(MONEY Magazine) – Near midnight on a cool Tuesday evening in May, Lester Thurow, American economist, slumps before a dish of German chocolate ice cream at Steve's ice cream parlor in Lexington, Mass. Breakfast that day had been in Seattle, where Thurow addressed a group of high-tech executives. Lunch was at 20,000 feet. In the afternoon, he was interviewed by two newspaper reporters, did a one-minute TV spot and attended to his duties as the newly named dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT. Then, after a quick dinner at home in Lincoln, Thurow Jeeped over to Lexington to lecture the local nuclear freeze group. Now, hoarse and bleary-eyed, he is talking about 1988. ''I've worked in every presidential election since 1960 -- except 1980,'' says Thurow, 49, poking at his ice cream. ''This year I'm maintaining a talking relationship with all the Democratic candidates.'' What are you saying to them? ''It's going to be tough for all of them. How do you tell people the economic facts of life and not get killed?'' What are the big issues? ''We're exploring for a theme.'' He winces. The son of a Methodist minister from Montana, Thurow tends to close his eyes before he speaks as if someone were twisting his finger. ''Right now the competitive thing plays best -- you know, productivity. The international thing -- the trade deficit and the like -- might play. But the American voter needs something he can see.'' How do you promote yourself? ''I've written four books in five years. The Zero-Sum Society has sold best by far, but my favorite is Dangerous Currents.'' You're on TV a lot. ''All the time -- once a week for the past eight years. Sometimes the network news wants me. A guy shows up and shoots 45 minutes of tape. From that Dan Rather will snip 10 seconds.'' Is this typical for an economist? ''It is if you want to affect policy. The right thing to do is have a mid- life crisis. Be a scholar until you're 40, then do policy. But it's a one- way door. You don't go back. Academics seems like a much smaller ball game then, and academic problems start to seem trivial.''

Trivial perhaps to Lester Thurow. But then Thurow is far from being only an academic or policy economist. Thurow, in fact, is nothing short of a full-bore celebrity economist, one of a small, highly acclaimed group -- mostly men, mostly over 40 -- who by dint of books, op-ed pieces, prime-time television appearances and incessant lecturing inhabit a shifting media zone between academe, politics and show biz. These cacophonous chautauquans include Thurow, Alan Greenspan, Arthur B. Laffer, Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Herbert Stein and the most recent recruit, political scientist Robert B. Reich. Yet even these dazzlingly dismal scientists have a problem. Nothing seems to be working quite right for the profession in general. In Washington two decades of bogus economic models of the national economy have soured the reputation of policy economists. On campus, academics scorn them as pseudoscientists. And on Wall Street they are reviled for conflicting forecasts that seem to have only a nodding relationship with the course of the stock market. In fact Citicorp, the nation's largest bank, folded up its economics department last year. ''Let's say this,'' sums up Thurow, ''if you were buying and selling economists like commodities right now, you would sell short.'' Nonetheless, while the professional stature of economics is imperiled, as a catapult to stardom it has never been springier. A recent Wall Street Journal article estimated that retiring Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker could earn $1.5 million on the speech circuit and a million more in book advances. The greenrooms of MacNeil/Lehrer and the network Sunday shows are regularly filled by economists clearing their throats on everything from Japanese investors to trade deficits to insider trading. Alan Greenspan, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, who was briefly a jazz clarinetist before becoming an economist, is at home under lights. A veteran talk-show guest, he leased his dour Walter Matthau-ish countenance in 1985 for an Apple computer ad captioned ''Alan Greenspan, Famous Economic Adviser.'' Celebrity economists come from all points of the compass -- Keynesians, monetarists, neoclassicals, neo-Marxists and, recently, a group called rational-expectationists, who believe that markets have a will of their own that no government policy can override. But careful observation reveals certain common characteristics among star-track economists: -- Affiliation with an elite university, think tank or Wall Street investment house -- A slim, easy-reading book that scorns the naive solutions of yesterday and proclaims a realistic but sensitive vision of the future -- An advisory relationship with at least one presidential candidate

Economist bashing is an old and respected pastime. It is practiced by journalists, politicians and in many instances economists themselves, to the applause of a public eager to see confusion and thimblerigging among know-it- alls. And it is so easy to do. Never before have economists been more sought after to inform the citizenry -- and rarely have they had less to say. The currently popular multieconomist confrontations serve only to compound the confusion. ''That's the way it should be,'' says Art Laffer, 47, ex-professor, capitalist, supply-side shaman and the eponymous architect of the Laffer Curve, one of the many relics in the prop room of economics. (The curve, which purports to show how higher tax rates can lead to less, rather than more, revenue for the federal government, is acknowledged -- by opponents like Thurow -- to have some theoretical validity but none applicable to life in America.) ''Lester and I take as our objectives to provide information -- to set out in a fun, modestly doctrinal form two different ways of looking at the planet,'' says Laffer. ''We provide good hard arguments and then let the marketplace decide. We ought to disagree.'' Of course, there are many more than two ways of looking at the planet. ''The economy is overdetermined,'' says Robert Heilbroner, professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and the author of the most popular book ever written about economists, The Worldly Philosophers. ''And that means that any particular event can be explained in more than one way. There are many causes.'' Still, Heilbroner is choosy about which explanations he'll accept: ''The rational-expectations people, for example, are stratospheric. They have nothing going for them but the mathematical elegance of their model.'' Lawrence Kudlow, chief economist for the investment banking firm Bear Stearns and a regular face on shows like Wall Street Week and the network news, will defend rational expectations, but he doesn't like Thurow's model: ''He's all wet. There is no 'zero-sum society.' One guy's gain is not another guy's loss.'' George Gilder, author of Wealth and Poverty, a 1981 book that was passed out by the Reagan campaigners as a sound depiction of the President's supply-side economic philosophy, is vehement in his castigation of the broad mainstream of the profession: ''The basic college version of economics is incomprehensible -- incomprehensible because it is all wrong. It could exist only in a university. No one could possibly stumble upon it because it's so farfetched.'' < Why then is it still force-fed to students? Gilder explains: ''It's very difficult to learn something that is all wrong, and if by chance you do waste all that time and learn it, you will be inclined to defend it ferociously.'' It is not surprising that most other economists ignore Gilder who, as a supply-sider without a Ph.D. in economics, has two strikes against him. Comments Alan Blinder, professor of economics at Princeton: ''Among economists, Gilder is a nonperson.'' One person who would be deeply disturbed by Thurow's idea of selling economists short is Danny Stern. As vice president and general manager of the Leigh Bureau, a speaker's agency based in Princeton, N.J., Stern is a close watcher of the supply and demand for economists. He knows where all his speakers are at any given moment. Where, say, is Lester Thurow? ''Lester is speaking to the Arthur Andersen accountants in St. Charles, Ill. Then he goes to Carleton College in Minnesota. Oh, yes, he's got a corporate gig in Boston tonight.'' What about Robert Reich? ''He's in Japan.'' And George Gilder? ''He's at home as far as I know. Supply-side was all the rage after the last election -- now you can't give it away.'' Seriously, what would Gilder cost for a night? ''You'd get him for $5,000. Lester is $10,000, and we're thinking of raising the price. Demand is too high.'' How much is Reich? ''$7,500, but he's coming on strong.'' What kind of economists do people like? ''Big names. Prestigious schools -- Harvard, Stanford, MIT -- Nobel Prizes. We got Franco Modigliani, the Nobel winner in 1985, through Lester. They had offices near each other at MIT. He's not an easy book, though. Turns down most offers but likes to go to Europe.''

''I'll tell you why so many more economists are becoming public figures these days.'' It's Milton Friedman talking. (A quintessential showman-scholar and seasoned pundit who is also a Nobel prizewinner, Friedman can charge $20,000 for an after-dinner speech.) ''It's because there are just so many more economists around. Did you know that until 1929 the federal government never spent any more than 3% or 4% of the national income? Now it spends more than 30%. The career opportunities for economists have widened enormously.'' Do economists naturally gravitate toward government? ''Yes, but here's an odd contradiction. Economists of all stripes tend to favor free markets -- at least in principle. But then their personal interests and career gains all lie in the direction of interfering with free markets -- so they do. This is why government has grown so much.'' Speaking of free markets, is it true you can charge $20,000 for a speech? ''Yes, but I'm thinking of raising it -- to discourage people from calling.'' Is that going to work? ''Sure, markets are markets.''

James Buchanan, the most recent Nobel economist, is the proponent of a theory of political economy called public choice, which has been assiduously shunned for decades by mainstream academic economists. His notion that the behavior of people engaged in politics can be examined by economic methods has been considered simplistic, unscientific and even mean spirited. ''We look at the incentives that influence politicians,'' says the dignified Tennessean in a rare interview in his office at George Mason University, outside Washington, D.C. His recent boost to celebrity status was an unsought surprise to him and, one surmises, a bit of an inconvenience. Danny Stern tried to sign him up as a speaker-for-hire but never got past the professor's secretary. Should an economist become a public figure to get his ideas across? ''I've faced that problem in spades since October when I won the prize. I was formerly just another voice in the wind. Now what I say may have some influence. But I've decided that it's not my best use of time to retail ideas.'' Is that true for all economists? ''I think the role of the economist is to sit back and analyze.'' Yet you appear on TV now and then. ''Oh, I try not to. I don't see much point. I did MacNeil/Lehrer once and CBS asked me to talk about how the country is spending beyond its means. I've been invited to be on Nightline, but I turned them down.''

The Brookings Institution, a beige limestone eminence built in the public structure style of the '50s, sits on Massachusetts Avenue among Washington's palatial embassies and trade associations. Square as the New Deal, with its name cut in big roman letters under eight stories of venetian-blinded windows, Brookings is a think tank dedicated to the defense of a faith. The faith here is largely liberal Democratic Keynesian economics, and it has been under siege for two Republican terms. But now that the orthodoxy of Reaganomics is wearing thin, Brookings is going on the offensive. This day begins at Brookings with Charles L. Schultze, former chief economic adviser to President Carter, and several other house-brand economists briefing a roundtable of reporters over bagels and melons. Afterward, Schultze, 63, white-haired and gravel-voiced, reflects on the plight of the entire profession: ''We may be past the heyday of the economist. Walter Heller was given credit for eight years of solid boom in the '60s, so the government went out and hired truckloads of economists.'' So what went wrong? ''Well, in the '60s, you could have your cake and eat it too. It was a time of low inflation and low unemployment. But the '60s ended with a policy mistake. LBJ decided to finance the Vietnam War without a tax increase, and inflation flared.'' You were President Carter's chief economic adviser after that. What were the solutions? ''There really were no solutions. The economist has become the bearer of bad tidings.'' Is this why recent Presidents seem to have become uneasy with economists? ''No President is comfortable with economics. Of all the things he deals with, the overall fate of the economy is what will affect his future most. Presidents see macroeconomic issues like productivity and the balance of trade as amorphous, fuzzy -- dangerous. Only Ronald Reagan is comfortable with economics, and that's because he doesn't understand it.'' Where do we go from here? ''Most economists now agree on the problems, but the solutions are hard: we either raise taxes or cut spending.''

Two floors above Schultze, Robert Litan, 37, a Brookings economist who is also an economic adviser for presidential hopeful Joe Biden, has a third possibility: ''Superconductivity.'' Are you kidding? ''Joe Biden is fascinated by superconductivity.'' Why? ''Productivity is the key economic issue of the times. But it's an abstract concept. The phrasing has to be very carefully chosen for an election. There's an overall feeling that the country is slipping. We want to tap that feeling. The slippage is quantified as a loss of productivity.'' Weren't we just talking about superconductivity? ''Yes. Well it could be that productivity comes in waves. You know, Joseph Schumpeter saw economic waves -- electricity, the automobile, then the transistor. These great leaps can suddenly raise the level of productivity.''

The Brookings cafeteria is a stainless-steel-and-formica affair full of pale-faced economists with their sleeves rolled up eating sandwiches and, in observance of Strawberry Week, digging into dishes of the fruit. Charles Schultze nods from behind a roast beef on rye.

Litan goes on: ''My legal experience is great for this job. I was introduced to Biden by Stu Eisenstat, who worked for Carter -- he's a partner at my firm. Most people at Brookings are technical experts. But I think bare-bones policy. I'm always asking, how do we draft the talking points? The knack is to convert theory into policy. It's a kind of alchemy.'' What are you working on now? Litan talks and looks straight ahead as if he were reading policy off a screen in front of his eyes. ''The student loan problem. I'm devising what's called contingent income repayment for student loans. Investment bankers will have to pay back more than, say, teachers -- and pay it back faster. Then we'd securitize these loans like Fannie Maes and sell them to investors. I ride the train back to Wilmington with Biden sometimes. And he loves the idea.'' What else? ''Saving is going to be a big factor.'' Are you saving? ''Economists save like squirrels. Here at Brookings that's all they talk about at lunch. IRAs, Keoghs. Brookings has a great retirement plan -- much better than my law firm. I'm obsessed by savings.''

Across town, at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington's battleship- class conservative think tank, lunch speaks to a whole different ideology. In the first place, it's luncheon. Down a nondescript hall, an ordinary office door opens into an elegantly appointed dining room. Hotel-plate tureens, set on a long linen-clad table, hold the catered hot lunch -- today, lasagna. Rosy cloth napkins fan out from the goblets set out for assembling dismal scientists. On this occasion, the lunchers include Herbert Stein, former chief economic adviser to President Nixon; Sir Alan Walters, former economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher and currently at the World Bank; Marvin Kosters, the Institute's director of economic policy studies; and Gottfried Haberler, emeritus professor of International Trade at Harvard, Viennese aristocrat, former colleague and friend of Schumpeter and, at 87, a regular participant in what the resident scholars call the weekly Economists' Lunch. ''There has definitely been a decline in the status of the economist in this Administration,'' ventures Stein. ''Economists speak in the realm of opinion -- and their opinions are becoming less confidently held. Take the issue of productivity -- we have no clear ideas about the relationship between policy and productivity.'' ''And the differences between economists are becoming less defined,'' offers Sir Alan. ''In any given country, economists all seem to think alike. For example, if you scratch an economist in India -- and I don't recommend you do -- you'll get a planner.'' ''Still,'' says Stein, ''television has to have its controversies. Producers call people with high recognition just so they can politicize an issue, and they keep calling until they find someone -- anyone.'' (Of the eight economists at the table, only one has never been on television.) ''If anything,'' adds Stein, ''television has changed the pecking order of the profession. There's now a whole layer of people with political connections who have exposure. Keynes was a public figure, but he didn't promote himself.'' ''I can remember him on the wireless all the time saying 'spend, spend, spend,' '' injects Sir Alan. ''I knew Keynes.'' It was Haberler, who has just finished his lasagna. ''He corresponded with everybody -- and did anything to get his ideas across. When I first wrote to him, he couldn't read my name so he cut out the signature on the letter and pasted it on the envelope with the return address.'' ''Economists are very funny people,'' says Marvin Kosters. ''They think what they are doing is very important. But they are reluctant to write up their ideas in a way that the public can understand.''

With a solid academic base, a popular text and a Business Week column, Princeton's Blinder need only become identified with a bold, incisive but properly compassionate economic policy prescription and he could go all the way. ''I'm writing a book that may make me a celebrity economist,'' concedes Blinder, 41, who is just putting the last touches on a popularized examination of the way economists approach problems. His academic work, largely in the area of public policy, has already attracted the attention of several Democratic presidential candidates. ''Fortunately, there are more candidates than celebrity economists to go around,'' he notes. Blinder was recently at an all-day brainstorming session at Senator Joseph Biden's home in Delaware (orchestrated by Bob Litan from Brookings). ''We were trying to devise a stand on trade policy that was both responsible and would play at the AFL- CIO,'' he recalls. Yet Blinder is first to see the ironies involved with celebrity. ''There was nothing else to write about one week last year, so I did my Business Week column on how we should get rid of the penny -- it was essentially filler.'' But the result was a spectacular rush of publicity -- calls from radio and TV stations all over the country, a camera crew wandering around in the Princeton economics department. ''Reader's Digest wanted to condense the column. Can you believe that?'' asks the stunned academician. ''How do you condense an 800- word column?''

''There is an old line in this business -- 'Round up the usual suspects,' '' says George J.W. Goodman -- Adam Smith to his audience on PBS' weekly Money World. The suspects are not necessarily the most respected economists but those who have the ability to talk on-camera. ''Kenneth Arrow at Stanford is just as distinguished an economist as Milton Friedman,'' says Goodman, ''but TV audiences have never heard of him.'' Lester Thurow, Robert Reich, Alan Greenspan, Art Laffer, Henry Kaufman are among Goodman's usual suspects. ''The rule with the Wall Street economists,'' says Goodman, ''is to predict early and predict often. No one remembers what you said anyway. Henry Kaufman is the most heavily promoted economist in the world. He made his reputation predicting higher interest rates in the '70s, but he has missed the turn for the last year or two. It doesn't matter; the economist on Wall Street is a sales instrument.''

''I don't like the word crash,'' whispers Wall Street economist Lawrence Kudlow. He glances around as if to be sure that none of his colleagues at the investment firm Bear Stearns has heard the vile term uttered on the premises. ''I'd prefer that you used 'correction' instead.'' The question had been about Kudlow's recent standoff with John Kenneth Galbraith on MacNeil/Lehrer over an article in the Atlantic Monthly by Galbraith comparing 1987 with 1929. ''I was at a disadvantage because the bit was about his article. But he was a little dotty that night -- slamming industry and calling for a recession.'' How did it come out? ''Oh, I have a good ear for the music -- I know when to react, when to land a punch. The staff at MacNeil/Lehrer thought it was a clear knockout.'' You're on television a lot. ''I spend most of my time on TV. Last night I was on CNN's Crossfire. Friday, I'm on Wall Street Week. Two weeks ago I did Money World. As chief economist, my job is to generate visibility for the firm.'' Why are there so many economists on TV these days? ''It's a reflection of the current high anxiety about the U.S. economy. Even the academics are getting into the act.'' Kudlow, 40, a former economist in the Office of Management and Budget, has decorated his office with Washington memorabilia -- flag and flagpole, framed letters from Presidents and Cabinet officers. Tiny sailboats bob on his necktie next to the monogram on his shirt. Which are the best televison shows for economists? ''MacNeil/Lehrer is good. Lou Dobbs' Moneyline on CNN is the best.'' Which are worst? ''Nightline is not a great show for economists. Ted Koppel doesn't understand economics, so he has his ears closed to economists.'' Do you generally use a particular model of the economy? ''Not really. I tend to be more of a classicist in the manner of the Austrian economists -- Hayek, Von Mieses. You know, free markets, sound money . . . sort of a conservative eclectic.'' How do you come up with your forecasts? ''I listen to the market. See, the idea is that the market has this wisdom.'' He shrugs as if to say, ''Don't ask me, but it works.'' What is the market telling you about Alan Greenspan's appointment? ''He's an old acquaintance. We were on Adam Smith's Money World together. He's a tight-money man. Short-term rates may go up. But I tell myself, Larry, stay cautious, don't go cranking up a model, don't go wild. Economists wedded to models are finding their star falling.''

Rich Dubroff, 31, is the producer of Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser, PBS' market-moving Friday night investment show. He sometimes books economists for the sought-after guest slot on the show. ''These are not slick people,'' says Dubroff. ''The economists we see are mostly nice, careful men.'' To Dubroff, the best TV economists are able to get across complex ideas in simple phrases. But the process is not entirely unslick, either. ''They know how to play the game,'' notes Dubroff. He cites economist Albert Wojnilower of First Boston as an example: ''He's a very shy man. But that helps. He comes across as being very earnest and that adds to his credibility.'' Supply-sider Paul Craig Roberts is the exact opposite. Says Dubroff: ''He gives no ground.'' *

''I can't afford to,'' says Roberts, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ''If you are Lester Thurow or Robert Reich, you just call up the New York Times or Newsweek, and they'll send forth a star reporter who will sit at your feet admiringly and write about how brilliant you are.'' Roberts, who has been an economics professor at Stanford, Tulane and Georgetown, has written three books on economics and was recently awarded the French Legion of Honor as ''the artisan of the renewal of economics,'' is not a little bitter about the lot of the conservative policy economist. The economics departments at most elite universities, according to him, consider policy economists second-rate. ''These faculties will tolerate a few liberal policy economists. They may not approve of his science, but they will support him because of his moral stance,'' Roberts argues. But conservative policy economists strike out on both scores, suffering in Roberts' phrase a ''reverse MacCarthyism. I couldn't be invited to teach even a summer course at Harvard or MIT. If you're immoral and also second-rate, there is no room for you at Harvard.'' Roberts tenaciously defends supply-side economics. He pounds page 189 in Samuelson's Economics, where, for the first time in 12 editions of the classic textbook, supply-side theory is presented: ''You see, I've caused them to change their damned textbooks, but they still will never call me a real economist.'' It may not matter. That is because the liberal-conservative divide may no longer be the scene of the heaviest combat. With the breakdown of the economic models, economists tend to head off in either of two opposing directions. Some -- mostly academics -- have just circled the wagons. Retreating deeper and deeper into the snarl of algebra, they embrace the credo of British economist John Eatwell, who said, ''If the world is not like the model, so much the worse for the world.'' The others have moved a little closer to the exits and nuzzled up to the social sciences -- psychology, sociology, political science and even literary criticism. Significantly, economists increasingly describe what they do as ''political economy'' rather than economics.

The house on Francis Avenue, an elegant Victorian built of dark, thin-set brick, sits in bosky gloom at the edge of the Harvard campus. John Kenneth Galbraith, professor, former U.S. Ambassador to India, belletrist and author of The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State, The Anatomy of Power and a number of other economic polemics that, taken as a whole, constitute the most damningly articulate assault on what has come to be known as the American corpocracy, is at home. A lean six feet, eight inches tall, he fills the doorway -- at least along its y-axis -- to greet a visitor. In the living room his wife Kitty has just finished her Sanskrit language lesson and gives up the coffee table to allow an interview to take place. Galbraith's work, intensely literary and unmathematical -- distinctly out of favor during the years of high-model economics -- is undergoing a revival. The Ambassador cantilevers himself into a Morris chair just beneath 29 pale green and white striped volumes of the writings of Keynes. What's happening to your profession? Have economists given up the Keynesian model? ''The great dialectic in economics is the continual change in economic situations. The original view of the Keynesian model was perfectly symmetrical. You did one thing for deflation and then you did exactly the opposite for inflation. Fine, but this entirely left out an extreme political asymmetry. In practice these processes are not reciprocal. It's easy, of course, to increase spending to stem deflation and recession, but it's very hard for a government to decrease spending to counteract inflation.'' Thus the elegance of the model is destroyed by reality? ''Also, we underestimated the extent of microeconomic disturbances. OPEC, agriculture, the current Wall Street insanity -- these microproblems in the aggregate can be greater than the macroissues in impact. Have economists lost clout because of these misestimations? ''Economists are now out of touch with Washington. It used to be that you could have a meeting of the Harvard Economics Society on the Boston-Washington train on any Thursday night.''

The economic observer most sought after by the gathering herd of Democratic presidential challengers works just across campus from Galbraith at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a colorful salad of overloaded bulletin boards, modular offices and embryonic bureaucrats reeking with career opportunities. Robert B. Reich, 41, a compact, intense man, strolls its halls like the Dalai Lama, preaching his prescriptions for a new American industrial policy. Where is economics going? ''In the first place, I don't do economics. Conventional economics has precious little to do with reality. I'm in constant warfare with conventional economics. Look at Brookings. Brookings has become a center of conventional, rigorous economics.'' What's wrong with that? ''Lots. Brookings misses the whole point. Politicians operate on two levels: slogans and bumper stickers on the one hand, and hard, detailed policy prescriptions on the other. So speechwriters are here.'' He slams one hand on his desk. ''And policy is here.'' Slam! Sounds like the old problem. Politicians say one thing and do another. ''But,'' he is red-faced now, ''when the dissonance between the story and the reality becomes so great, the myths that link the slogans to policy prescriptions change. That's where I operate.'' Reich's most recent book, Tales of a New America, is a prime example of the new soft-core model-less economics. A beguiling combination of cultural anthropology and French deconstructionism, the book searches for the solutions to America's economic problems in the realm of the collective unconscious of the population. It has sold well, but it has also made Reich anathema to most mathematically inclined economists. Reich's friends are naturally more tolerant. Robert Heilbroner, who has studied the lineage of celebrity economists from Adam Smith on down, reserves judgment when asked if Reich is in the direct line of succesion. Still he wishes the new contender well. ''He's on the side of the angels,'' says the resolutely liberal Heilbroner. ''And we need all the angels we can get.''