Campaign Portrait

When Pierre Samuel du Pont IV told his father that he wanted to go to law school, Pierre Samuel du Pont III was baffled. Du Ponts, after all, did not become lawyers, they hired them. Twelve years later, after du Pont had finished law school and fulfilled his filial obligation by working in the family business -- the country's largest chemical company -- he went back to his father. He was restless: one of his more memorable company tasks was assessing whether du Pont should manufacture peanut butter and jelly in an aerosol can. He wanted to try his hand at politics. "I was on track to become a senior executive at 63, and I was only 30," explains du Pont.

Twenty years later, Pete du Pont's ambitions are again being met with incredulity. Surely, when the former Republican Governor of Delaware called a press conference last September in the Hotel du Pont and announced that he was running for President, he had to be kidding. When even the urbane Robert Dole contrasts his plebeian Kansas roots with the preppie background of the front runner, George Bush, a du Pont of Delaware hasn't got a chance. What skeptics do not understand is that, in his own mind, Pete du Pont is a self-made man, one who rebelled against his family tradition by going to law school and then into politics.

Du Pont, 52, insists that his heavyweight name has no real bearing on his campaign. It is an irresistible angle for journalists, he admits, and the patrician roman numeral provides an easy stereotype. Du Pont is astute enough to ban reporters from his elegant home near Wilmington and his sprawling summer house in Maine, but he knows he cannot really bury his privileged background. "I am what I am. I can't change it, so I don't worry about it."

In a political climate in which most candidates are searching their souls for a persona that voters can trust, du Pont stands apart. He considers the obsession with "character" and the media's ceaseless quest for revealing personal anecdotes slightly silly. To his closest aides, du Pont's unapologetic approach is not mysterious. "He doesn't need this," says his longtime aide Glenn Kenton, campaign chairman. "He knows he could do a good job as President, but he can live without it."

Pete du Pont hopes to distinguish himself as an iconoclast, a free-market conservative boldly willing to question sacrosanct social programs that his better-known rivals fear to address. He wants his ideas to speak for themselves, and loudly enough to drown out the murmurs about his patrimony. He has selected five issues that he believes can excite the electorate. It took the methodical du Pont two years to research and hone his message, and he has now compressed it neatly onto a single 3-in. by 5-in. card that he keeps in his breast pocket. Dispensing with the usual homilies about preserving the family farm, du Pont brashly advocates abolishing farm subsidies within five years. Worried about the cost of the baby boom's retirement, he proposes a private alternative to Social Security modeled after IRA accounts. To make public schools more competitive, he wants parents to be able to enroll their children anywhere, regardless of district lines. He also advocates testing students for drugs. He particularly wants to replace welfare with a mandatory jobs program. He calls these proposals "damn right" issues because when stated simply, they make the average voter say just that.