Candidates Peck at Bush in GOP Debate

George W. Bush faced a steady drumbeat of criticism Thursday night but still marched away a clear front-runner from a low-key first debate among all of the Republican presidential contenders.

From the first moments on, Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer, Bush’s most conservative opponents, used virtually every question to challenge the Texas governor’s proposals and record. Bauer jabbed Bush on abortion and foreign policy, whereas Forbes repeatedly denounced as “inadequate” the tax cut plan Bush released Wednesday.

Bush defended his tax proposal as a “good, bold, practical plan” and argued that his decision-making experience as governor of Texas provided him the skills he would need to manage foreign affairs and bring change to Washington. “There is only one person on this stage, only one person, who has been in a chief executive officer position in terms of government,” he said. “That’s me.”

Under a rigid format that denied the candidates the opportunity to question or directly respond to each other, the 90-minute debate rambled from subject to subject and spent little time on some of the core issues in the campaign. With two television moderators choosing the topics, the candidates spent much more time discussing the regulation and taxation of the Internet than issues that sharply divide them, such as trade, education and relations with China and Russia.

The main focus was clearly Bush, the leader in the polls who was debating his rivals for the first time. Though Bush did not dominate the event in any sense, the consensus among observers was that he held his own, committing no gaffes and absorbing no particularly punishing blows.

“This was a test of Bush, to see how he would perform,” said Stuart Rothenberg, the publisher of a Washington-based independent political newsletter. “I don’t know if he was the best person up there . . . but I think the question was whether he would seem poised, prepared and presidential, and I think, clearly, the answer was yes.”

Even with the focus on Bush, the event’s format produced a random cross-fire of confrontation. Conservative activist Bauer attacked Forbes’ flat-tax plan as tilted toward business over families and charged that the publisher’s proposal to divert most of the Social Security payroll tax into private investment accounts could imperil the system.

“Quite frankly, the system will be bankrupt if Steve’s plan of letting everybody drop out would be put in place,” Bauer insisted. Forbes defended his plan as a means of giving individuals more control over their retirement.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah sharply disagreed when Forbes indicated that as president he would drop the federal government’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. Forbes criticized Bush for earlier statements that he would reappoint Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who Forbes argued is endangering the economy by needlessly raising interest rates. Sen. John McCain of Arizona then countered Forbes by pledging to reappoint Greenspan. To close the circle, Hatch denounced McCain’s proposal to reform the campaign finance system by banning large, unregulated “soft money” contributions to the national political parties.

As expected, Forbes took the sharpest tack. He quickly criticized Bush for not including in his tax cut plan a permanent ban on Internet taxes or a cut in the capital gains tax. He accused Bush of allowing state spending in Texas to rise twice as fast as federal spending under President Clinton. Mostly, though, he charged that Bush’s tax plan--which focused on an across-the-board cut in income tax rates, an increase in the child tax credit, and the elimination of the inheritance tax--would not provide reform as sweeping as his own plan for a single-rate flat tax.

“It is small, it is inadequate, it leaves the IRS in place,” Forbes said.

But Forbes never generated much of a reaction from Bush. Indeed, the Texas governor largely ignored the gibes and defended his proposal in an almost leisurely fashion. Bush offered a kind of Goldilocks defense to the attacks: “For some it’s not enough, for some my tax cut is too big, which leads me to believe I may be doing something just right.”

Opening another front, Bauer said that he would only appoint federal judges and a vice presidential running mate who oppose abortion, something Bush has refused to promise to do. Bauer said he would choose banning abortion if he could only accomplish one thing as president. “I don’t think we are going to get anything else right in America unless we get this right,” Bauer said.

During the cross-fire of competing accusations, Bush and McCain were mostly conscientious objectors. At one point, Bush turned to McCain--who had faced two rounds of pointed questioning about his temper--and affably declared: “He’s a good man, he’s a good man.”

The closest Bush came to criticizing one of his rivals was when he read from a 1977 column in which Forbes supported a hike in the retirement age to 67. Several years later, Congress and Reagan agreed to phase in such an increase over several decades. Forbes is now running television ads criticizing Bush for recent remarks in which he opened the door to a further increase in the retirement age. On the underlying issue, Bush gave little ground. Although he said “I would hope we wouldn’t have to” raise the retirement age for younger workers, he again refused to rule it out.

For his part, McCain notably avoided direct criticism of Bush. The closest he came was late in the debate, when he said--without specifically referring to Bush--that it would be misguided to rely solely on projections of a large federal surplus to fund tax cuts. Bush has said he would fund his tax cut plan, whose 10-year cost has been estimated at $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion, from expected surpluses.

“I wouldn’t count on these surpluses, although I am very optimistic,” McCain said. “The difference between my tax cut proposals . . . is that I pay for them. We eliminate corporate welfare and we cut unnecessary spending. That’s the way you should do tax cuts.”

In other highlights, social conservative activist Alan Keyes, while denouncing the violence at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, said the demonstrators are “telling us something we ought to listen to” about the public resistance to surrendering authority to international organizations like the WTO.

Hatch used his closing statement to offer a critical review of the evening’s proceedings as he urged his rivals to meet for a traveling series of unstructured debates next month in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Let’s kind of be like [Abraham] Lincoln and [Stephen] Douglas and really have a debate here, rather than the stilted thing that we are doing,” he said.

McCain repeatedly returned to his theme that campaign finance reform is key to rebuilding trust in government and ending the capital’s stalemate on issues from defense to health care. At one point, he said reform of health maintenance organizations is being blocked because trial lawyers have too much influence with Democrats, and “on the Republican side, we are in the grip of the huge money from the insurance companies and the HMOs.”

Bush, asked about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, said he would “be helping the opposition groups” and would undertake military action “if I found he was developing weapons of mass destruction.”

The debate was the first of three Bush will participate in over the next two weeks: He’s scheduled to appear with the GOP field in Arizona on Monday and in Iowa the Monday after that. Earlier, Bush had skipped three candidate forums in New Hampshire, a decision that produced considerable grumbling among the local political community and helped convince him to rethink his original intent not to debate his rivals until January.

At the moment, New Hampshire is, by far, the most competitive of the states that will cast the critical first ballots in the GOP contest in January and February. Recent polls have shown Bush holding a wide lead in Iowa (with Forbes a distant second) and in South Carolina (where a recent CNN/Time survey showed him leading McCain by about 4 to 1).

In New Hampshire, though, McCain has clearly found an audience, and the race is much tighter--though exactly how much differs from poll to poll. A CNN/Time survey released last weekend showed McCain leading Bush by 2 percentage points, but two surveys released just before the debate Thursday put Bush ahead. A poll by the Concord Monitor newspaper showed Bush ahead of McCain, 41% to 36%, while a Boston Globe survey reported the widest margin of any recent poll here: It gave Bush a 45%-to-31% advantage over McCain.

Though Forbes is now spending heavily on television here, the Globe survey found him attracting only 5%--no more than Keyes. Bauer drew just 1% and Hatch no support in the Globe survey.

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Times staff writer Mark Z. Barabak contributed to this story.

Hear Barabak on the debate and the presidential race on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/debate