Campaign ’96 / BEHIND THE SCENES : Supply Sider Watches Over Forbes’ Fortunes : Jude Wanniski helped birth the publisher’s run for president. But his profile lowers as campaign flags.

The man who nudged Steve Forbes toward the presidency had just ordered himself a vodka martini--straight up, olive--then quickly changed his mind in favor of a Diet Coke.

It was only lunchtime, and in less than six hours on this January day, he was scheduled to be on national television for an interview about--what else?--Steve Forbes.

Jude T. Wanniski, a key theorist of supply-side economics, earlier this year found himself the Oracle at Morristown, among the best sources of insight into Forbes’ psyche.

He could tell you about Forbes’ culinary leanings (dessert), about Sabina, the first lady of the would-be Forbes administration (shy), about the candidate’s mind (“He’s the most informed man in the world”).

He could tell you about the flat tax. “The flat tax is designed to be of the greatest benefit to ordinary people,” he argued in the weeks before the New Hampshire primary, when many polls showed Forbes leading. “That’s why ordinary people are flooding to Steve Forbes.”

Today, however, the race for the Republican nomination is a far different story: Forbes is flagging as he heads into the New York primary Thursday, and Wanniski is a little harder to get ahold of.

“We’re worried around here about how they’re running the campaign,” confides Wanniski assistant Barbara Haslam.

Perhaps they have a right to be, here in graceful Morristown, a city that Wanniski likes to call the birthplace of three separate revolutions: the American (George Washington’s winter headquarters was nearby), the supply-side (Wanniski’s office is here), the Forbes (the candidate was born here).

Wanniski is one of those who suggested early on that the publishing magnate run for president in the first place. Forbes’ first response, at the beginning of 1995, was a resounding “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“At first, Steve responded with a laugh,” said Gretchen Morgenson, Forbes’ spokeswoman. Then Wanniski “suggested it again. Steve started to talk about it with others close to him.”

Then Wanniski hit the fax machine. In one of his regular newsletters, sent to clients from the gray Victorian where he plies his trade, Wanniski wrote of a Forbes candidacy: “If the nation and the world more than anything else need a leader who can help guide a peaceful revolution in bottom-up entrepreneurial capitalism, he is the only man whose life has prepared him for that assignment.”

It was about this time that Wanniski, on vacation in Hawaii, was faxing Forbes, who was on vacation in Florida, about why the publisher should be the president. “It bowled them over, he and Sabina,” Wanniski said. “They had to take it seriously.”

Then on Sept. 22, with his family surrounding him, Forbes tossed his hat in the political ring. Wanniski responded with a faux birth announcement three days later titled “A Star Is Born.”

Wanniski, 59, and Forbes, 48, met a couple of decades ago during the early life of supply-side economics, the theory that widespread prosperity will follow tax cuts.

Wanniski, then an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, takes credit for coining the term “supply side” and says that he was there when economist Arthur Laffer first sketched the Laffer Curve, supply side’s graphic explanation, on a napkin at a Washington meeting.

Frederick Taylor, former Journal managing editor, says he “always liked [Jude]. I always thought he was wrong as heck. I have claimed that if I paid more attention to him, Ronald Reagan and supply-side economics would never have been born.”

By 1978, Wanniski had written “The Way the World Works,” the boldly named bible of supply-side theory, which Forbes reviewed in his family-owned magazine: It “could do for the Republican Party what Marx’s ‘Manifesto’ did for communism . . . [though] unlike Marx, Wanniski is easy reading.”

Wanniski had left the Wall Street Journal to start his own consulting firm and later started an annual critique of the press called Media Guide.

“By 1980, I was talking to Steve with some frequency,” Wanniski said.

And by the next year, Ronald Reagan had adopted the supply sider’s views in his first administration, Wanniski and Forbes were breakfasting monthly and Forbes was breaking from his father’s view that supply side economics could not work.

When Wanniski’s Media Guide lost its sponsorship during the 1980s, Forbes Inc. stepped in and later made it a quarterly called MediaCritic, with Wanniski as an editor at large.

The two men don’t meet as often these days, but Forbes’ optimistic rhetoric sometimes rings with a little Wanniski.

Jude: “Steve Forbes is in the same position Julius Caesar was in as the head of the Pax Romana. [A Forbes administration could] mark the beginning of the Golden Age, American leadership of the Planet Earth. People want to be a part of what we are. They’re looking to us for guidance.”

Steve: “I want to be president so we can get government out of the way and open the doors to this New American Awakening . . . a time when entrepreneurial energy and creative drive burn brighter than ever before in our history.”

The Players / RESUME

A periodic look at the behind-the-scenes aides, consultants, media members and others shaping the course of the 1996 presidential campaign.

Jude T. Wanniski

Age: 59

Personal: Married to Martha, 33, Three children from an earlier marriage.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in political science, UCLA; master’s degree in journalism, UCLA.

Background: Key contributor to development of supply-side economic theory. Former reporter at The National Observer and columnist at the Wall Street Journal. President of Polyconomics Inc., a political and economic consulting firm. Editor-at-large for Forbes MediaCritic, a quarterly publication.

Downtime: Writing books, playing golf.

“At first, Steve responded with a laugh. . . . [Wanneski] suggested it again. Steve started to talk about it with others close to him.”

--Gretchen Morgenson, spokeswoman for the Steve Forbes presidential campaign, discussing Jude Wanneski’s efforts to persuade the publishing magnate to run.