's new governor and Canada's new Reform Party, as well as Giuliani. The Reform Party's success was particularly stunning -- it gained 52 of 297 seats in Parliament.
In Giuliani's campaign, Luntz learned that Conservative Party candidate George Marlin was taking votes from Giuliani. So he advised Giuliani not to debate Marlin, because a debate would lend Marlin legitimacy.
"Frank was really terrific. His polls were terrific," said van de Linde of the Garth Group. "He confirmed our strategy and helped us decide what our target audiences were."
Being hired by The Garth Group was a political save for Luntz, who was on the outs with the Republican camp after his defection to Perot.
But Garth didn't hire Luntz to save him, van de Linde said. The reason: because four years earlier, when Giuliani and Dinkins were vying for the same job and Luntz was polling for The New York Post, his polls proved to be the most accurate.
"He was the only pollster who saw the late surge for Giuliani. We wanted the best, and Frank had proven he was the best in 1989," van de Linde said.
For the Reform Party, Luntz wrote the first draft of a campaign plan and came up with the idea that Reform candidates allow audience members to speak first at all rallies and campaign stops,
he said.
Neil Weir, a Reform Party leader, said party strategy was formed by a consensus of about 30 people, including Luntz. The consensus rule was at the very heart of the party's success, he said.
In Puerto Rico, Luntz advised Gov. Pedro Rossello to emphasize positive aspects about himself, rather than use negative campaigning. Rossello heeded the advice, although it was difficult, Luntz said. "In Puerto Rico, the reaction when you're hit is to hit back twice as hard," he said.
But Luntz has lost, too. Besides Buchanan and Perot, the list includes Joseph Cannon, an unsuccessful 1992 U.S. Senate candidate in Utah.
Luntz's father, Lester L. Luntz of West Hartford, said the depth of his son's passion for politics first showed when a baby sitter who watched him as a 5-year-old reported that little Frank asked her to read him a U.S. News & World Report story about Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller.
The boy's first experience in politics was with the Democrats, working at age 12 for a West Hartford Town Council candidate.
There are various versions of what happened next.
At 12, Luntz remembers waiting two hours at a mall for Peter Kelly, then chairman of the Hartford Democratic Committee, now a fund-raiser and lobbyist in Washington. Believing he was forgotten by Kelly, who was to take him out campaigning for Jimmy Carter, Luntz remembers going home and crying.
Kelly doesn't remember forgetting Luntz. He recalls tooling around with the boy handing out bags of peanuts -- a ploy to remind people to vote for Carter, who owned peanut farms.
Either way, Luntz gave the Republicans a try, thinking they were a closer match ideologically, and found them more welcoming. He conducted a straw poll among teenagers for James Buckley of Sharon, who lost a run for the U.S. Senate in 1980.
He stumped for Ronald A. Sarasin, who ran for governor in 1978. And at 16, as a student at Hall High School in West Hartford, he became president of Teenage Republicans of Connecticut.
In the year since the presidential election, he has begun to regain favor after The Washington Post took note of his accurate polling, and bruised Republicans started scrambling for a way to capture the Perot votes.
But some Republicans stubbornly refuse to forgive Luntz, who they say prostituted himself politically by jumping from one candidate to another, seemingly without regard to ideology. Luntz explains the ideology-leap question, saying he joined Buchanan's team to work against Bush. Then he jumped on with Perot because he believed Perot's ideology was closer to his own.
As it turned out, Luntz, who describes himself as a social libertarian, a conservative on economic issues and a "mild hawk on foreign policy," didn't agree with Perot on much. The experience shook his confidence to judge a candidate, he said.
Some Republicans are repulsed by Luntz's self-promotion as an expert on the Perot phenomenon. "I don't think he had two minutes with Perot in his whole experience," said Rollins, who split with Perot before the candidate dropped out.
Now, though, his goal is to help get a hero elected president -- some guess that hero is Jack F. Kemp, although Luntz won't confirm it -- and then to be appointed secretary of education.
Eager as he is to win friends in the Republican crowd, Luntz believes he can help his party more by telling the painful truth as he sees it.
In front of the cameras, before that large C-Span audience, he gently urged his listeners not to gloat over the Republican wins around the country. "I don't think it was a Republican victory and I don't think it was a conservative victory," he said, dousing the puffs of pride swelling in the room. "These campaigns were not a referendum on Bill Clinton; they were referendum for change."
It's a dictum he will intone over and over until he's convinced the Republicans are listening.
The roller coaster rattles on