Bauer vs. Forbes : The fight for third place

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by Ramesh Ponnuru

IN early November, Steve Forbes decided to pull out of the Louisiana caucuses. The official story is that he wrote it off as a minor-league affair, since neither George W. Bush nor John McCain would be competing there. But that explanation won't wash. The Forbes campaign had been saying for months that a win in Louisiana on January 15 would give it the momentum it would need to do well in the Iowa caucuses nine days later. And Forbes didn't need to wait for announcements by Bush and McCain to know those two weren't playing. Besides, there are actual delegates at stake in Louisiana, not just bragging rights. No underdog candidate-no candidate, period-would throw away the chance to scoop up 21 delegates, out of pride. The likely reason Forbes bowed out? He was afraid he would lose to Gary Bauer.

With only weeks to go until the primaries, Bauer and Forbes are fighting a bitter contest to determine who will be the conservative challenger to Bush. Forbes aides deny there is a battle; Bauer is "not a factor," they uniformly insist, and Forbes is gunning for Bush. But Forbes doesn't have a clear shot at Bush, not least because Bauer is in the way.

Expectations for Forbes have dropped dramatically. For most of this year, candidates such as Dan Quayle and McCain were banking on Forbes's negative ads to take Bush down a few notches. "We're getting ready for nuclear winter," a McCain adviser said in July. Forbes's spinners were saying that it was a Bush-Forbes race in reality, a Bush-McCain race only in the fantasies of the establishment media. Now McCain is rising in New Hampshire-with no assistance from Forbes-and Forbes's spinners are counting on McCain to bring down Bush there.

Part of Forbes's problem may be that he came out of the gate too early. No presidential candidate had a better 1997 than Forbes. He was everywhere: speaking at the Christian Coalition, writing a big essay in Policy Review, running ads against partial-birth abortion, denouncing congressional timidity. But now that reporters have received three or four faxes a day from Forbes for three years, they are no longer interested in what he's going to say next.

Also, Forbes's overtures to social conservatives passed the point of diminishing returns. It may have been when he declared that ending abortion was a higher priority for him than cutting taxes; or when he urged the Republican party to deny funding to candidates who support partial-birth abortion; or when he defended the Kansas state school board on evolution. At some point, Forbes's words stopped ringing true. In 1996, suspicion of Forbes by social conservatives crippled his campaign in Iowa. The lesson should have been, as one Republican strategist puts it, "next time I'll be friends, not next time I'll be baptized by immersion."

In 1996, Forbes had appeal as a fresh face, a businessman with a product- the economics of growth-that nobody else was selling. Since then, he's gone from being a nonpolitician to being a bad politician. In national polls of Republicans, he's hovering in the single digits. Running negative ads may not help him. The political culture, adapting to the pacific temper of the times, has turned against negativity. And Forbes's own reputation for running "slash-and-burn ads" ensures that his opponents and the press would come down hard if he tried it now.

Forbes's disappointing performance has the Bauer camp writing his political obituary. Frank Cannon, Bauer's campaign manager, remarks, "I think the numbers are showing after millions of dollars there's an upper limit on interest in Steve Forbes." Bauer has called on Forbes to leave the race. This might be held rather cheeky, since Bauer himself is stuck in the low single digits. But Jeff Bell, an adviser to Bauer, explains that Bauer's numbers aren't as damning as Forbes's-because Bauer isn't as well known. Although he's influential among social conservatives, Bauer has never had an audience in the millions, as Pat Robertson and James Dobson do.

Bell and Cannon were among those encouraging Bob Casey, the former governor of Pennsylvania, to mount a pro-life campaign against Bill Clinton in the 1996 Democratic primaries. Casey balked for health reasons, but Bauer has given them a second chance to run the campaign they had envisioned. The key idea, as Bell puts it, is a "different way of talking about abortion." This approach, developed by Robert P. George, a professor of politics at Princeton and yet another veteran of the Casey effort, emphasizes an American tradition of widening the circle of democracy- granting legal protections first to white men, then to blacks and women, and now to the unborn. They hope that a pro-life position framed this way will be more appealing than one that focuses on regulating women.

Bauer has started to run ads on this theme in Iowa. If they work, the campaign plans to follow them up by broadening Bauer's message to include economics, where he offers a style of populism starkly different from that of Forbes. Forbes's populism takes the form of empowering individuals with medical savings accounts, privatized Social Security, and the like. Bauer's is a more traditional populism in which the state intervenes to protect the vulnerable from powerful corporations.