With the disastrous showing of the Forbes campaign in the New Hampshire primary on February 20, different political soothsayers have reacted in different ways. Some have asked: “What will Steve Forbes do now?” Others have asked: “What will the pro-growth, low-tax, social moderates do now?” And others, those of us entranced by the frivolities of American politics, have asked: “What will Jude Wanniski do now?”
It’s a silly question, really, since the answer is so obvious. Wanniski — the man called (by himself) “the most influential political economist of the last generation” and the strategist credited (mostly by himself) with launching the Forbes campaign — will continue to be Wanniski. Forward- looking. Optimistic. Delusional.
“Believe me, all the Forbes enthusiasts were thrilled to pieces with the results in New Hampshire,” Wanniski said, 48 hours after the vote. Thrilled? To pieces? With a distant fourth-place finish and 12 percent of the vote in a state Forbes earlier had a chance of winning?
“He has the resources to go on,” Wanniski said. “He’s clearly the best man to be president. And the good news is he’s brought in Malcolm Wallop [the former Republican senator from Wyoming], who has superb political skills. He’ll go full time into the operation.
“I still think Steve is going to be the nominee.”
To dismiss Wanniski’s post-New Hampshire assessment as the cynical cheerleading of a spin doctor is to misunderstand the man For the explanation is indelibly Jude-like: The bad news is really good news, thinly disguised, and even if the bad news really is bad, a white knight is arriving to make it good. Even if the white knight is a retired and obscure United States senator from a state with half the population of San Antonio.
That incorrigible optimism explains, in part, Wanniski’s appeal. But only in part. Twenty years after he emerged as the chief pamphleteer of “supply- side economics,” he continues to roll Republican politics, having flirted with the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Bob Dole, and now Forbes. Which may say as much about the Republican party as it does about Jude Wanniski.
I wish,” George Will once said of Wanniski, “that I were as confident about something as he is of everything.” Given that it comes from George Will, this is a statement of amazing power. For Wanniski, former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and now an economics consultant, certitude is the stock in trade. So, just as crucially, is eccentricity. He is a publicist in the old sense of the term, a popularizer and dramatizer, who has applied his gifts not least to the story of his own career. No accounting of it would be complete without essential anecdotes.
His grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner and dedicated Communist who gave his grandson a copy of Das Kapital at high school graduation. Jude himself was raised in Brooklyn — the Dodgers are a recurring motif in his writing — and became a newspaperman, working in Alaska and then Las Vegas. In his Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal, Edward Scharff devotes nearly a chapter to Wanniski and recounts much of the legend: how Wanniski reported to his new job at the National Observer in 1962, driving up to the offices in a silver Buick Riviera convertible wearing a gold lamsports coat and mirrored sunglasses, a Las Vegas showgirl on his arm; how, in the mid-70s, he took Arthur Laffer and then-White House deputy chief of staff Dick Cheney out for drinks and encouraged Laffer to explain supply- side economics by drawing his eponymous curve on a napkin; and how, in 1978, he was fired at last from the Journal for canvassing a suburban New Jersey train station on behalf of a political candidate. The candidate was his fellow supply-sider Jeff Bell, and the man Wanniski canvassed was one of his own bosses at the Journal.
To certitude and eccentricity you may add indiscretion. Wanniski first plunged into presidential politics with Ronald Reagan in 1979, having tried unsuccessfully to convince Jack Kemp to make a run — a quadrennial exercise in pointlessness Wanniski shares with many Republicans. By this time Wanniski had gone the route of all supply-siders: He had set up a lucrative consulting business, woolrig businessmen away from their demand-side delusions. To the same end he had also written an entertaining popular exposition of supply- side economics, called with characteristic grandiosity, The Way the World Works. It was enormously influential to a generation of tax-cutting and gold-bug policy wonks — “It totally rearranged my electrons,” one said recently — and remains, 18 years later, Wanniski’s great achievement.
In preparation for the 1980 campaign, Wanniski, Laffer, and others privately briefed Reagan on the benefits of a tax-rate reduction, which Reagan, counseled by Bell, had advocated as early as 1976. In public, however, Wanniski “over-reached” — the generous term used by Martin Anderson in his history of the Reagan years, Revolution. The left-wing journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway published an interview with Wanniski in the Village Voice, under the title “The Battle for Reagan’s Mind.” ” Wanniski,” wrote supply-sider Bruce Bartlett at the time, “seemed to take credit for inventing the Laffer curve, inventing the Kemp-Roth bill, Jude and . . . making [Jack Kemp] a major national spokesman.” Wanniski also claimed a healthy tax cut would reduce prostitution, pornography, drug use, divorce, and abortion.
The Voice article was the first iteration of what became, for Republicans, an inconvenient caricature throughout the 80s: of Reagan the marionette, tugged this way then that by opportunists of various colorations, The candidate was not amused. “Reagan and his campaign staff immediately dropped Wanniski,” wrote Anderson. “And, to the best of my knowledge, Wanniski never spoke to Reagan again, and never . . . played any role in the development and implementation of national economic policy after Reagan was elected president.”
Publicists of lesser gifts could not have survived the humiliation, but Wanniski is the Consultant Who Will Not Die. He owes his continued viability to several factors. Disdaining conventional wisdom in all its forms, he is eminently quotable, making him a favorite of financial journalists hoping to juice up a story. He has the ear, in particular, of Robert Novak, the most influential political reporter in the country, and limited access to his old outlet, the Journal editorial page. From his offme in Morristown, New Jersey, he faxes to favored clients and reporters and policy-makers a breathless series of notes, memos, bulletins, and newsletters. And above all there is his persistence, a tenacity of almost superhuman proportions, on behalf of his causes, which range from the absolutely immediate necessity of a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate to the absolute inevitability of a Forbes presidency to the absolutely catastrophic consequences of a failure to return to the gold standard.
“He is simply indefatigable,” says one journalist who has been the object of Wanniski’s barrages, “both in his self-promotion and in his attention to whatever his cause of the day is.” His newsletters are studded with insinuations of his intimacy with the great and powerful — Treasury offcials, Capitol Hill players, Fed governors, and especially the big guy himself, Alan Greenspan. “I’m sure Greenspan will take his calls, Say, once every six months,” says a Greenspan friend. “Alan’s a pretty accessible guy — he’ll take your call if you have any standing at all. And then Jude can write about it for the next six months: “Well, I’ve been talking to Greenspan . . .'”
For a brief period beginning in 1994, Wanniski turned his attentions to Bob Dole. “I remember, if he hadn’t gotten any response from Dole for a while, he’d come down here and just sit in the press office,” says a Dole staffer. ” He knew Dole would have to show up sooner or later. And when he did, Jude would just . . . well, ‘tackle’ isn’t the right word. But he’d get hold of Dole. Dole never paid him much attention, though.” Another journalist recalls meeting with Dole in “94. “What’s with Wanniski, anyway?” Dole asked the assembled reporters. “He got Elizabeth’s fax number, I don’t know how. Now he’s sending faxes to her too!”
For the most part, Wanniski’s romancing of Dole consisted of offering unsolicited advice. “Do you still have the memos I wrote when I tried to get you to do the [Jesse] Jackson show?” Wanniski wrote in anticipation of a Dole appearance on CNN. “Review them now for Larry King. . . . Did you read my little piece in the Morristown newspaper? I fax it along again. Its message will be of use on Meet the Press.” The romance was reciprocal in a uniquely one-sided fashion: Jude would offer Dole advice, and in return Jude would praise Dole in his newsletter.
But the relationship was ill-starred, as anyone familiar with Dole, who makes no secret of his contempt for supply-side theory, would have guessed. In a March 1995 profile, the New York Times Magazine quoted Dole making unflattering remarks about tax cutters. Wanniski was crestfallen. “All my work!” he cried to acquaintances at the time. “All my work down the drain!” Today he speaks of Dole with undisguised contempt. “I tried to teach him,” Wanniski told me bitterly, “but he just couldn’t cut it.”
The Dole courtship, curious as it was, is not the strangest Wanniski has engaged in over the years. Even in print, he has enlisted some odd fellows in the supply-side cause. He has written often in praise of Karl Marx: ” emphatically a gold-standard free-trader.” He recently told Business Week that Lyndon LaRouche is “a gold-standard guy” whose followers are “not trained in demand-model economics,” which may be why Wanniski has hired several of them at his consulting firm. Moving, however slightly, closer to earth, he worked tirelessly for the conversion of Jerry Brown in late 1991. ” He thinks in terms of entrepreneurial capitalism,” he told the Journal at the time. Aside from Forbes, his political heroes of the moment are Robert Bennett, a nondescript senator from Utah who flirts with gold buggery, and New Jersey Rep. Bob Torricelli, a liberal Democrat whose ideology seems to intersect with Wanniski’s at a single point — a desire to cut the capital- gains tax. “If you’re a politician and you return his phone call,” says an old associate, “he’ll decide you’re savior of the world.”
“We can now confidently predict,” Wanniski faxed his clients in June 1992, ” H. Ross Perot will be elected President of the United States, probably by a landslide . . .” The memo’s inspiration seems to have come from the fact that Perot had granted Wanniski an interview the week before. Wanniski wrote that he “could safely make these predictions on the information that [campaign consultant] Ed Rollins had accepted Perot’s offer to be co-campaign manager. . . . Rollins’s acceptance was the last piece of information I needed.” He offered his picture of a Perot cabinet: Ann Richards or Wallop as vice president, zilliondire Ted Forstmann as Treasury secretary, and Jesse Jackson as secretary of state, who would “focus his energies on pro-growth policies everywhere.”
When I asked Wanniski why his prediction of a Perot victory had gone awry, he grew bitter again. “Ed Rollins,” he said. “He wrecked that campaign. When he was hired, that’s the point I knew it was over.”
“A Perot Presidency would be a colossal event in the history of the world,” Wanniski wrote in those happy days of June 1992, and he has brought the same extravagance of speech to the Forbes campaign. “Steve is a secular Christ,” he told me. When the Christian Coalition began attacking Forbes in Iowa, Wanniski fired up the fax machine. The Coalition, he wrote, “is one of the most active money changers in the temple atop Capitol Hill, always careful to ask for more than Congress can deliver. Its director, Ralph Reed, is clearly willing to bear false witness against his neighbor, Steve Forbes, as he did yesterday, the Lord’s Day. . . .” The fax drew a sharp rebuke from Forbes campaign manager Bill Dal Col: “We cannot be held responsible for what he writes or says.” Wanniski, according to a Forbes insider, has been barred from the campaign headquarters.
Which returns us to the question, What will Jude do now? The Forbes campaign is a test of one of his central hypotheses, that tax cuts are the surest path to electoral victory. The evidence so far is not good. Forbes’s vote totals in Iowa and New Hampshire — 10 percent and 12 percent, respectively — conform roughly to those of Kemp in 1988, the last candidate to make tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign.
“He lionizes people to an absurd extent,” says a former Wanniski favorite. ” And then when you fail him, he turns on you with an unbelievable viciousness.” The story of the supply-side movement is to a large extent the story of other supply-siders’ falling in with Wanniski, followed by the inevitable falling out. It has happened with Laffer, Bell, even Kemp, who has been locked with Wanniski in an intense intellectual symbiosis for 20 years. “Alas, he has become one of the nomenklatura in the Kremlin on the Potomac,” Wanniski wrote in 1991, in response to some now-forgotten apostasy.
“My guess,” says one supply-sider who has felt the lash, “is that he’ll turn on Steve when the campaign finally fails.” For now, Wanniski shows no sign of doing so. He is optimistic, forward-looking, without a trace of the frustration that comes when the world doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
By Andrew Ferguson
