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Clueless in Seattle
The real legacy of the WTO protests is a rising tide of populism -- try telling that to politicians swapping platitudes on global trade.
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The GOP presidential candidate says he'll sue if the state's byzantine laws keep him off the ballot.
By Andrea Bernstein
[12/09/99]

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But these are fair shots. There is a tremendous policy chasm between the Bush and Forbes ideologies. And the Bush campaign is trickily going negative against Forbes for going negative on Bush. A pro-Bush group, the Republican Leadership Council, recently ran ads about Forbes, saying, "If he doesn't have anything nice to say -- don't say anything at all."

"When he got off the airplane in New Hampshire, there was a question thrown to George W. Bush about the Forbes ad on Social Security," Fox News Channel's Brit Hume reported on Dec. 5. "And he said, 'Well that's the way Forbes campaigns, he likes to tear people down.' ... But there is nothing personal about that ad ... But this is out there now, that it's negative campaigning if you criticize somebody's position on an issue. Some campaign we would have if nobody ever did that."

"I think it's a disgrace that you'd have a bogus front organization like that running attack ads against me," Forbes told the New York Observer. "If Gov. Bush wants to criticize me, he should come out in the open. Let's have a vigorous and honest debate instead of doing attack ads behind other groups that are funded by your big fund-raisers."

Though the definition of negative campaigning may be somewhat subjective, Forbes has certainly crossed that line on occasion. Faithful readers will recall that at one of Bush's first campaign appearances in New Hampshire, an odd young woman stood in the Manchester Holiday Inn -- where Bush was addressing a Republican women's forum -- handing out anti-Bush leaflets, attacking the Texas governor for 75 tax increases.

Whatever reporters asked this woman, she replied with an "X Files"-like refrain: "The truth about Bush will come out."

"Who printed this up?" I asked her.

"The truth about Bush will come out," she said.

"What's your name? Who are you with?"

"The truth about Bush will come out."

Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes said there were "a billion reasons why this thing is wrong. Every tax increase [Bush] supported was part of a net tax decrease of a billion dollars."

But the accuracy of the young woman's fact sheets wasn't really what struck me. It was her trance-like mantra, and the fact that someone was clearly paying her salary, and it was curious that she wouldn't own up to who exactly that was. After all, the tax increase allegations were all accurate, if out of context, and a fair example of not only Bush's inability to get his tax cut bill passed in the exact manner he wanted, but his willingness to compromise with those who would raise taxes here to pay for cuts in taxes there. So why the weirdness? It remained a mystery.

Until last weekend, that is, when I finally saw that young woman again. She is Forbes' western New Hampshire field representative, Jennifer Couture. And though she denied being the woman in question, it was no doubt her, and according to other Forbes staffers, she was on the Forbes 2000 payroll at the time.

While that sort of furtive political guerrilla tactic is a peculiar and ethically marginal way to criticize your opponent, Forbes has certainly been more aggressive in criticizing Bush publicly than McCain, whose effusive praise of the Texas governor has become something of a joke among political watchers. While Forbes has refused to say whether t he thinks Bush is intellectually up to the task of being president, he clearly thinks Bush's shallowness of intellect speaks for itself.

"Look what happened in the [Manchester] debate," Forbes says. "What did we learn? We learned he's governor. We learned that Texas is the second-largest state in the union. We learned it has the 11th-largest economy in the world. We learned that he reads a couple papers from Texas. He's reading a book on [Dean] Atcheson, though no one asked him who wrote it or what the title is. But beyond that what did we learn? Not much."

I pointed out that the Manchester Union Leader endorsement of Forbes calls Bush an "empty suit." Does Forbes agree with that? "Yeah," Forbes says. "That's what we need to learn. People want to know these things before an election instead of keeping your fingers crossed that it's going to work out after the election. I know the Republican Party's desperate to win ... but it's not going to win unless you have that strong message. You can't just say, 'Well, I'm a good guy, I've got proposals here, nothing that's going to upset anyone.' It's not going to work."

At a new-supporter event last weekend in Milford, N.H., Forbes even broke out into a subtle (and pretty funny) imitation of Bush's Texas twang when mimicking the politician who looks at the tax code as something to trim instead of overhaul. And on Dec. 3, after Bush brandished a circa-1977 quote from Forbes about raising the Social Security retirement age, Forbes responded afterward alluding to the rumors of Bush's wild youth, quipping, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible. And, unlike some, I grew away from that initial position and clearly some others are still stuck in it. At least you knew what I was doing in my youth. I was writing magazine columns ... Others haven't been so forthcoming about what they were doing."

Next page | Forbes takes a step to the right