Presidential Nomination

TWENTY-FIVE years ago this week I sat across the desk from the mayor of a big city who convinced me that the cities had a future after all.I needed convincing, because I was on a reporting tour that took me to Newark, Detroit and Cleveland -- riot scarred and, to me, hopeless.But the mayor of Indianapolis said he knew the key to urban salvation, and his ideas and his intellect converted me. I've been preaching his gospel ever since.And what is the message? Merge the city and its suburban county!

A RECENT front-page story by Sun staff writer Rafael Alvarez on the City Life Museum's search for objects d'Bawlmer got us to wondering:With so many folks living in the suburbs, someone is bound to start a Suburban Life Museum. But stocked with what?* A strip of vinyl siding.* A tiny hexagonal sign warning that children and pets should keep off the freshly chemically treated lawns.* Orange pylons from kids' soccer leagues.* Supermarket register tapes for school computer funds.* Happy Meal gewgaws and/or Chuck E Cheese tokens.

WASHINGTON -- With all the speculation on whether Gov. Pete Wilson will seek the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, much is being made of the fact that his state of California has moved its presidential primary from early June to the end of March. The clear reason is to give the state a much bigger say in the selection of the nominee than in past years.Despite an early assumption that Wilson would be able to tuck away California's 163 delegates, the largest state bloc at the GOP national convention in San Diego, the latest Los Angeles Times poll indicates that 59 percent of California voters surveyed want him to live up to his 1994 re-election campaign pledge to serve out his new term.

SEN. ARLEN SPECTER of Pennsylvania, who had a brain tumor removed last year, announced this week that he is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.Apparently the surgeons didn't get it all. Or maybe they got too much. Arlen Specter has no more chance of being nominated for president than does the last Pennsylvanian who sought it. That would be Harold Stassen, a Minnesotan who has become Philadelphia's version of Ross Pierpont.In fact, I would say Specter has no more chance of being nominated for president in 1996 than does the last Pennsylvanian who was nominated.

Washington. -- Lamar Alexander was a two-term governor of Tennessee and U.S. secretary of education, but more to the point he was president of a university (the University of Tennessee). Having dealt with faculty parking and football boosters, the U.S. presidency hardly seems daunting, so he probably will seek the Republican nomination for that office, sounding an anti-Washington theme with which Americans usually agree: ''Leadership cannot come from Washington because solutions are not in Washington.

ED MUSKIE is 80 today. His friends gave him a birthday roast in Washington two weeks early. As speakers made needling comments about him, he replied, "That is a lie, and the American people know it is a lie."That's a reprise of what was probably his finest hour. In 1970, President Nixon made a nationally-televised speech attacking Democratic congressional candidates for being "pro-criminal." Democrats chose Muskie, their 1968 vice presidential nominee, to respond. He said of Nixon's charge, "That is a lie, and the American people know it is a lie."

WASHINGTON -- Republicans in Congress are trapped by their own party history in making the case against President Clinton's economic program. The result is that they are obliged to fall back on that oldest of old chestnuts -- that Clinton is just another liberal tax-and-spend Democrat.Even under the most auspicious circumstances, the Republicans would be somewhat hamstrung in fashioning a response. They are in the minority in both houses and are singularly lacking in national figures to serve as their spokesmen -- except, of course, for Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole.

CRAPSHOOT: ROLLING THE DICEON THE VICE PRESIDENCY.Jules Witcover.Crown.450 pages. $25. Cynics might suggest that life is too short to read a whole book about a political office with so little real power as the American vice presidency. Jules Witcover's "Crapshoot" could change their minds. It is a highly entertaining look at the trials and tribulations of all the men who found themselves in that lofty but far from exalted post.No review can do justice to the colorful account Mr. Witcover -- a political columnist for The Baltimore Sun -- presents of the political intrigue that has surrounded so many contests for the vice presidential nomination, especially the struggle that occurred with the Democrats in 1944, when party leaders successfully conspired to replace Henry A. Wallace with Harry S Truman as the nominee.

Democratic presidential hopeful Paul E. Tsongas came to Maryland yesterday and joked that he was responsible for President Bush's slide in the polls.George Bush had a 91 percent approval rating last March when the former U.S. senator from Massachusetts entered the race for his party's presidential nomination -- but by yesterday the Republican president had slipped to 55 percent."

The hello-my-name-is tag read "Larry Agran" -- and if the name did not mean a lot to people attending the Maryland Democratic Party bull roast yesterday in Timonium, the paste-on tag's second line was intended to help: "Presidential candidate."Mr. Agran, former mayor of the 110,000-population city of Irvine, Calif., and the better-known Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin -- two of the announced candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination -- shared top billing at the event.The presidential hopefuls glad-handed their way around a building at the state fairgrounds, greeting about 700 Marylanders they hoped would remember them and perhaps tell their friends.