In a way he’s done just that. Forbes is forcing the country to debate his “flat tax,” which would rip up the current tax code. In a single stroke, he would reconfigure the most basic activity of government–tax collection–and recalculate every American balance sheet. With a small organization, but with $20 million of his own money, Forbes has transformed the race for the GOP presidential nomination, which begins this week with voting in Hawaii and Alaska. For now, geek is chic.
How far can he go? In the end, the Forbes Frenzy may prove nothing more than a passing media fancy. He’s running second in many polls, but who knows if he can turn ads into votes. Forbes’s sudden rise is proof that we live in weird political times. Voters are looking to the sky for the next deus ex machina, and with his message and disarmingly nerdy manner, Forbes has tapped into deep public resentment of the IRS and of slick Washington politics. The drab budget haggling makes a man of such simple economic views appealing. He’s a sunny optimist–a telling contrast to the dour Bob Dole and severe Phil Gramm.
His rivals are certainly taking note. They snipe that he’s soft on everything from a balanced budget to gays in the military. Prodded by Forbes’s popularity, Dole and Gramm endorsed competing versions of a flat tax last week. Then they released their old income-tax returns. Their candor was laudable, but their aim tactical: to force Forbes, a 48-year-old publisher worth an estimated $439 million, to do the same.
In New Hampshire, armies of reporters maneuvered for position at every Forbes campaign stop. He took questions–and avoided damaging answers –with an evasive ease that any veteran politician would admire. Why not release your tax returns? “A diversion,” he sniffed. Won’t your flat tax cost the Treasury money? “No, it win unleash a boom unlike any we’ve seen in years.” How about Fortune magazine’s charges of lax journalistic ethics? “That story is full of lies.” Abortion? “I want it to disappear, but we need a change of heart as well as policy.” In the van, there was no hand-wringing. “No surprises so far,” he said.
A WORD TO THOSE WHO may underestimate him: don’t. This is a preppy who relishes a fight. He looks like the captain of the chess club, but thinks like a captain of industry–even if Dad built the company. Forbes’s confidence is real, the unshakable faith of a wealthy eldest son shielded from misfortune. His adulthood has been spent studying capitalism and selling ads in a cutthroat market he sees as tougher than politics. His belief in supply-side economics borders on zealotry.
Forbes is also not quite the political novice he appears. His late father twice ran unsuccessfully for governor of New Jersey, and his son studied the details. Steve can rattle off the names of the consultants in rival GOP campaigns. His campaign is no hasty pudding, but a thoroughly planned, shrewdly run operation. “I’m in this to win,” he says,’ and sounds like he means it.
Dole’s ads say that Forbes is “untested,” but that’s not quite true. The Forbes clan knows about crisis management. Forbes’s crisis time, he told Newsweek, came in 1990. His beloved father was under a threat of blackmail. A family man and father of five, the elder Forbes also was widely rumored to have been a homosexual bon vivant in later years. Claiming to have been one of Malcolm’s lovers, a young man named George Warnock wrote him two threatening letters.
The Forbes camp knew what to do. The company’s security team set up a sting, according to Warnock’s attorney. They taped conversations between the potential blackmailer and a Forbes aide. Malcolm’s death in February 1990 didn’t stop Warnock. Instead, he wrote to Steve, who confirmed to Newsweek that he had received at least one threatening letter from the man. The family cooperated with the U.S. attorney, who prosecuted. Warnock pleaded guilty to one count of extortion and was sentenced to a year in prison. Forbes doesn’t recall details of the sting, but doesn’t deny it happened. “It wouldn’t surprise me, ff somebody is trying to shake you down, and makes an appointment to shake you down, that you would record it,” he said coolly.
Forbes was reared to be polite. But “polite” doesn’t mean “nice.” He has the Scots version of chutzpah. Last November he was still an asterisk in the polls–yet behaved as if he was already Dole’s main challenger. Because of tangled budget negotiations, Dole was late for an important forum on “Larry King Live.” Forbes refused to walk onto the set in Washington–let alone sit down–until Dole did so.
Forbes can be cold-blooded and pugnacious, even at the risk of his own interests. In 1993, his former longtime secretary sued for age discrimination. Anne Barton alleged that she had been let go only months before her 65th birthday. Forbes could have settled the suit quietly to avoid any public embarrassment. Instead, he seems to have taken the suit as a personal affront and a matter of principle. He gave a lengthy deposition trashing the woman as a trouble-making incompetent, even though she had been a loyal retainer for 15 years. Only after the federal judge in the case made a procedural ruling in her favor did Forbes let up. “The thing has been settled, and I’m not going to comment,” he says now.
Forbes enjoys the role of contrarian. In the far suburbs of New Jersey, most boys in the ’50s were fans of the Yankees or the Giants. Forbes chose the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1964 he favored neither Goldwater nor Rockefeller for the GOP nomination, but moderate Gov. Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania. At Princeton in the ’60s, he ignored the reigning cultures–the protesters in the streets and the preppies in the eating clubs. Instead, he launched a campus business magazine. He wasn’t gung-ho for the Vietnam War. At the time, he thought it a “mistake.” Rather than volunteering for Vietnam or protesting, he joined the National Guard.
Forbes didn’t love the war, but he did love to argue. An article in the first issue of his undergraduate magazine praised Dow Chemical, the manufacturers of napalm. He savors ideological combat so much he may have embellished the details of one past skirmish. He says he saw Students for a Democratic Society leftists at Princeton burning copies of his magazine.. But Forbes’s contemporaries don’t remember it. “No one I knew, nor did SDS, have anything to do with burning anything,” said Peter Kaminsky, an SDS and student-body leader from those days. Forbes directed inquiries about the episode to his partner in publishing the magazine, Jonathan Perel. But Perel said he never witnessed such an event, only heard about it from others.
Forbes knows how political patronage works. After college, GOP power brokers in New Jersey got him appointed to a state commission. Later, in 1985, he became head of the board that oversees Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Forbes lobbied fiercely for “the radios”-and protected his handpicked staff. According to an inspector general’s report, the agency was rife with uncontrolled spending and tax management. Forbes’s answer is that real spending was reduced. Maybe so, but Dole told Newsweek that “Forbes was always coming and asking me for money.”
Other avenues of attack are sure to open now. It won’t be pretty, and the Forbes inner circle knows it. Last winter, Forbes and his friends conducted a series of"murder boards," grilling him on every personal and political topic. The sessions took place in the dining room of the Morristown Country Club.
They think they are ready. They better be. In an MTV interview, Dole stressed his opposition to gays in the military and to “late term” abortions under any circum-stances-both stances to the right of Forbes. Gramm’s allies in Iowa also noted that Forbes had supported Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which allows gays to remain in the military if they don’t act on–and keep quiet about-their sexual preference. “Guess where they’re going with that one?” said a top Forbes aide. They are expecting an effort to link Forbes’s moderate views on cultural issues to his late father’s alleged lifestyle. “We knew that others would try to bring this up,” said the aide, who professed to be unfazed.
How to handle the Malcolm issue? “I’m the candidate, not my parents or grandparents,” Forbes says. His advisers will present him as he evidently is: devoted to his wife of 24 years, Sabina, and their five daughters, who range in age from 22 to 8. “It’s time to roll out the family,” the aide said matter-of-factly.
Forbes may not last once the voting starts. The public’s appetite for his flat-tax orthodoxy could fade. And even for a Forbes, there’s probably a limit to how much money he will spend. But if he’s getting nervous, he’s not showing it. By the time he and his entourage got to his jet at the Manchester airport, it was near midnight, and fog was shrouding the East Coast. The pilots told him they could take off–but weren’t sure where they could land. “Let’s go,” Forbes said cheerfully, and settled in. “What a day!” he said, opening a giant bag of nacho-cheese Doritos. “Health food, anyone?” he asked. Forbes’s confidence paid off. The skies cleared over Newark, and he made it home.
