They Also Serve … - analysis of Steve Forbe's failed campaign - Brief Article

National Review, March 6, 2000 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 11

IN the late winter of 1995 Steve Forbes came to see me. He wished to advise me that Jack Kemp's decision not to seek the Republican nomination in 1996 left a hole in the political strategy of Empower America, the think group in which he and Kemp and Jeane Kirkpatrick were active. He was considering, he said, putting his own name up as candidate, and wished to tell me about it in deference to whatever seniority I had, as an old conservative hand.

He must have read the surprise I registered. I began to talk about what I thought were his special difficulties. He interrupted me--"I know I know I know. I talked to Bob Bartley [the Wall Street Journal's editor] yesterday and he started to say exactly the same thing, so I'll say it and save you the trouble. 1) I've never run for political office; 2) I'm a graduate of Princeton; 3) I inherited a business from my father, as also a private fortune." He paused for a moment. "All I'm asking is that I be allowed to fall on my ass on my own."

Well, nobody could stop him and nobody did. But his failure is more a statistical defeat than a strategic defeat, because it was now possible, largely owing to his initiative, to support radical, yes radical; reforms. Principal among these, of course, is his signature call for a fiat income tax. We aren't about to get one, even if Alan Keyes is elected president. But to make the idea thinkable is a significant step forward. Milton Friedman proposed the flat tax 40 years ago; I in a book in 1973. Congressman Dick Armey was toying with the idea in 1996; but among presidential candidates, the actual words were framed by Steve Forbes's lips.

And it was he who most strenuously emphasized the desirability of allowing reforms in Social Security. "We are all in favor of the Social Security program," Mark Shields remarked at a recent panel, eliciting from me the same answer Steve Forbes would have given: "I am in favor of Social Security, and against the Social Security program." Forbes would amend the program to allow for individual investments by participants. This would add to the capital pool and return to the investor a higher figure than he'll get back from government IOUs.

But did he, as expressed in his withdrawal speech, "transform the political landscape?" It is safer to say that he did everything in his power to do so. The great political ice ages that chum up their own divinities (equality) and hobgoblins (vouchers) are difficult to stay. But then occasionally in history it seems to work. Yeltsin stood up against the Soviet tank in 1991, and prevailed, even as the student who tried the same thing in Tiananmen Square failed. There are too many interests that stand in the way of a flat tax to justify the assumption that the idea has actually gestated, thanks to Mr. Forbes. But at least one can say that what was once merely textbook paradigm is now something tried out in political palaver, in the villages of Iowa and New Hampshire, bringing not mass conversions, but respectful attention.

Mr. Forbes might have added to the negative recitation of his personal history, that he was born without charisma. But the last two months spare everyone from the delusion that mere eloquence moves mountains. There they were, Forbes, Bush, McCain, Bauer, Hatch, and Keyes. Alan Keyes is about as eloquent as a political contender can be, whose burden is to answer all questions in one minute or less. If Forbes had been born with the tongue of Cato, he might have moved his New Hampshire vote from 13 percent to 15.

American conservatives will anxiously look to Steve Forbes and weigh his advice on the best political candidate among the survivors. They might take his advice, and might ignore it: It is classically difficult to pass along personal constituencies. But one hopes that his heroic effort will inspire even if his programs do not. He spent four and one-half years speaking to everybody everywhere, visibly against the tug of his own reclusive inclinations. He invested a life's savings in the effort, chose his words carefully, made no concessions except perhaps for his repeal of the law that there is no free lunch--there was a free lunch, in Candidate Forbes's tent.

The old hands salute him.