CAMPAIGN ’96 : Iowa Endgame Finds Forbes on Defensive

The last weekend of political skirmishing in Iowa flared into a supercharged test of the religious right’s influence over the Republican presidential race, as publisher Steve Forbes lashed back at rivals for trying to use conservative social issues to erode his once-growing base of support.

While Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the front-runner in the Iowa caucus campaign, concentrated Saturday on upbeat themes in front of growing crowds, Forbes alleged that he had been victimized by a stealth rumor campaign originating from a telephone research group in Utah.

Forbes campaign officials blamed the phone bank attacks on Dole. Aides to the Kansas senator denied the charge but acknowledged that the firm had been hired to do polling work.

Decrying “dirty politics,” Forbes said Saturday night that “tens of thousands” of telephone calls distorting his record had been made over the past week in Iowa, in the recent Alaska straw poll and in New Hampshire, where the first Republican primary will be held eight days after Monday night’s caucuses.

Forbes sought to minimize his differences with the state’s influential constituency of religious conservatives by sending a letter of support Saturday night to a rally of 1,000 activists who gathered at a church here to oppose homosexual marriages.

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Dole and former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander also sent letters of support for a “marriage protection resolution,” which committed the candidates to oppose any efforts to grant legal status to “same-sex marriage.”

But Forbes, Dole and Alexander did not attend the rally, which featured a parade of conservative speakers offering passionate, sometimes vitriolic, denunciations of the “homosexual agenda.”

Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and former State Department official Alan Keyes did address the rally, with Keyes drawing the most enthusiastic response. Echoing his controversial address to the 1992 GOP convention, Buchanan declared that America faced “a cultural war” against “the false gods of secular humanism.”

A new poll showed Forbes holding on to second place as Monday night’s caucuses approach, but Buchanan and Alexander both appeared to be closing in from behind.

The poll by the Des Moines Register showed Dole with a solid lead over the Republican pack, indicating support from 28% of likely caucus voters surveyed over the past week. With 19% of respondents still undecided, Forbes was still in second place with 16%. Buchanan had 11%; Alexander, 10%.

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But aides in several campaigns insisted that Forbes had suffered a loss of support in recent days not fully reflected in the Register poll because it was taken over an unusually long six-day period.

Unrelenting attacks on Forbes have “certainly taken him off his message for the first time in this campaign. He’s responding to attacks, not making them,” said Brian Kennedy, chairman of the Iowa GOP.

As he traveled by bus through Iowa’s rural interior, Forbes at first tried to stay above the fray, remarking little on the sniping from religious conservatives. But the campaign’s visual cues gave off a different message: Forbes pointedly surrounded himself with his family on the campaign trail and showed them off on CNN’s Larry King interview program Saturday night.

And in a new half-hour campaign commercial that aired in part of the state Saturday and will be shown in Des Moines today, he made repeated references to his own conservative “values” while the video alternated childhood photographs of the young tycoon with past testimonials by conservative thinkers, politicians and even GOP patriarch Ronald Reagan.

Taking the stage in a rickety Elks Lodge in Iowa Falls Saturday afternoon, Forbes was joined by his wife, Sabina, and, for the first time in Iowa, by his five daughters.

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“You’ve heard the attacks on me, about my wealth,” Forbes told the crowd of 75 people. “Now they’re going to probably attack me and say, ‘Under the flat tax, with five kids, he’ll have $51,000 of tax exemptions. So there goes Forbes again.’ ”

Also Saturday, Forbes appeared on CNN’s “Evans & Novak” program and launched into a complaint about the attacks on him.

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Trying to repel escalating charges from his opponents that he is a “social liberal,” Forbes said he would reverse President Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the armed forces if advised to do so by military leaders. He also reaffirmed his acceptance of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion “if you had the culture with you,” and insisted he opposed homosexual marriages.

But he grew testy when asked about the deteriorating tenor of the caucus campaign, charging that several rivals were behind an anonymous phone effort that had labeled Forbes as soft on abortion and a proponent of gay rights.

A spokesman for the Forbes campaign first aired those charges Friday, claiming that Dole, Buchanan and leaders of the Christian Coalition were behind the calls.

All denied it.

On “Evans and Novak,” Forbes complained that “tens of thousands of calls have been made” against him in the recent Alaska straw poll, in Iowa and in New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary a week from Tuesday.

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Forbes campaign operatives were even more specific. Chip Carter, Forbes’ director of organization in Iowa, said Saturday that the campaign was contacted by Michael Berry, a Utah-based telephone research worker, who claimed that since mid-January he had made repeated calls to voters suggesting that Forbes backs gay rights. Berry said an employer had told him the calls were being made on behalf of the Dole campaign.

While a man identified as Berry verified the Forbes campaign comments on CNN, a spokesman for Western Wats Center, a telephone research group operating out of the Utah towns of Provo and Ephram, denied the charge. And the Dole campaign said the firm was only being used as a subcontractor on campaign polling.

After a campaign stop in Indianola, Dole himself scoffed at anything sinister. “I think he [Forbes] is a little frustrated,” Dole said. “He is probably finding out that this is not softball.”

Despite making an issue of the phone bank rumors that threaten to cut into his support, Forbes still faced the graver issue of placating Christian conservative leaders who remain suspicious of him.

“What bothers us,” said Michael D. Johnson, who helped organize the Saturday night rally against gay marriages, “is that Forbes is not taking a clear stand. We wonder if he’s hiding a more liberal position on gay rights.”

Times staff writers Henry Chu and Nancy Hill-Holtzman in Iowa contributed to this story.