The race to be first with hybrid cars powered by anything but gasoline is the rage.

It almost seems that if you can grow it, harvest it and convert it, there is a car in your future.

Corn, switchgrass (not the type your mother used on you when you misbehaved) and cooking oil have found their way into the engine compartment.

The feasibility of these agricultural byproducts for powering cars is to be determined, but there is federal money dangling in front of would-be innovators. Chattanooga has been designated as a model city to supply hydrogen power to a federally backed Nissan project.

The full-throttle approach to breaking through the clutter and being the perceived innovation king stokes the imagination of automobile designers around the world. The lure of federal taxpayer dollars stokes the fire a bit as well.

But will this current rush to hybrid technology slow as people return to time-tested driving patterns and the gasoline-powered buggy rules supreme once more? Diesel appears to be positioned to make a real dent in the traditional fossil fuel approach, but will electricity, hydrogen and ethanol really catch on?

The answer may reside at the Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Squirreled away in the archives at the center are the papers of the Tennessee senator.

Deep within those papers — and it will take some searching to uncover this gem — is a position paper prepared for the Senate minority leader when he campaigned for president in late 1979 and early 1980.

After being blind-sided in Maine in a non-binding delegate test, Sen. Baker limped into the presidential year of 1980 with lowered expectations.

To jump start the campaign, Doug Bailey, a political consultant with the firm Bailey-Deardourff, crafted a position paper to be used in advance of the Iowa caucuses.

He proposed that Sen. Baker announce to the agriculturally minded voters in Iowa the notion of an electric car. The political staff surrounding Sen. Baker was tremendously skeptical. But when you are looking for something to break through the clutter, the electric car filled that bill.

The Bailey point in 1980 was not so much to say that the country was on the verge of producing such a vehicle, but to stimulate voters who grew corn to vote for a candidate who would push to use their crops in

new ways. It was something of a stretch to get from corn that produces ethanol to an electric car, but if one thinks outside the box, then perhaps the connection would be made.

As a side to the electric car issue, the way Sen. Baker broke through the political noise was challenged in a public forum in Iowa by an Iranian student.

But Sen. Baker raised the notion of electricity powering automobiles in 1980, and 29 years later, it is the talked-about topic — for more than the federal dollars that are dangling on a string, one hopes.

A proposal before its time, but a great lesson in context, research and non-Internet-based digging.

To reach Tom Griscom, call 423-757-6472 or e-mail tgriscom@timesfreepress.com.