Forbes Team Mixes Pep-Talk Optimism, Hardball Ads

On the stump he is the epitome of cheery optimism, evoking a Reaganesque rebirth of America fueled by tax cuts. On the air he’s an attack dog, pitilessly skewering his rivals for supporting such budget-busting projects as bike paths in Miami and ski lifts in Idaho.

The two sides of Steve Forbes’ campaign personality mirror his two camps of advisors. On policy issues, he has long consulted with a circle of neoconservative friends and advisors including former Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski and Catholic theologian Michael Novak. They are fiscal conservatives and social moderates convinced that pro-growth economics will enable America to overcome the rents in its social fabric.

The other camp, however, includes two of the most contentious, albeit successful, campaign pros in the country: Thomas Ellis and Carter Wrenn, both former lieutenants of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Forbes’ rivals and other political observers say his harshly negative television ads in Iowa and New Hampshire bear the unmistakable stamp of Wrenn and Ellis.

“I call it the mark of Zorro,” said Harrison Hickman, a Washington-based political consultant who tangled with them in several North Carolina contests. Indeed, a Republican National Committee member on Wednesday called on Forbes to fire Wrenn for his role in a 1990 Helms ad branded by many as racist.

Forbes himself has tended to emphasize the contributions of his informal inner circle to his political rise. Many of those he lists as “unofficial” and unpaid members of his kitchen Cabinet are theorists and ideologues of conservatism dating back to the Reagan years.

Wanniski, for example, coined the term “supply-side economics” in 1975. His 1979 book, “The Way the World Works,” was a bible of Reaganomics, although Wanniski broke with the Reagan camp before the 1980 election. The reason was that the Reagan team had abandoned one of the pillars of supply-side doctrine, a return to the gold standard. Forbes, by contrast, has made using the price of gold as a touchstone for monetary policy a major part of his own platform.

Campaign’s Two Faces

Other advisors come from the moderate, Jack Kemp wing of the GOP. Campaign director Bill Dal Col, for example, was Kemp’s chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Ronald Reagan. Dal Col later became president of Empower America, a conservative think tank that continues to provide a pulpit for out-of-office Republicans.

But it is the presence of Wrenn and Ellis that is attracting the sharpest scrutiny, in part because the right-wing ideology and race-baiting elements of some of their previous campaigns are so at odds with the sunny inclusiveness of Forbes’ personal appearances.

“The Forbes of the media campaign is different from the Forbes who’s on the campaign trail,” Wanniski acknowledged.

Ellis, a Raleigh, N.C., lawyer, won notoriety in 1983 when President Reagan withdrew his nomination to the Board for International Broadcasting, a panel that oversaw Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. The board was later headed by Forbes himself.

Under questioning by Democratic Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Paul E. Tsongas, Ellis acknowledged that he was an opponent of school integration during the 1950s. He also acknowledged that he had circulated handbills during Reagan’s 1976 North Carolina primary campaign suggesting that then-President Gerald R. Ford contemplated choosing Sen. Edward Brooke, a black, as his running mate.

Biden and Tsongas also attacked him for serving as a director of the Pioneer Fund, which had financed William B. Shockley’s research purporting to show that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

Ellis said the directorship was largely a figurehead position and he was unaware of the Shockley grant. “I do not believe in my heart that I’m a racist,” he said, later attributing his withdrawal to a “personal attack” by “two ultra-liberal senators.”

Controversial Ads

As founders and directors of the National Congressional Club, a fund-raising apparatus long associated with Helms, Ellis and Wrenn perfected the kind of media campaign that resembles more a bare-knuckled boxing match than an exchange of ideas.

Perhaps their most famous ad was one prepared for Helms’ 1990 campaign against Harvey Gantt, a black former mayor of Charlotte, N.C. The ad, known as “Hands,” shows a pair of white hands crumpling a job-rejection letter while a voice-over explains that the job went to a minority hire because of “quotas.”

The “Hands” ad was the focus of the objection raised Wednesday by RNC member Harry Singleton, who is black. “These ads can only be described as racist, which raises considerable concern about the people who made them,” he said. “. . . Why do you surround yourself with campaign aides like these?” The Forbes campaign had no comment on the statement.

Political consultants acknowledge, however, that Wrenn and Ellis are enormously effective--witness the relentlessly negative ads with which they have blanketed the Iowa and New Hampshire airwaves, putting Forbes into second place in Iowa and within statistical reach of the lead in New Hampshire, according to recent polls.

In one ad that ran earlier this year Forbes accused Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the overall front-runner for the Republican nomination, of having quashed a floor vote on balancing the federal budget.

Dole contends that he deferred the vote because he knew the measure would lose. “But when they attacked him for that,” Hickman said, “they made Dole look like an insider. They made it appear he was against a balanced budget, and they made him look more concerned about the way legislators feel than how the people feel. And all in 30 seconds. They do the best job of making their opponents into hypocrites, holding their actions against their words.”

“They are very smart, very politically savvy guys,” said Charles Black, who has worked with Ellis and Wrenn and is now running the presidential campaign of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas). “They’re very valuable people for Steve Forbes to have on board.”

Insider Concerns

For all that, Forbes campaign officials are clearly concerned that Wrenn and Ellis could be a liability for the candidate if he gets smudged by their reputations. The campaign refused to allow them to be interviewed; by contrast, the campaign offers reporters a telephone number for theologian Novak.

Until recently, Forbes tried to downplay Wrenn’s role in the campaign by suggesting he was merely an office manager rather than a key strategist.

That tack was undercut by Ellis himself, who told a Raleigh business magazine last fall that “as far as the nuts and bolts of the campaign, Carter is doing it all.”

More recently, Dal Col acknowledged that Wrenn is part of the “creative team,” along with Dal Col himself, former Helms pollster John McLaughlin; campaign spokeswoman Gretchen Morgenson, a former stockbroker and Forbes magazine senior editor; and Josh Gilder, a former Reagan White House speech writer.

Most insiders and other observers say that Forbes himself should go at the top of that list. Campaign officials take pains to portray Forbes as an exceptionally engaged and well-versed manager.

“Steve sets the tone,” Dal Col said. “He approves every [advertising] script and every spot.”

He added that Forbes is determined to avoid a divisive campaign. “He’s instructed us to run a broad-based campaign. We’re not segregating voters.”

Even those cited as unofficial advisors say Forbes has less than constant need of their advice. Novak, who wrote a monthly column for Forbes magazine until giving it up in 1994, said he has talked to Forbes only three or four times since he announced his candidacy in September and described his role as largely a “sounding board” on the abortion issue.

“He’s much more pro-life than most of his critics are saying,” Novak said, noting that Forbes has opposed trying to enact an anti-abortion constitutional amendment because he does not see a political consensus for one.

“He doesn’t like those politicians,” Novak said, “who speak boldly about changing a law that there’s no imminent prospect of changing.”