IN 1968 Phil Gramm was in danger of losing his job. He had been hired the year before to teach in the Texas A&M economics department. But now the university had hired away some prestigious professors from elsewhere to build a top-flight department. Gramm, with a PhD from a weak program at the University of Georgia, was suddenly not a good fit. “I felt that he would be gone in a year or two,” recounts Thomas Saving, part of the professional infusion. Gramm set about auditing courses from the new professors to make up his knowledge gap, an effort that seemed doomed. “He was a very poor reader at that time,” Saving recalls. “Today they would have diagnosed him to be something.”
By 1970 Gramm had his tenure. “When he discovers that the climb is going to be a lot harder . . . than before, instead of giving up he just works harder and faster,” says Saving, who soon became a friend of Gramm’s. The Gramm mini-drama earlier this year certainly fits that model: he descended into near-oblivion inside the Beltway only to rise again after his hard-won coup in August’s Iowa straw poll. Thorough organization. Relentless fundraising. Never off message. Phil Gramm is the GOP’s straight-up-the-gut running back, the candidate who can point to articles he wrote as a professor twenty years ago that read like one of his speeches today (minus the mama references). Gramm, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, has made it clear he won’t be left easily.
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