"I am not a backslapper," Lloyd Bentsen says. The effect is not quite that of Richard Nixon denying he is a crook, but it is clear that Bentsen considers the idea distasteful. He speaks with a certain hesitation. A man not given to on-the-record reflection, he is pondering the question of how, at the age of 68, one of the Senate's gray eminences had become an overnight sensation. That the subject is himself only increases his discomfort. "I'm not real gregarious," says the gifted understatesman. "And I guess some people have felt that I wasn't approachable, until they saw me out on the campaign trail." Now they know different, Bentsen says. "I get {stopped} going through the airports and going down the halls. Since the election I haven't found anyone who's voted against me. I might have to ask for a recount." He delivers that last sentence more than simply speaks it -- not for the first time, one senses. That the presidential campaign recedes rapidly in the national memory is, in all likelihood, an unmixed blessing, except, perhaps, for Bentsen. He seemed a larger, more exciting, dare one say ... sexier figure during his few months on the national stage than he had in his previous 25-year political career. Longtime advisers say he loosened up, let the public see his sense of humor, his joie de vivre, as Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards puts it. But since returning to Washington, Bentsen has kept his profile lower than one might have expected for a man whose name is now on the short list for his party's presidential nomination in 1992. "I have never gotten into an intraparty fight," Bentsen says. "Sam Rayburn taught me that. There's really not much to be gained unless that's the area you want to operate in. The substance, the direction of the party is set by the Democratic members of Congress and that's where I propose to be." It is difficult to square the profoundly unruffled man seated behind his neatly crowded desk with the fellow who displayed such panache in driving a team of charging Clydesdales into a campaign rodeo in North Dakota,difficult to understand why 9,000 students at Chico State College would have burst through police lines for the opportunity to shake his hand. "I found it stimulating," Bentsen says of the campaign. "I guess that transmitted." He is not being coy. The mystery of the "new" Lloyd Bentsen and his recent disappearance doesn't much interest him. He figures he can find that other guy if he needs him. Lloyd Bentsen and George Bush have eaten a lot of meals together in the past few months. Bush, in a fence-mending mood, invited Bentsen and his wife B.A. to dine with him and Barbara at the vice president's mansion. Later there was lunch at the White House and a handful of working breakfasts with other congressional leaders. The president also asked Bentsen to introduce Cabinet designees James Baker, John Tower and Robert Mosbacher at their Senate confirmation hearings. Fellow Democrats were equally solicitous. As a testament to Bentsen's newly acquired status, they chose him to deliver their reply to Bush's first televised speech. At receptions on the first day of the new congressional session, the senator found himself courted by liberal members who had once sought to minimize his influence. As the best-known and best-liked conservative voice in the party, Bentsen was ideally situated to take advantage of the institutional introspection that Democrats subject themselves to each time they lose a national election. As chairman of the Finance Committee he was perfectly positioned to present the party's critique of Bush's economic initiatives. But Bentsen was silent for several months. This was due, in part, to the death of his father Lloyd Sr., 95, who was killed in an automobile accident in mid-January. It was because the Finance Committee produced four major pieces of legislation last session and is now in a naturally fallow period. It may also be due to the fact that Bentsen was making a cautious assessment of his presidential chances. The senator claims not to have given the issue much thought. (He made a resoundingly unsuccessful bid for the nomination in 1976.) "Kind people have talked to me about it," he says. "But I'm not taking it seriously." Perhaps not, but some of his allies are. Jack Martin, who engineered Bentsen's Senate campaigns in 1982 and '88, recently accepted a position as "senior adviser" with the Democratic National Committee, a position from which he could play advocate for the Texas senator. "I think he is a prime candidate," says George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader. "The party is going to go through a period of hashing out what its public pitch should be," says Tom Donilon, a Democratic consultant. "It will probably end up thinking its public pitch is where Bentsen is now." Still, it would be ironic -- after nearly 25 years of factional feuding and rule restructuring, after 25 years of Old Left, New Left, liberalism and neo-liberalism -- if the Democratic Party decides its best hope of recapturing the White House is Lloyd Bentsen, a man about whom there is not much neo and even less liberal. The largest portrait on Bentsen's office wall is that of fellow Texan and former House speaker Sam Rayburn. Rayburn didn't like the painting, Bentsen says, because he thought it was rather too realistic regarding his baldness. "He was going to throw it out," Bentsen says. "But I told him, 'You look like you just told somebody to sit down.' I said, 'It looks very Churchillian and I like it.' So that's when he signed it to me. He wrote, 'To my friend Lloyd Bentsen who likes ugly things.' "He was really a very warm, nice man." Like Rayburn, Bentsen has a "marketplace of interests" concept of the Democratic Party. There is more of coalition than cause in his legislative approach. This balancing act has bred a certain tension into his career. Bentsen won the Democratic senatorial nomination in 1970 after a nasty primary fight with liberal Ralph Yarborough (and defeated George Bush in the general election). But he moved quickly to allay fears that he was part of Nixon's "ideological majority." He backed George McGovern in the 1972 election and worked hard for Jimmy Carter in '76. "I heard Carter tell him it was Lloyd Bentsen's coattails that helped him carry the state," Martin says. Six years later, Bentsen emerged as the most powerful Democrat in Texas by lending his considerable fund-raising clout and technical expertise to liberal colleagues who swept into office. In the Senate, meanwhile, he built an image as a master of the delicate compromise. "Under his stewardship in the last session we passed catastrophic health care, the plant closing bill and welfare reform," George Mitchell points out. Still, Bentsen received just a 40 percent approval rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action in the 100th Congress. That put him 32 points below the Democratic average and eight points below the average of the Senate as a whole. His ascendancy has meant tax breaks for oil, gas and real estate interests. The Texas rancher/financier opposes gun control and stands to the hawkish side of center on defense and foreign policy issues. He is also a favorite of corporate lobbyists. As the shameless, if legal, $10,000-a-plate "Eggs McBentsen" breakfasts he held for high-powered lobbyists underscored, Bentsen has received more money from political action committees than anyone in the Senate. Nonetheless, he has champions who are not conservative, white or male. "The left wing of the party may not be totally happy with a Lloyd Bentsen, but I can't tell you how tired I and other Democrats are of losing," says Barbara Jordan, who worked against Bentsen in the 1970 Senate primary. "So we may have to do things that are not 100 percent ideologically pure. There may be certain people and ideas we need to support because they are pragmatic and command a majority." Ronnie Dugger, publisher of the Texas Observer, the bible of Lone Star populism, says that Jordan is proposing a formula for defeat. "The idea that he should inherit the mantle of leadership is, to me, absurd. The conservative {Robert} Strauss and Bentsen strategy lost, and lost Texas in the last election. "People say Bentsen is beautifully positioned, but Bentsen has been beautifully positioned for years. Will you please tell me what remarkable {thing} Bentsen had done before catastrophic health care?" This debate over who really belongs in the party is a familiar one. Bentsen stands with moderates and conservatives like Ernest Hollings and Sam Nunn. "We have to broaden our base," Bentsen says. "We're not going to win presidential elections unless we do. If you look at the number of Reagan Democrats we got back {in 1988} it was an appreciable number, but not enough." He advocates a "forceful and aggressive stand on crime," plus an appeal to the old New Deal coalition. "We have to remind them of a few things we've done," he says. "Social Security. We're the folks who put it in and we are the ones who are going to protect it. Remind them that Medicare is ours. We put it in and we're going to protect it." It is a fairly standard stump speech unusual only for being delivered in a one-on-one interview. Its content aside, though, the larger question is whether Bentsen is the man to deliver it. Tom Donilon helped the candidate prepare for the event that recast Bentsen's image -- the Dan Quayle debate. "The expectations for Bentsen were terrifically high," he says. "The expectations for Quayle were terrifically low. It was going to take a terrific performance for him to come out of there looking like a victor ... "The last day of preparation, Thursday morning, he tossed aside the briefing book. He said, 'I've got everything you guys can give me. Now let me show you how Lloyd Bentsen is going to do this.' "He's not at all shy about having people come in who are the experts in their fields," Donilon says. "I get the sense he enjoys having a team around him that is top-notch. That comes from a terrific sense of who he is." But if Bentsen has a firm sense of who he is, it is a secret he guards closely. A man with many acquaintances, but few close friends, he was labeled an "enigma" in the press after Michael Dukakis chose him as his running mate. The word "patrician" popped up quite a bit too. "I get tired of him being called 'patrician,' because Lloyd is anything but that," says Robert Strauss, former party chairman and fellow Texan. "He is not a hail-fellow-well-met. He is not a Rotary type. He is very warm, very personal and very sensitive." Strauss acknowledges that Bentsen does have "a certain reserve." But adds: "Those who know him best know him differently. Whether out for dinner or on the tennis courts or talking over business, Lloyd Bentsen is fun. "He loves to rib and be ribbed. And enjoys sitting around in social situations, usually with a glass of wine, occasionally a scotch or a vodka." Joe Kilgore, a childhood friend who succeeded Bentsen in the House, paints the senator as an outdoorsman. "This might be unpopular to say, but he's a quail hunter," he says. "He'll shoot skeet, clay pigeons. But quail hunting is an ideal sport for him. It's outside. It's competitive and it's social. You're shooting with other people." Both of these verbal tableaux are offered with an eye toward establishing Bentsen, millionaire investor, as a regular, if well-heeled, kind of guy. The first is undercut somewhat by the fact that Bentsen is more likely to know the fellow whose wine he is sipping than is the budding, budget connoisseur. "We have some good friends who have vineyards, wineries," he says. "The {Barry} Sterlings, for example, have Iron Horse and they do an excellent job on whites. And the {Robert} Mondavis are friends of mine." As for Bentsen the American sportsman, well, Kilgore readily concedes that the senator is so busy with one thing and another that he probably doesn't spend more than a few hours a year with a rifle in his hands. The senator's personality is elusive, perhaps because on the one hand, he is an old school politician with deep roots in the conservative Texas Democratic tradition that produced Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, Strauss and John Connally. On the other he is a savvy, state-of-the-art executive who built a $7 million family-staked insurance company into one of the more prominent investment firms in Texas. Pivotal to each role is an ability to make deals, divide spoils and structure agreements broadly enough that they contain a little something for everyone. In matters of style, however, the paths diverge. The emotional appeal of a populist politician is anathema to a smooth inside operator. With rare exceptions, the '88 campaign being the most notable, Bentsen has cast himself as the latter. Little wonder. The son of a self-made millionaire, he owns a ranch in south Texas, a home in the Kalorama Square compound and a farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Bentsen makes no apologies for a lifestyle with which he is exceedingly comfortable. Yet the sense that he is a competitor, a gambler, is clearly important to him. "When I ran for the Senate in 1970 a fellow was talking about the race in the gym at the House one day and he said, 'Bush obviously will win that one.' " Bentsen recalls. "But the man who ran the gym said, 'I'm not sure. I remember Bentsen playing paddle ball down here and throwing his body all over the floor, sliding across the floor.' "I do a lot of physical things. That's how you work off {stress}. I can recall playing tennis and I ran all the way back for a lob and I ran into the restraining fence. And I heard a fellow on the other side say, 'Lloyd Bentsen must be out here.' " When he speaks about why he enjoyed the '88 campaign, Bentsen conveys the same sense of joy in its sheer physical exertion. "I think I had my adrenaline, my blood pressure and my pulse rate going about 150 percent of capacity," Bentsen says. "If I ever had any cholesterol it must have blown it out of the pipes." Joe Kilgore, now an Austin attorney, sees the '88 campaign's benefits as being primarily mental. "His abortive and totally disastrous run for the presidency in '76 was somewhat of a mystery to him," he says. "The result of this last election erased any corrosive effects that might have had." Making another run seem all the more attractive? "I don't think you ever get it out of your blood," Kilgore says. Fortunately for Bentsen, there is a clear coincidence between positioning himself for the presidency and fulfilling his natural role in the Senate -- that of a key Democratic spokesman on economic policy. He was particularly active on that front last month. On April 13, he wrote to Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, asking him to investigate assertions, made in the current Harvard Business Review, that panicky Japanese investors touched off the Oct. 19, 1987, stock market crash as well as the May 10, 1984, collapse of Continental Illinois bank. The next morning, Bentsen boycotted the Rose Garden ceremony at which Bush signed a short-on-specifics deficit reduction package that he'd worked out with the Democratic leadership. Through a spokesman Bentsen characterized the reduction as having been achieved with "smoke and mirrors" and said it was based on excessively optimistic economic assumptions. At first blush, such issues seem incapable of arousing much passion, let alone helping a party recapture the White House. But there is a growing perception among Democrats that hitting the Bush administration hard on the budget and trade deficits and their impact on America's economic competitiveness may be the best way to win back disaffected voters. "People are concerned about losing jobs," Bentsen says. "We've lost very major numbers of high-paying manufacturing jobs. And the jobs that have been replacing them have been mostly in the service industry. Most of them are low-paying jobs, and that's a concern to me. "Some of these people are not going to be able to have as good a standard of living as their fathers did. We have to address ourselves to those things." Bentsen sounded this theme in his letter to Brady. "For some years," he wrote, "I have expressed concern that America's trade and budget deficits will cause us to lose control of our financial destiny. The fact is that the U.S. is far more dependent on foreign investment today than it was in either 1984 or 1987." He also put the issue squarely in his debate with Quayle. "We've seen this administration double the national debt," he said. "They've moved this country from the number one lender in the world to the number one debtor nation in the world ... This country has exported too many jobs and not enough products." The argument has particular political clout because tying the loss of manufacturing jobs to the trade deficit plays well with blue-collar workers, and raising the specter of Japanese control of the American economy offers Democrats an opportunity to appear more nationalistic than Republicans. Still, playing the trade issue requires striking a delicate balance between economic nationalists on one side and leading economists who fear that measures aimed at protecting American markets and workers will touch off a trade war. Bentsen, in guiding the 1988 Trade Bill through the Senate and into law, was able to mollify both groups. "In many ways Bensten was a masterful broker because it wasn't just a compromise," says Robert Reich, a public policy professor and sometime Democratic consultant. "He was able to craft that trade bill which reflected a wide set of interests and vantage points in the Democratic Party and come up with something that was neither protectionist nor free trade, but gave the executive branch enough authority to fashion, essentially, an industrial policy." The talents Bentsen drew on to fashion the trade agreement are precisely the ones he would draw on were he to make another presidential bid: consensus-building skills, good relationship with powerful Democrats and outstanding organizational abilities. Not for Bentsen the emotional appeal. "He's not a raw meat guy," says former aide Joe O'Neill. Nor will he lead a little people's crusade. "You won't see him traveling around the country, running around pell-mell to any group that can get 1,000 people together," says Strauss. "He won't grasp for power. It will flow to him, if it is there." There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Bentsen, as a young congressman, won a house from another representative in a poker game. He won't confirm it, though he says "years ago" he played a great deal. "I think that is one of the greatest insights into the makeup of a person." What poker taught him, he says, is: "You have to be willing to go for it, and not look just for the sure thing." He may be hinting at his own plans when he says this. Or he may be bluffing. In either case, he is enjoying himself thoroughly, and seems awfully pleased with the cards he's been dealt.