What a way to spoil a meal. Only a few months ago Buchanan was the only conservative polemicist around causing trouble for Bob Dole. Now there’s publisher Forbes, too. While Dole is bogged down supporting President Clinton on Bosnia and propping up Newt Gingrich on the budget, Forbes is out relentlessly hawking a sweeping, simple 17 percent flat tax in millions of dollars’ worth of TV ads. Forbes has already won one victory: he’s quietly set the terms of the debate in the early GOP presidential race. “I was for a flat tax long before he was,” Buchanan scoffed. But last week Buchanan unveiled his own specific proposal.
The ad blitz, paid for by a personal fortune of perhaps $200 million, is awesome. In Iowa, according to an estimate by Republican chairman Brian Kennedy, Forbes is spending $100,000 per week. In New Hampshire, his ads appear on WMUR, the only broadcast station in the state, twice as often as anyone else’s. And he’s been blanketing both states, as well as Delaware, with radio. In Laconia one station manager welcomed Buchanan to a call-in show–then racked up revenue running Forbes’s flat-tax ads.
Thus far, opponents have tried to ignore Forbes. A public-interest group estimated last week that he would save at least $128,000 a year on his own taxes under his proposal. While some New Hampshire papers put the story on the front page, the Manchester Union-Leader, the state’s largest paper and a staunch Buchanan ally, did not. “We’d just as soon not give him the attention,” said one newspaper insider.
That’s about to change. Buchanan called Forbes’s supply-side proposals “big-rock-candy-mountain conservatism” that would worsen the deficit. Buchanan and others will focus on the fact that Forbes would do away with all deductions, including those for home-mortgage interest and charities. So far, Dole has been too busy to pay much heed to Forbes. But Dole will soon flatter the multimillionaire by imitating him: next month, a commission Dole appointed will also recommend a flat tax.
As for Forbes, he seemed unruffled – and curiously unsurprised – at his new prominence as he relaxed in a Manchester hotel room last week. He doesn’t have much time these days for books, he confessed. But he has managed to dip into one: a new biography of Abraham Lincoln. There’s no log cabin in Forbes’s past; he’s more comfortable in precincts like the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, where he will hold his first major fund-raiser this week. The fact that he’s asking other people for money – and they’re giving it –i s all the proof you need that this is a serious Forbes initial public offering.
