AS ADVANCE PUBLICITY GOES, Maureen Dowd’s column on Malcolm “Steve” Forbes, Jr., the billionaire magazine publisher who announced for the presidency Sept. 22, wasn’t the best the candidate could have hoped for. Writing in the New York Times last month, Dowd described the 48-year-old Forbes as “Walter Mitty with a platinum card,” a dilettante with a “wacky streak.” “Almost everyone seems to agree,” wrote Dowd, that Forbes “is loopy for thinking about pouring his own millions into a bid for the Republican nomination.”
Dowd’s assessment isn’t far off. Like tales of the Yeti, Forbes’s run for president is pretty easy to dismiss. Then you talk to his supporters, those who’ve seen the footprints in the snow, and the idea of a Forbes presidency begins to seem somewhat less fanciful.
Unlike the other candidates for the Republican nomination (or at least those who aren’t dumping an estimated $ 25 million of their own money into the race), Forbes doesn’t plan to take a dime in federal matching funds. The decision allows him to score some potentially juicy rhetorical points (“I’m not going to ask the American people to foot the bill for my campaign,” “I believe in this enough to pay for it,” etc.). More important, it allows his campaign to avoid restrictive spending caps in the states. While other candidates can spend only $ 660,000 during primary season in New Hampshire, for example, the Forbes camp can spend as much as it wants.
And, according to Forbes adviser John McLaughlin, the fledgling organization is ready to spend with a vengeance. The other major Republican candidates, says McLaughlin, who has worked for such one-time longshots as Gov. George Allen of Virginia and Mayor Bret Schundler of Jersey City, “have spent hundreds of thousands in Iowa already on organization. Forbes can come in there and can spend three or four times the amount of money they spend.”
Part of that money (up to $ 1 million) will go toward getting on the ballot in New York state, something the Forbes people seem convinced they can accomplish despite the seemingly insuperable obstacles the Al D’Amato machine has placed in the path of everyone but Bob Dole. Most of the rest, Of course, will buy advertising. “We’re going to use heavy media right up front,” explains Bill Dal Col, who has taken leave from running Empower America to manage the Forbes campaign. “And we’re going to do” it through every media avenue, not only television, but radio, print, direct mail, Internet.”
The Forbes media juggernaut, John McLaughlin predicts, will leave the other c andidates with a tough decision: “Once Steve starts communicating a message thr ough advertising, what do they do? Do they start spending, or do t hey try to hold it till later on?”
No matter what they do, the field will be considerably smaller by February. Contenders who don’t do well in straw polls and the early primaries are likely to see their sources of funding dry up fast. The Forbes campaign, whose main contributor is committed for the long haul, will be immune from such pressures. “For Forbes, we can hang in there,”says McLaughlin. “We can place in the middle of the pack in Iowa and still be alive for New Hampshire, and do better in the next state. People will be dropping out and we’ll still be in it. All we have to do is show signs of progress and still be in the race.”
By March 12, when half of the delegates will have been picked, the Forbes strategists hope that just about everybody else in the race will be broke and heading home. “We may not see a move in poll numbers till January,” predicts John McLaughlin, “but as you go into Super Tuesday, it’ll probably be a one-on- one race, probably us and somebody else.”
Of course this is all something of a rosy — not to say miraculous — scenario. For one thing, the Forbes campaign, like just about everybody else in the race, is betting above all on a Dole meltdown, which is by no means a sure thing.
But even if a photograph of Dole vacationing on the Monkey Business with a 1990s Donna Rice were somehow to appear between now and Super Tuesday, the Forbes campaign would still have to overcome its candidate’s relative anonymity. Worse yet, the issue that seems to excite Forbes most — reforming the tax code — has a tendency to put most people to sleep quicker than bourbon and Sominex. “When he talks about lowering interest rates,” John McLaughlin concedes, “the way he would do it is not something the average person understands. He wants to communicate his beliefs even though he knows it may not connect with the average person, because he feels it’s important.”
While there is an undeniable dignity in Forbes’s pander-free approach, it’s not the sort of stuff that traditionally has brought men to their feet, or set women swooning. The Kingfish never tried to explain capital gains.
Forbes supporters remain undeterred and brighteyed. “His is the only Kemp- Reagan ‘shining city on the hill,’ ‘America can be a better place” message,’ points out political consultant Sal Russo.
Ultimately, though, it’s neither message nor money that saves the Forbes campaign from seeming utterly preposterous, but recent precedent. “Looked at from inside the Beltway,” says Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner, the notion of Steve Forbes running for president “is wacky and nutty. But then you think that in ’92 this weird squeaky little guy who doesn’t stand for anything managed to get 19 percent of the vote.”
by Tucker CArlson
