CAMPAIGN ’96 : Dole and Forbes: Ultimate Insider Duels an Appealing Outsider

EPSOM, N.H. —  Jack French has found his candidate.

“I’ve seen [Phil] Gramm talk, but I like Steve Forbes a lot better because I think he’s a businessman,” said the 62-year-old real estate broker and self-described “Yankee trader.” Commenting after a Forbes campaign event in this central New Hampshire town, he said: “All I know is that the IRS is the most powerful agency there is in the world, and he wants to do something about it.”

On the other hand, James Seppala, a banker in Berlin, N.H., remains somewhat less certain about his man.

“I’m not sure Dole’s the perfect candidate,” he said after hearing the senator address a Chamber of Commerce luncheon by telephone. “But with having a Republican Congress and now a Republican president, maybe there will be some movement in Washington.”

“After all,” he added, “he’s the front-runner . . . unless somebody can come out of nowhere.”

The two voters exemplify the two vastly different candidates who are currently leading the New Hampshire Republican primary race and have spent the past two days stumping back-to-back across the state.

Steve Forbes, the multimillionaire magazine publisher, has come out of nowhere by spending more than $12 million on a series of television commercials. They have given him tremendous name recognition while promoting his 17% flat tax and assailing Dole’s “Washington values.” And, as a daylong campaign swing through the state showed this week, his personal appearances seem to be only strengthening his appeal.

Addressing intrigued and then enthusiastic crowds, Forbes has shown himself to be a quick student of political strategy. Every round of applause that greets one of his sound-bite-sized digs at the IRS, the FCC and “all those other alphabet agencies in Washington” still brings a look of surprised delight to his face, as if he can’t believe the campaign grind has turned out to be such fun.

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Dole, by contrast, remains the quintessential Washington insider. Although some of his supporters’ ambivalence seems to reflect the electorate’s uneasiness with Washington politics, his long experience remains his greatest asset.

“We’ve spent a lot of time with an amateur, and that hasn’t worked,” said Littleton, N.H., banker David Markle, taking a swipe at President Clinton. Attending a Dole speech in his town Friday night, Markle said: “I don’t think being in government a long time is necessarily bad. You have to be able to get things done.”

Dole tends to bury his listeners in the minutiae of the political process. He delivers step-by-step sermons on his Washington maneuvers to attain such cherished GOP goals as a balanced budget and welfare reform.

One such speech so annoyed Everett Chambers, a retired aerospace worker, that he lectured Dole afterward. “Tell it so Joe Six Pack can understand it,” he said. “Don’t talk that Beltway stuff.”

Meanwhile, Forbes paints his policies with a broad brush and illuminates them with his sunny vision of a low-tax, high-growth future.

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To be sure, not all his listeners end up as convinced as he is of the unalloyed virtues of his flat tax. Forbes’ proposal would abolish the current income tax system and impose a 17% tax on earned income with no deductions. The plan would include a $13,000 exemption for each adult and $5,000 for each child, meaning the first $36,000 earned by a family of four would be tax-free. Dividends, interest and capital gains would be entirely exempt. And the mortgage-interest and charitable contributions deductions would be eliminated.

Forbes’ rivals denounce the proposal as a rich-person’s tax cut that either will widen the federal budget deficit or hit the middle class hard.

Forbes campaign officials reply that the plan would produce a tax cut for 98% of all taxpayers. But his delivery--predicting a flat-tax inspired drop in interest rates and surge in job creation and emphasizing the principle rather than the specific rates--is clearly aimed at distracting voters from doing their own math. It does not always work.

“I’ll probably go right down to my desk and figure it out,” said Edward Summer, head of the individual-claims department at Chubb Life Insurance Co., after hearing Forbes address a packed auditorium of company employees on Thursday. Summer said he had $20,000-25,000 in mortgage and charity deductions, “so I’m not positive it would be an advantage to me--and if not, I’ll have more questions.” Nevertheless, he said, Forbes “has that refreshing air of wanting to try something new.”

Such willingness to give the candidate the benefit of the doubt is markedly lacking among those who describe themselves as “leaning” toward Dole--a clue to why recent polls have shown his commanding lead over Forbes to be “soft.”

Among the most frequent reasons Dole partisans give for supporting the Senate majority leader is that none of his rivals, as intriguing as they may be, seems to have a chance of outracing him to the nomination.

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“Dole is certainly at the top of my list,” said Roger Jones, a Gorham steel fabrication plant executive attending the White Forest chamber luncheon. “He’s got all the ins and outs. He’s got the power and the connections. But he’s also got the procedures and outlook that need to be changed.”

While Dole has endorsed the flat tax in principle--retaining the mortgage and charity deductions--the biggest threat to his campaign may be his inability so far to energize a crowd the way the reputedly shy and bookish Forbes, a political novice, does when he says of the federal tax code: “You can’t reform it, you can’t trim it around the edges. You can only scrap it, kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and see that it never rises again to terrorize the American people.”