Steve Forbes, front and right - Editorial

National Review, Oct 23, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 22

The entry into the presidential race of Malcolm (Steve) Forbes Jr. is something more than merely ho-ho time. Commentator William Schneider, on CNN, snappily summed it up: If Dole stumbles, it becomes an open race, and Forbes has the money to project his views.

They are as rumored. The single unusual feature of his free-market program is a call for a return to the gold standard, something we have not heard much about since Lewis Lehrman retired from politics. Money-exchange issues don't have the sex they had back when William Jennings Bryan set out to save the American people from crucifixion on a cross of gold. What the word "gold" tends to communicate today is merely sound currency, anti-inflation. Mr. Forbes assured his following that when his Administration takes office, once again people will be able to think in terms of 4.5 per cent interest rates on their mortgages.

Beware, said Forbes, the use of the comparative "-er." As in "cheaper" government, "lower" taxation. Forbes would do away entirely with the tax code. He calls for a $36,000 exemption from federal taxes, after which the tax would be a flat 17 per cent. Capital-gains taxes would be phased out. Prometheus, unbound.

Steve Forbes will tell you in unharassed conversation that there is something missing in the other campaigners for the Republican nomination. In his announcement speech he paid the formal courtesies to the other candidates: every one of them would be an improvement on what we now have. "[Yet] I think a lot of people would agree, there is an empty feeling in this campaign so far. One reason is that none of the other candidates is raising high the banner of economic expansion and opportunity. . . . But there are other reasons for the empty feeling. The fact is, the other candidates, on both sides, are insiders. And we all know that if the insiders had the answers, they would have implemented them by now." The emphasis, says Forbes, is on his own entrepreneurial background. This uniquely qualifies him, in his understanding, to lead the charge to high-octane economic energy.

But when he has the quiet opportunity to do so, he focuses, of course, on Phil Gramm, the only competitor in sight, in the event Dole should founder. "He is as smart a man as I have ever known," Steve Forbes will tell you. But -- he thinks -- Gramm's candidacy overstresses the negative, the need to cut spending in particular. Forbes is the enthusiast who sees an American giant bursting with innovative energy, shackled by the Lilliputians of Washington with their tax codes, regulations, bureaucracy -- the culture of Washington, which, he says, as a true outsider he is uniquely liberated from. Steve Forbes truly believes that the special music in the political air of 1996 is not elsewhere being heard, and that he can serve as the tunesmith for the nation.

The announcement speech he made was hardly musical (". . . like John F. Kennedy did," "like Ronald Reagan did . . ." -- Steve Forbes and Adlai Stevenson attended the same college!). But it was very very American. He has come into the political fight with the brashness of the wholesome iconoclast. There is nothing there of the grouch, no petulance, no swagger: Steve Forbes is not Ross Perot. And even though the odds are preposterously adverse, he is willing to make the run and to finance his own campaign.

What can sympathetic but skeptical conservatives say about it all? "Look," Forbes said recently to a friend. "I am a male, I am white, a Protestant, an Ivy Leaguer, rich, business-oriented, without practical political experience. It couldn't be worse, but at least I'd like to be free to fall down on my own arse, without any help from conservatives." Fair enough, and bon voyage.

(Universal Press Syndicate)