HE WANTS NEWT'S JOB

By JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

Whenever Newt Gingrich needs a little extra motivation to keep off the 30 pounds he has lost since summer, all he has to do is look at Bill Paxon. Paxon is the lean, boyish, irrepressibly upbeat Congressman from upstate New York who might have become Speaker of the House last July if the attempt to overthrow Gingrich had succeeded. The coup failed, Paxon was forced to resign his leadership post and Gingrich has since reasserted a semblance of control, over both his weight and his troops.

But his once loyal lieutenant has not skulked away in ignominy. In fact, Paxon's star is rising again, thanks to an aggressive seduction campaign by his fellow House Republicans. As Gingrich has surely noticed, the man who would succeed him has been busy shuttling around the country, raising money for his colleagues and storing away political IOUs for the moment the post-Newt era arrives. Gingrich's loyalists are feigning indifference in public while fuming in private. "Paxon betrayed his own mentor," snipes one. "Is that the kind of leader we want?"

For some of Paxon's peers, all of whom face re-election next November, the answer is yes--the sooner the better. "When I think of whom I want to see as the face of the Republican Party," says Oklahoma's Steve Largent, "I think of Bill Paxon." Largent is one of the group of disgruntled conservatives who fomented the rebellion that nearly toppled Gingrich. But Largent and others like him say that even if Gingrich has improved as manager of the G.O.P. majority, this hasn't eased the burden imposed on all Republicans by the Speaker's dismal public-approval ratings. "He's still less popular than O.J. Simpson and the Unabomber," complains Largent. "The baggage he carries, we carry."

And for Republicans tired of Gingrich, Paxon, 43, is the perfect antidote. Where Gingrich has said he wants to be "the leading teacher of 21st century American civilization," Paxon sheepishly admits to being "a regular guy" and "not much of a big thinker." And while Gingrich is famous for his discourses on subjects such as the democratic possibilities of information technology, Paxon's whole political philosophy can be summed up in three phrases: cut taxes, shrink government and above all, elect Republicans. That Paxon doesn't have Gingrich's expansive intellectual range--or combativeness--suits many of Paxon's compatriots just fine. Republicans are winning most of the major political arguments of the day, they say; their problem is style, not substance. "Being conservative and mean are not synonymous," says Representative Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, referring to Gingrich. "Conservatism is popular. We've got a good message; we just need a good messenger."

The telegenic Paxon has the virtue of being articulate without coming across as arrogant. He says things like "Oh, geez" when asked a probing question, and "darned" is the closest thing to a curse he'll utter, even in private. But his choirboy exterior is wrapped around intense ambition. Like President Clinton, Paxon started dreaming about a career in politics at a young age. The son of an elected county judge and a mother active in the state G.O.P., he grew up in the rural town of Akron, N.Y., 25 miles east of Buffalo. By the time Paxon was a teenager, he was volunteering on the campaigns of local G.O.P. candidates and subscribing to the National Review--proof that he was conservative way before it was cool. The turmoil of the late 1960s only hardened his political views; when the 130 high school seniors at St. Joseph's Collegiate Institute in Buffalo registered to vote in 1972, Paxon was one of only two who registered Republican. He was, he remembers proudly, "the only one with a Nixon poster in my locker."

When Paxon decided to run for a seat in the Erie County Legislature, the local G.O.P. chairman was so sure the 23-year-old upstart would lose that he tried to recruit Paxon's mother to run instead. Paxon won, treated it like a full-time job and then went on to the state legislature, where he learned how to be a conservative Republican without alienating potential allies among the party's moderates. "With Bill, personality always transcended politics," says state senator Mike Nozzolio, a friend and former housemate during Paxon's Albany days. "He dealt with everyone on a colleague-to-colleague basis."

That approach has worked well in Congress, where Paxon, who was first elected in 1988, has as close a bond with moderates like Rick White of Washington as he does with hard-liners of the Largent and Graham variety. Yet it has also opened him up to the charge that he is more committed to winning than to a set of beliefs. Paxon points to his conservative voting record--but quietly casting a vote is different from taking the lead on an ideologically loaded issue. And in his first nine years in Congress, he was never the front man on any cause dear to conservative hearts. Even Jay Dickey, an Arkansas Republican and friend, jokes that Paxon is "a New York conservative--conservative lite."

But it's because he hails from a region of moderate Republicans that Paxon might be able to bridge the party's moderate-conservative divide. He did so in his personal life when he married Susan Molinari, a pro-choice Republican colleague who quit Congress this year to anchor a Saturday morning news show for cbs and spend more time with their 18-month-old daughter. In his public life, he did it as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1994 and 1996, when more than a third of all current House Republicans were elected. If Gingrich was the mastermind behind the G.O.P. revolution, Paxon, as campaign-committee chairman, was the one who carried it out. More than a few of today's Republicans owe their jobs to him. Washington State's White, for example, challenged an incumbent Democrat in '94 in a race few Republicans thought he could win, but Paxon steered the maximum allowable amount of campaign-committee money into White's battle anyway. "Bill was there for a lot of us when no one else was," White says now. "That goes a long way."

Paxon's performance at the campaign committee won him the job of being Gingrich's main public defender and campaign manager. When the Speaker's re-election was in doubt last January, it was Paxon who was darting from member to member on the House floor pleading for votes. Gingrich narrowly survived. Then came July 9, when Paxon at least passively entertained plans devised by House rebels to remove Gingrich. When the plot fizzled, he suddenly found himself outside the circle of power.

Since then, Paxon has begun focusing his attention for the first time in Congress on legislating, which has exposed both his strengths and weaknesses. He caught the current wave of anti-irs sentiment with his bill, introduced in September, to eliminate the current tax code by 2001. But the bill, which fits on 1 1/2 typewritten pages, doesn't actually do anything to replace the code with something else. It leaves the politically perilous question of tax reform for others to solve.

As he travels the country from district to district (a total of 30 by the end of the year), Paxon's status as a Republican leader-in-waiting is less obvious to some audiences than others. So Paxon's G.O.P. comrades are pitching in. At a recent fund-raising breakfast in West Palm Beach, Fla., Representative Mark Foley made sure donors knew the identity of their guest by passing around copies of an article from the Weekly Standard titled "Speaker Paxon?" Not much more needed to be said. Paxon had a plane to catch, and another colleague to win over.