-Caveat Lector-
Forbes:
Bush's Conservative Rival
During the week before the Ames poll, it was impossible to avoid
Steve Forbes. When I turned on the
radio, there was the Forbes ad, before the farm report. When
Hatch went to make a live appearance on
the evening news in Cedar Rapids, there was the Forbes ad. There
was even some trouble trying to
schedule a candidate debate Friday evening because Forbes had
bought a half- hour of the debate-hosting
station's airtime for an infomercial. Driving down U.S. 169 in central
Iowa, I overtook the two Forbes
buses pulling out of a dirt road between two cornfields; on board
were the candidate, his family, his
campaign chairman, his pollster, his campaign manager, his
communications director, a spokesman, the
chairman of Sunglass Hut, and the usual travel aides.
Forbes, poor fellow, hasn't improved his performance on the stump
a jot. He continues to smile and bob his
head while greeting supporters, as if he were on a business trip to
Asia. During his speech, the
head-bobbing stops and the energy goes to his forearms, which
chop mechanically as he makes fists,
except for two fingers on each hand, which point straight outward.
Even his aides have begun to imitate
him.
But all of this hardly matters: the real work was being done back at
Forbes's Iowa headquarters, near the
state capitol. The campaign, which is rumored to have spent $2
million on Ames (Bush spent $825,000),
called more than 250,000 Iowans and reached another half-million
by mail. Staffers sent postcards and
placed radio and newspaper ads to bring people to bus-tour events
and to fuel calls to the campaign's 800
number, which overwhelmed the office's 17 phone lines. After
participants signed up, they each received
two letters and two calls. Another 300 were recruited on the
Internet. All of the participants were entered
into a database, and the Forbes staff, working 19- hour days for a
month, developed a manifest and chose
a captain for each of its buses. Once on the buses, participants
watched a Forbes video and received a
Forbes t-shirt and a hardcover copy of the candidate's new book.
The coordinated effort apparently worked. On straw poll day,
thousands wearing orange Forbes t-shirts
crowded the Forbes site. Inside the arena, Forbes's campaign
launched an absurd display: "Stars and
Stripes Forever" played while confetti and balloons dropped,
sparklers and fireworks were ignited, and
horns blew. The balloon drop turned out to be a blunder, because
other candidates' staffers popped the
balloons while Forbes spoke. The place sounded like a bag of
popcorn in the microwave. But the voting,
fortunately for Forbes, was mostly over before his fiasco on the
floor.
Dole and McCain:
Mainstream Alternatives
Senator John McCain, who skipped the straw poll, picked up Dan
Quayle's South Carolina advisers when
they defected after Quayle's flop in Ames. McCain denounced the
poll as a sham, concentrating instead
on New Hampshire. It's far too early to know whether that tactic will
work, but this much is clear: Dole
has kept pace with McCain as the mainstream alternative to Bush,
should he stumble.
Dole's strong showing in Iowa is the work of what she calls her
"invisible army" of young professionals,
who are wealthy, well-educated, and, in most cases, women. A few
days before the vote, I met some of
them at a Dole reception for businesswomen held in West Des
Moines. Dole, not terribly spontaneous on
the stump, was actually lively here. She put in a sisterly quip about
Bob Dole ("he's home making the bed")
and won the biggest applause for a line demanding 100 percent
deductibility of health insurance premiums
for the self-employed. After her speech, the 60 women attending
presented her with a doll wearing a
t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan someday a woman will be
president. Dole's female supporters would
deliver a more important gift at the straw poll: 45 women from local
chapters of the National Association
of Women Business Owners and the Business and Professional
Women would fill a bus to Ames for her.
"I've never done this before," said Kathi Koenig, one of the
organizers.
Dole continues to get no respect from the press. Part of this, no
doubt, is plain old sexism. One reporter,
returning from a one-on-one interview with Dole on her campaign
bus, told his colleagues, "She looks great
naked." But there's also a legitimate beef to make about her
unwillingness to answer questions. When I
started talking with her about the upcoming straw poll, she replied:
"Well, we're having a great time. Isn't
this a wonderful state? Great people." She pointed to the horizon.
"Isn't this beautiful? The rain cleared.
That's good. Well, they need the rain. But maybe after the parade.
Isn't it beautiful?" You can just see Bob
listening to this over breakfast while reading his newspaper,
muttering, "Whatever."
Still, I must confess: I like Dole more each time I see her. She
seems, over time, a fetching combination of
the maternal, the ordinary, and the Thatcheresque. Yet her poor
image among opinion-makers caused her
to be underestimated in Ames. Her tent wasn't nearly as spirited as
Buchanan's, with its whooping
peasants. At one point, supporters complained that her music was
too loud. A dole rocks banner on stage
seemed to be hung in irony. Inside the arena, Dole didn't get much
of a reception; the real cheers came
when her husband joined her onstage. So, almost everyone in the
place was astonished when she came in
a strong third. Soon, the reason was revealed: two-thirds of her
supporters were women. They came,
voted, and left.
Buchanan and Bauer:
Populist Irritants
Buchanan made few campaign stops in Iowa before the Ames poll,
so it's telling that one of them was at
a farmer-owned ethanol plant in Blairstown. After the obligatory
photo-op with guys in hard hats,
Buchanan launched into an attack on big agricultural concerns.
With his shirt ripped and his dress shoes
muddy, Buchanan lambasted the "Hollywood lawyer" (Mickey
Kantor) and " some academic" (Charlene
Barshefsky) who, he claimed, run Clinton's trade policy. Thus did
he stake his populist claims:
anti-big-business, antiHollywood, anti-lawyer, anti-academic.
Buchanan aims to be the last friend of the working stiff in either
party this year; the problem is, there
aren't many Republican working stiffs. When I remarked to him that
there were plenty of blue-collar
Democrats who had no way of expressing support for him in a
GOP primary, he replied: "There sure are."
Buchanan did nothing to dismiss the third-party talk when we
spoke; the night before, he'd said on TV
that he had "impure thoughts" about bolting from the GOP.
Conventional wisdom says that Buchanan, if
he joins the Reform Party, will hurt Bush in the general election by
stealing the social conservatives, but I
bet he would steal an equal number of blue-collar workers from
Gore or Bradley.
As if to underscore that point, six tractor-trailers and about 400
Teamsters joined the Buchanan tent at the
Ames straw poll. The union had bought tickets for its members,
and, while the Teamsters didn't officially
endorse Buchanan, he was clearly their man. Buchanan, drawing
cheers from the truckers, decried the
"big banks" trying to "deindustrialize America" before turning to the
topic of Mexicans. "You put Pat
Buchanan in the White House, and we'll put that border back up,
and those trucks will never enter the
United States of America," he said. The Teamsters, many of them
Democrats, then marched over to vote.
The race's other populist, Bauer, was able to place fourth in Ames
by rallying church groups. His
21-year-old daughter has been lobbying youth groups across Iowa,
and the campaign has advertised on
Christian radio. Bauer, who headed the Family Research Council,
a Christian interest group, also has
benefited from the infrastructure of the group's state affiliate, the
Iowa Family Policy Council.
A diminutive figure himself, Bauer makes his stump speech about--
what else?- -the little guy. "The littlest
guy of all," he says, is the unborn child, and the "second littlest guy"
is the family farmer. But somehow it is
difficult to picture Bauer as a serious prospect. He simply doesn't
have the resources to contend with
Forbes to be the conservative challenger to Bush. Bauer, who
wears an impish grin, does seem to possess
a rare sense of self-awareness. When his volunteers-on-wheels
sang melodies at the state fair parade,
Bauer walked away, embarrassed. "I can't believe I'm actually
doing this," he said. "I'm standing in the
middle of the street and there are people singing songs with my
name in them ."
Keyes, Quayle, Alexander,
and Hatch:
The Irrelevancies
The goal of any candidate is to avoid winding up like talk-show host
Alan Keyes, a political nonentity who
seems to be running so he can rant in front of crowds. At Ames, he
shouted past his time limit, continuing
to holler and gesticulate madly even after his microphone was
turned off.
In danger of joining the Keyes category is now Quayle, who,
painfully, polled even lower than Keyes. It
was obvious something was wrong early in the week, when just 15
farmers showed up to talk with Quayle
at a farm event and the only camera waiting when he arrived was
one from PBS. The event was five
days before the poll, and Quayle already sensed trouble. "I can't
imagine any campaign deciding to stay in
or get out based on the straw poll," he said. " This is a straw poll,
and I emphasize the word 'straw.'" The
crowds grew slightly for Quayle during the rest of the day, but
people seemed more curious than devoted.
A columnist from the Cedar Rapids paper thumbed through the
sign-in list at a Quayle reception in that
city and said, "I guess if you've got an endangered species on your
property, you want to show him off."
Alexander, who gambled everything on Ames and lost, has taken a
more dignified route: he quit. The
candidate was reportedly upset by my profile of him in tnr, which
depicted him partially nude and was
described by The New York Times as an "obituary." Actually, the
piece was sympathetic to Lamar's
quest, a noble but doomed endeavor to run a grassroots campaign
at a time when money is everything.
Bush spent just ten days campaigning in Iowa, but Alexander, who
spent 39 days in the state, finished a
distant sixth. Alexander knew this was happening, and his last day
of campaigning before the poll, at the
Iowa state fair, had the whiff of a valedictory. He took a turn as
"honorary chef" at the Iowa Pork
Producers tent and played "God Bless America" on the piano for
fairgoers. At the Republican booth, I
picked up an invitation to his straw poll festivities, written during
happier times. "This campaign's really
cooking!" it said.
The other irrelevancy is the usually relevant Hatch, who had been
counting on two constituencies to get
him through the straw poll: Mormons and chiropractors. Both, he
found out, are insufficient supporters.
There are about 16,000 Mormons in Iowa, but not many of them
came to the straw poll for Hatch. On the
other hand, "there are 1,200 chiropractors in Iowa ," all of them of
voting age, said Hatch spokesman Jeff
Flint. "Our first contacts in many of these places are chiropractors.
At one event, the chiropractors started
going wild." Hatch's staff says the back-crackers like him because
his health insurance legislation has
helped them qualify for reimbursement from insurance companies;
I suspect it has more to do with his
ramrod posture. The chiropractors were indeed a force at the straw
poll. "I think we probably got two
hundred," Flint said.
Unfortunately for Hatch, he failed to motivate others in similar
proportions. He placed dead last among the
participants. And yet, there he was on the coliseum floor after the
tally, claiming victory. "New Candidate
Hatch Has Solid Iowa Showing," read a statement from his
campaign, clearly printed before the results
came out. "He exceeded expectations considerably." Really? With
two percent of the vote? I asked Flint
what the expectations had been. "One percent," he said.
As the tally board, initially concealed by a blue cloth, was
uncovered, Bill Dal Col, Forbes's campaign
manager, watched anxiously behind sunglasses, holding a pad.
"Yeah! Thank God!" he declared on seeing
the results. " Technology works!" Greg Mueller, the campaign's
communications director, turned to Dal
Col. "I'll take that, brother," he said. Rick Segal, Forbes's Internet
man, hugged Dal Col. Within seconds,
the spin had begun. "It shows it's a two-man race," said Mueller.
"For the first time, it's the establishment
that's splintering," said Dal Col. "It's gonna be a rough night in
Austin," said pollster John McLaughlin.
Next came the Dole spinners, who rushed to the coliseum floor to
remind everybody that Dole had spent
only $250,000 on the poll. Tony Fabrizio, Dole's top strategist, said
he was "thrilled." Bush "won, but he
didn't dominate this field." Finally, the Bush team joined the action
on the floor with some counterspin. "The
real winner is the Democratic process," said Karen Hughes,
Bush's communications director. "We did this
in sixty-three days," declared top strategist Karl Rove. One Bush
man, told that journalists were viewing
the vote as a Bush setback, responded with the sort of expletive
that so recently got Bush himself into
trouble.
But the Forbes campaign got the best of the spin session. The
candidate himself emerged for a victory lap,
drawing a scrum of a couple hundred. " We're going to win the
nomination," he declared. "I am the
conservative alternative." Then, young Forbes aides leaped to the
stage to pose for triumphant photographs
around the chart with the vote tally. It must have appeared to the
Bush folks, for just a moment, as if the
Visigoths had sacked Rome.
------------------- end ----------------------------
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