Does Steve Forbes have what George Bush in Iowa once called “The Big Mo”? Surveys in Arizona (Feb. 27 primary) show him tied with Dole there, and he’s making a stealthy midwinter trip to Alaska where he hopes to turn the state’s invisible Jan. 26-29 caucuses into a small springboard. In Iowa–where his TV attack ads appear as many as six or seven times a night-he’s solidly in second place for now, and his private polls show him pulling within 10 percent of Dole: His flat tax is hot, his brainy awkwardness is hip and his complete lack of political qualifications uniquely qualifies him for the job. Or so some voters seem to be saying. We’re in the era of the millionaire protest candidate. He’s loaded as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore!
All told, Forbes, whose refusal of federal matching funds frees him to spend whatever he wants, will likely deploy $8 million in Iowa. That’s at least a million more there than anyone else (out of about $25 million in family money he’s pumping in nationally), and he’s augmenting his air war with a late ground game, The Forbes forces will send an unprecedented seven mailings to all 250,000 Iowa Republicans between now and the election, and professional phone banks will contact two thirds of expected caucusgoers-about 3,000 calls a day. The rich are different from Richard Lugar.
But Forbes is probably not as strong in Iowa as his poll numbers and the hype suggest, and it’s not just because Pat Buchanan has started in with cracks about the publisher’s yacht club. I went to Iowa figuring that Forbes could simply hire hundreds of college kids, let them rent Jeep Cherokees (or Lexusess) to ferry folks to the local gym and essentially buy the caucus. But it’s not as simple as that. Bemuse his field operation started from a dead stop in late December–with an Oldahoman at the helm–Forbes is only organized in 17 of the 99 counties so far. The other candidates have been there for more than a year, with well-connected locals in charge.
Ironically, paying for your own campaign has its disadvantages in a caucus state. It’s not that GOP voters resent personal wealth. R’s that candidates with donor lists find it easier to identify and mobilize likely mucus attendees. If someone gives $25 to Dole or Phil Gramm or Lamar Alexander, he’s almost certain to show up for two hours on a chilly night in February. This gives the other candidates a base to build on.
Or so the prevailing logic on the ground goes. Brian Kennedy, the neutral state GOP chairman, says there are.really only three-reasons people participate in the fine civic act of attending a caucus – and each works against Forbes. There’s passion, which Kennedy says potential Forbes voters who know him just from television may lack; the urging of a neighbor, which plays to those like Gramm who have organized extensively at the precinct level; and personal contact. Something like 70 percent of caucusgoers have seen a candidate in person. That means there’s no substitute for showing up early and often, as Iowa winners like Carter (‘76), Bush (‘80) and Dole (‘88) did. Forbes is getting good crowds, but he started too late.
And Dole is not the only one who is offended by Forbes’s ads. For a candidate who stresses that he is the only optimist in the race, Forbes’s media buy is surprisingly downbeat and deceptive. It’s designed by Tom Ellis and Carter Wrenn, the two slashing operatives who gave Jesse Helms his start. One ad that disturbed Forbes’s friend Jack Kemp blasts Dole for having postponed the Senate vote on term limits-without mentioning that it was term-limit advocates who urged Dole to do so bemuse they lacked enough votes.
Worse, Forbes’s version of the flat tax was flattened in last Saturday’s candidate debate. “It’s a truly nutty idea in the Jerry Brown tradition,” said Alexander. “It will cause real estate to crash and cause the values of your homes and farms to go down by 10 or 20 percent.” He’s right. Once people find out Forbes wants to end the most cherished middle-class entitlement of all–the home-mortgage deduction-they may take a second, less favorable look.
Forbes could also quickly prove to be out of step with the larger budget-balancing tone of the campaign. Jude Wanniski, the godfather of supply-side economics and the man who first urged Forbes to make the race, notes approvingly that “all of the other candidates are budget balancers; Steve is not.” That may work for voters who are convinced by Forbes’s argument that economic growth is ultimately more important than a balanced budget, but it runs counter to the prevailing Republican idea of 1996.
Mike Murphy, Alexander’s clever strategist, had it right when he said that Dole can be beaten only if Republicans start acting like Democrats–in other words, if the party has grown so big that it has room for Democrat-style insurgencies against the established order. Until now the GOP has almost always handed its nomination to the guy whose turn it is. That still argues for Dole. Unless the hogs run wild.
