NEWS ANALYSIS : Forbes’ Writings Map Out Evolution of His Positions

In a 1988 magazine column, Republican presidential contender Steve Forbes called the influential religious conservative leader Pat Robertson a “toothy flake.”

In another column three years earlier, Forbes disparaged proposals to crack down on illegal immigrants by sanctioning employers who hired them. “An important portion of this country’s prosperity,” Forbes wrote, “is now dependent on illegals. . . . The American Southwest would suffer a depression without them.”

Today, Forbes presents himself as an heir to Ronald Reagan’s message of “hope, growth and opportunity.” But in 1976, he opposed Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald R. Ford, writing: “If the Republican convention dumps Ford for Reagan, then the GOP will get--and deserve--a thrashing at the polls this November.”

These are just some of the nuggets from the Forbes file--the opinion column Forbes has written twice monthly since 1972 in the eponymous business magazine Forbes, founded by his grandfather and passed on to him by his father, Malcolm Forbes.

Steve Forbes seems to have rocketed out of nowhere to land on the cover of Time and Newsweek this week--and into position as the chief rival to Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas in the Republican presidential race, at least for now. But Forbes does have a record. His columns provide a clear guide to his thinking over time--the closest equivalent to the votes cast by his principal competitors from Congress, Sens. Dole and Phil Gramm.

Mostly, however, the columns display a consistent, coherent and staunchly ideological way of looking at the world. Like a planet orbiting a sun, Forbes’ thinking revolves around a nearly mystical faith in the potential of tax cuts, deregulation and a restoration of the gold standard to accelerate economic growth--a purist distillation of the supply-side faith that shaped the tax cuts Reagan pushed through in his first year in office. As early as 1983, Forbes was touting the flat tax that has become the centerpiece of his suddenly surging presidential campaign.

In a handful of instances, however, the 563 columns reviewed by The Times, dating to 1975, show cases of Forbes reversing long-held positions to align himself with prevailing attitudes in the GOP.

On illegal immigration, Forbes has somewhat hardened his earlier laissez-faire attitude.

Earlier this month, Forbes said he would support a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, an idea he repeatedly opposed.

While Forbes opposes big government, his columns reveal little enthusiasm for the political struggle to cut spending. Nor has he seemed particularly taken with the idea of a balanced budget.

“If by magic we could make the national debt and the budget deficit disappear,” he wrote in 1993, “the barriers to full prosperity would remain largely intact. The economy wouldn’t expand much faster.”

In all these respects, Forbes’ thinking closely parallels the views of Jack Kemp, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the original supply-side hero, whose choice not to seek the GOP nomination prompted Forbes’ decision to run.

But the columns show Forbes departing from Kemp in two broad respects. Forbes displays much more enthusiasm than Kemp for the conservative populist efforts to impose term limits and other reforms on Congress. And Forbes’ writings show unease with the priorities of the social conservative movement that considered Kemp a reliable ally.

For instance, in a 1987 column improbably urging liberals to support the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork, Forbes echoed language of the abortion-rights movement and wrote: “How likely is it that the American public will support laws pushing abortion into ‘the back alley’?”

Beneath all of this is an optimism so determined that it amounts to an ideology in itself. Regularly over the last two decades, Forbes has predicted boom times just ahead--a trademark that continues in his campaign. “We are in a golden age,” he insisted in a column just weeks before widespread dissatisfaction with the nation’s direction led to George Bush’s 1992 defeat. “Like most such eras, the luster will be more apparent to historians than to those who live through it.”

Avoiding Red Ink

On fiscal issues, Forbes, who began his column just two years after he graduated from Princeton in 1970, initially took traditional Republican positions that stressed the importance of avoiding red ink. In two 1975 columns, he opposed proposals to cut taxes for fear of increasing the deficit: “A not-impossible $100-billion deficit would be an unmitigated disaster.” Rather than tax reduction, he wrote, “the most productive stimulant for the economy at this point” would be an increase in the gasoline tax to reduce the deficit.

Through the early years of the Jimmy Carter administration, Forbes continued to lean toward the center. While conservatives mobilized against the SALT II arms control and Panama Canal treaties, Forbes supported both. Initially Forbes even praised Carter’s economic agenda. Six months into Carter’s term, Forbes wrote: “Businessmen should stop the whining and support the fundamental soundness of this administration.”

Over the next few years, the views in Forbes’ columns veered sharply toward a more predictable and ideological conservatism. The key to the shift was his integration into the circle of supply-side thinkers that included Kemp, economist Arthur Laffer and former Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski. In a June 1978 column, Forbes declared that Wanniski’s founding supply-side text--his book, “The Way The World Works”--”could do for the Republican Party what Marx’s Manifesto did for communism.”

Wanniski, who was instrumental in persuading Forbes to seek the presidency, says that Forbes’ views in the early 1970s reflected the more traditional economic conservatism of his father, Malcolm Forbes. The supply-side movement, Wanniski recalled, developed as Steve Forbes had begun “feeling his way” toward his own view of the world.

‘Stagflation’ Pivotal

In an interview Monday, Forbes said his conversion was prompted largely by the high rates of unemployment and inflation during the late 1970s--a state of “stagflation” that undermined the traditional economic theories that dominated post-World War II policy-making.

“It became very clear that what we were brought up with on economics had gone kablooey,” Forbes said. “That started [in me] an intense search for what in the world is going on.”

The supply-siders inspired the across-the-board reductions in income tax rates that Reagan powered through Congress in 1981. Supporters say the tax cuts prompted an economic boom during the 1980s; critics say they contributed to a continuing polarization of income and produced the massive federal deficits that still dominate Washington.

Once he adopted supply-side doctrine, Forbes never wavered in his support. And as Reagan warmed to the supply-side agenda, Forbes warmed to Reagan; eventually, he described Reagan as “America’s most important” president since World War II.

Forbes isn’t an advocate of big government: In 1993 he lauded a worldwide trend toward downsizing government in the wake of the Cold War. He has consistently urged deregulation (including eliminating all regulation of radio and television) as well as privatization of more government programs.

But, like many supply-siders, balancing the budget has not been his priority.

In 1985, like Kemp--then a member of the House--Forbes opposed Dole’s effort to reduce the deficit with an ambitious package of spending reductions. And in at least three different columns, Forbes said the balanced-budget amendment was ill-advised. “Not since Prohibition has there been a proposal so fraught with danger,” he wrote in 1992. Echoing arguments common among Democrats, Forbes maintained that a balanced-budget amendment could grant too much power to courts to order tax hikes or spending cuts.

Like most supply-siders, Forbes instead insisted the key to reducing the deficit was accelerating economic growth through reform of tax and monetary policy.

Through the early 1990s, he called for twinned reductions in the capital gains and payroll taxes. More recently he relentlessly promoted the 17% across-the-board flat tax on wages--which he has written would produce a “seismic economic boom” in which “unemployment would virtually disappear” and stock prices “would double . . . fairly quickly.”

Forbes is just as enthusiastic about the other top economic priority of supply-siders: reestablishing the link between the value of the dollar and gold. Forbes maintains that the U.S. should use the price of gold as “a compass” for determining the supply of money in the economy: when the price of gold rises above $385 an ounce, he argues, the Federal Reserve Board should squeeze the money supply; when it dips below that level, the Fed should loosen the spigots.

World View

On issues of America’s interaction with the world, Forbes, like many supply-siders, opposes the inward-looking economic nationalism associated with commentator Patrick J. Buchanan and Texas businessman Ross Perot. “There is no connection between a trade surplus or deficit and a country’s economic health and wealth.”

Forbes opposed the Clinton administration’s efforts to require Japan to purchase fixed amounts of auto parts as “socialism lite,” urged rapid expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement to Chile and Argentina, and called for developing a Pacific free-trade zone ultimately including Japan.

During the 1980s, he passionately supported the “Reagan doctrine” of providing aid to anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua, Afghanistan and elsewhere. He maintains the U.S. should develop a strategic missile defense system, like that proposed by Reagan, “with Manhattan Project-like speed.” And he has supported the expansion of NATO to include former Soviet bloc nations.

During the crisis over North Korea’s refusal to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities in the winter of 1993, Forbes urged retargeting “scores of” nuclear missiles, a blockade of oil shipments and the reintroduction of “tactical nuclear weapons” to South Korea. He has also argued that the U.S. should publicly support entry into the United Nations for Taiwan--a step that most experts believe would produce a fundamental break with mainland China.

The columns also identify Forbes as an early, consistent and eloquent advocate of intervention in the former Yugoslav federation. As early as August 1991, he wrote that under President Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia was moving in an “unsavory and unstable” direction. Though he opposed sending U.S. troops as peacekeepers, Forbes, beginning in 1992, called for the U.S. to ship arms to the Bosnian Muslims and support them with air strikes. “Our passivity is . . . morally repulsive,” he wrote in late 1992.

Faith in Growth

On immigration, Forbes’ views reflect the supply-side faith that population growth is a spur to economic growth. He has regularly supported greater legal immigration (“it contributes mightily to our economy and our culture”), and opposed Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal for a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

Forbes likened Wilson’s criticism of illegal immigrants to former California Gov. Earl Warren’s support for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Earlier, during the debate over the 1986 immigration bill, he argued that increasing the level of legal immigration and establishing a guest-worker program were a better response than employer sanctions to concerns over illegal migration. “Mexico needs ‘a safety valve,’ ” Forbes wrote in 1985.

Even at that time, Forbes called for beefing up the Border Patrol. But he switched his emphasis last November, when he called for much tougher enforcement against illegal immigration. Still, Forbes’ aides say reports that he endorsed a national version of Proposition 187 at the time were incorrect. And in another 1995 column he denounced proposals to create a national database intended to discourage employers from hiring illegal immigrants as “a project more in character of the former Soviet Union.”

That criticism highlights the libertarian streak flashing through Forbes’ writings. In 1986, he criticized Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist’s record of supporting wiretaps in the Nixon administration. In 1991, he declared “it’s an outrage” that companies were seeking so much information on employees’ private lives.

Social Issues

On social issues, Forbes’ writing was more veiled and oblique than his pronouncements on economic and social policy: He almost never expressed direct views on issues such as abortion. (Today, Forbes says that although he opposes abortion, America lacks a social consensus to ban it. In response to such remarks, the Iowa Right to Life Committee declared Monday that he “is not pro-life.”)

But even while carefully framing his remarks, his columns suggest skepticism about the social conservative movement. In a 1980 column, for instance, he noted the “damage done” to the GOP by dropping support for the equal rights amendment.

When televangelist Robertson challenged Bush for the 1988 nomination, Forbes wrote: “Fundamentalists may have liked Robertson’s message, but not the messenger; most voted against this toothy flake.”

Like most conservatives, Forbes ultimately soured on Bush too, writing that his administration was “allergic to innovative thinking.”

For 1996, Forbes first invested his hopes for a Republican revival with Kemp. When Kemp decided not to run, Forbes wrote last February that Republicans “must offer a positive pro-growth agenda.” Within weeks, at the urging of Wanniski and other supply-siders, Forbes had begun the process that convinced him he should deliver that message himself.

Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this story.