Forbes’ Ascent in Republican Race Puts Offended Dole on the Offensive

No one can accuse Steve Forbes of slighting the big picture. Within the first five minutes of his speech to a crowded room of supporters here one night last week, the magazine magnate-turned-presidential candidate managed to talk about the new millennium, the “post-Cold War world” and a “new era that will alter the way we live and . . . work.”

These sort of phrases don’t trip off Bob Dole’s tongue. Dole has a low tolerance for high concept. The senator is more likely to talk about leadership, stability, dependability, endurance. More and more, Dole also reminds his audiences that he comes from “a small town, Russell, Kan.,” where there wasn’t “a lot of money . . . but there were a lot of values.”

Partly, Dole’s emphasis on experience and empathy reflects his unsettled political situation. As Forbes has surged to a strong second place in recent public opinion polls here and in New Hampshire, Dole is trying to create a winning contrast against a millionaire opponent fresh to politics and green with money. But more than positioning explains the front-runner’s tone.

Forbes embodies the two things Dole may like least: privilege and theory. Dole’s distaste for both were at the core of his defining political battles during the 1980s. His resentment of privilege deepened the disappointment of his defeat in the 1988 Republican presidential race by George Bush--a man Dole always believed had been coddled by life. Dole’s preference for experience over theory provoked his repeated confrontations with Jack Kemp and the supply-side economists who inspired the 1981 Reagan tax cuts--and then resisted Dole’s efforts to reduce the deficits that ensued.

In Forbes, Dole faces an opponent who marries Bush’s privilege (and then some) with Kemp’s devotion to supply-side theory. As Dole labors to contain Forbes’ surprising ascent in this state, memories of his battles with those other two men are rising like ghosts from the spectral, snow-covered Iowa fields.

In Washington, Republican leaders routinely castigate President Clinton for inciting “class envy” by accusing the GOP economic plan of favoring the rich. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, most of the men seeking the GOP presidential nomination are inciting class envy as if their careers depended on it--which they might.

Sen. Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander, Patrick J. Buchanan and even Morry Taylor all say Forbes’ flat-tax plan would favor the rich at the expense of the middle class. But none of them seems as personally offended by Forbes’ emergence as Dole does. Running against Forbes has surfaced the instinctive populism of a man whose family survived the Depression in part by renting out the first floor of its home and squeezing into the basement.

Against Forbes, Dole is venting the class resentment that rippled just beneath his battle with Bush in 1988. Having climbed from meager circumstances in Russell and overcome crippling injuries in World War II, Dole always believed himself a stronger, more resourceful leader than Bush, who was born to comfort. Yet Dole’s antagonism toward Bush was curbed by their shared generational experience of serving under fire against Hitler and imperial Japan.

With baby boomer Forbes, there is no such boundary. As he campaigned through eastern Iowa last week, Dole jabbed at Forbes’ wealth at every stop. Typically, Dole revealed his feelings mostly in the waspish one-liners that buzz through his sometimes-rambling and disconnected speeches.

In Anamosa, Dole complained that Forbes has not released his tax returns. All we know, Dole said, “is that he made two or three or four million dollars last year--probably not one of his better years.” To a crowd that gathered as the evening chill settled over the town of Clinton, Dole said: “I know it’s dinner time, and I know if Forbes were here, he’d buy your dinner.”

Though he doesn’t remotely approach Forbes’ estimated $400 million-plus in assets, Dole now lives comfortably too. Noting that, Bill Dal Col, Forbes’ campaign manager, says Dole is exhibiting not “class antagonism, just antagonism” at the prospect that a first-time candidate could steal the nomination Dole has sought for 16 years.

But Dole’s irritation appears genuine when he repeatedly accuses Forbes of trying to buy the presidency. One Dole advisor says Forbes’ money doesn’t offend Dole so much as the way Forbes has spent it. While stressing “hope, growth and opportunity” in his personal appearances, Forbes has invested millions of dollars in negative television commercials, most of them aimed at Dole. “He feels that Forbes is operating the way that a lot of rich kids do, that it is mean-spirited and synthetic,” the Dole advisor said.

If Dole’s jabs at Forbes’ wealth evoke memories of his struggles against Bush, the senator’s attacks on his rival’s agenda reprise his battles with Kemp.

Though Dole helped pass the Reagan income tax cuts in 1981, he was never sold on the supply-side theory that the tax cuts would produce so much economic growth that they would pay for themselves. When the deficit ballooned, Dole spent much of the next decade trying to shrink it, both with spending cuts and tax hikes. Kemp and other supply-siders resisted Dole on both fronts: They considered any tax increase anathema and viewed large spending cuts as politically suicidal.

For 1996, Dole thought he had finally bridged the divides by pledging not to raise taxes as president and endorsing a flat tax himself, at least in broad principle. But the old divisions are reopening now that Dole is attacking Forbes’ specific version of the flat tax as tilted to the rich and likely to swell the deficit.

The most careful studies of the Forbes plan support Dole. But, in his appearances, Forbes says the Reagan experience proves his case that a 17% flat tax wouldn’t enlarge the deficit. When Reagan cut taxes, he says, government revenues rose; the problem was “the Washington culture spent it and then spent some more.” For Forbes, the value of tax cuts is an absolute: “Every time . . . the tax burden is reduced on the American people, revenues go up, not down.”

Dole has seen enough imperfection to bridle at absolutes. He’s careful to avoid any hint of repudiating Reagan, but after the huge deficits of the 1980s, he remains unimpressed by promises of self-financing tax cuts. “Somebody else told me that once,” he says. “I’m a little bit skeptical about it. It sounds too good--surely somebody would have thought of it [already].”

The attacks from Dole (and the other Republican contenders) on the Forbes flat tax--that it will raise the deficit, burden the middle class, shrink home values and parch charities--are planting doubts here. But, as some of Dole’s advisors recognize, by denouncing Forbes’ promises of sweeping change as impractical and unrealistic, Dole risks entrapping himself as the crabbed voice of convention--the implicit defender of the status quo.

That’s exactly how many of the voters attracted to Forbes already view the front-runner. “Bob Dole would make a very respectable president,” said Steve Mrstik, a Forbes supporter from Iowa City. “But I’m not sure something new would come from his administration. And I want something new.”

Even more than the fascination with the flat tax itself, that urge for something new is the real wind in Forbes’ sails. With his nonpolitician pedigree and his portrayal of term limits and tax reform as a means of stripping power from “the Washington politicians,” Forbes, more than anyone else in the field, is tapping into the anti-Washington sentiment that powers the new conservative political coalition.

Forbes still faces plenty of Iowa skeptics dubious he has the qualifications for the top job, and he may lack the organization to fully translate his poll numbers into caucus votes. Social conservatives, who sense a worrisome whiff of libertarianism in Forbes, provide the backbone for a dense grass-roots organization that could lift Gramm here. And Alexander and Buchanan are still stirring. But the publisher with the bottomless checkbook now has the potential to instantly squeeze out all of Dole’s rivals with a second-place finish in the caucuses two weeks from now.

If that happens, Dole could face a protracted struggle against Forbes in a hall of mirrors--where his battles against Bush and Kemp in the 1980s are replayed, this time through the prism of the anti-Washington politics of the 1990s. Before long, Dole may be worrying less about what Forbes has in common with Bush and Kemp than what he shares with Ross Perot.

The Washington Outlook column appears here every other Monday.