New York
FOUR YEARS AGO, STEVE FORBES hosted a triumphant fund-raiser at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was a large, well-orchestrated event, and Forbes delivered a stirring speech that gave his newborn presidential campaign instant credibility. Last Thursday, Forbes held another big fund-raising dinner at the Waldorf. It was a success financially, raising over $ 1 million. But the reviews from the people at the tables were not glowing. “Wasn’t that awful?” one big-name conservative asked when I bumped into him in the hallway afterwards. “That was awful,” a Wall Street guy complained, when we ducked into the hotel bar to catch a little of the Knicks game. “I’m sure I’ve been at a worse political event at some point in my life,” a longtime Forbes loyalist noted, “but at the moment I can’t remember one.”
These instant reactions overstate the case, and it’s silly to judge a whole campaign by one speech, especially this early in the season. Steve Forbes has proven he can be a formidable presidential candidate. He is the most effective spokesman for some of the party’s best policy ideas, like Social Security reform.
Nonetheless, the stumble last Thursday is interesting, for two reasons. First, it shows what can happen when an ideas-based candidate tries to turn himself into a professional campaigner, complete with marketing gimmicks and packaging strategies. And second, the event says something about the state of conservatism. Because while the GOP establishment has flocked to George W. Bush, Forbes is the candidate of the conservative establishment. Forbes has spent his life championing conservative ideas, and activists and idea mavens admire him. On policy grounds, Forbes is closer to the right-leaning think tanks, magazines, and editorial pages than any of the other candidates. So the fate of Forbes’s campaign is an indicator of the health of the conservative movement.
First the packaging and presentation. It’s already clear that it is going to be harder this year for candidates to wow fund-raiser audiences than it has ever been. In past years, people who plunked down $ 1,000 for a chicken dinner were probably pretty committed to the candidate. But these days, the Dow is near 11,000, and for a lot of people a $ 1,000 donation is not that big a deal. So if a client or colleague leans on them to buy a plate at a dinner, they do it, even if they’re not that enthusiastic about the candidate. The audiences this year will not be so easy.
And on Thursday night, Forbes did little to prime them. All the other speakers (and there were many) delivered their remarks from behind the lectern. But Forbes pulled a half-Liddy. He stood away from the lectern in the middle of the stage, which was bare but for the two TelePromp Ters. The effect of seeing him up there alone in full body view was to magnify any awkwardness, especially the fact that Forbes had no place to put his hands. Forbes now speaks like someone who has been overcoached, who is trying to remember the pre-choreographed hand gestures and the by-the-book vocal inflections he has been taught. In 1996, Forbes was appealing because he was not a professional politician. He was running because no one else was advancing his ideas. Now he presents himself as a professional campaigner, just not a polished one, complete with all the career-politician cliches, like balloons and streamers that drop down at the end of the speech, and standard stump phrases like, “I am running for president because I want the American people to win.”
Another problem was that though the dinner started at 7:30, Forbes didn’t get up to speak until 10:00. A series of speakers came before him to tell us what a good man Forbes is. Some of these speakers — like Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell and Godfather’s Pizza chairman Herman Cain — were magnificent, but some were not so good. A ranch owner from Montana said Forbes has the “skill set” to be president. She praised him by saying he personally knows his dry cleaner. Furthermore, there was a longish campaign video that showed even more people — like Armstrong Williams, Walter Williams, and Caspar Weinberger — extolling Forbes’s virtues. The combined effect was numbing. Judging from this event and the early TV ads, the Forbes people think they need to humanize their guy in order to get people to listen to his ideas. But it’s hard to run a campaign filled with lavish praise for the candidate when everybody knows that the candidate is paying for most of it himself.
Flaws in presentation can at least be addressed, and these may have just reflected Forbes on a bad night — all candidates have them. The ideological problem is more troubling. There was something missing in the substance of the candidate’s speech, and the lack reflected a deficiency not just of Forbes but of contemporary conservatism. The problem lies not in specific policies. Forbes has deemphasized the flat tax this year and emphasized issues like Social Security reform, health care choice, and school choice. These are all great issues, and Forbes knows the substance better than anyone. The problem was in the way he tried to connect the policies to a larger vision.
Thematically, the speech was flat — which George W. Bush’s kickoff speech (all theme) was not. To understand this, it helps to remember that the conservative movement has been out of step with America for the past four years. During the 1995 budget fight, conservatives hungered for aggressive slashing of government. The country did not. During Lewinsky, conservatives hungered for impeachment. The country did not. In essence, much of the movement still longs for the conservative revolution that seemed in the offing in 1994 but never came about. The country is off in another direction.
The Bush, Dole, McCain, and Bauer campaigns have at least made efforts to adapt to the electorate of the moment. But Forbes has essentially stuck with the GOP theme of 1994. The key word in the Forbes campaign is “freedom.” That was the theme of the Gingrich moment: The government should “Leave Us Alone.” Hillary and her regulators should get off our backs. But post-Lewinsky and post-Littleton, it hardly seems that America’s problem is that we are not free enough. Rather it seems that American culture lacks self-control, real standards, and respected authority figures. The emphasis on freedom and emancipation seems out of step with the times.
The Forbes campaign may right itself and go on to capture the nomination. But if things don’t go well, the conservative establishment will have to ask itself some hard questions. Has the movement ossified? Is it out of step with the times? Why do the politicians who are most intimately connected with the think tanks and idea journals, like Newt Gingrich, Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm, and Steve Forbes, fail in the national arena, while those who remain at some distance from the conservative establishment succeed?
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
