But as next week’s primary approaches, the GOP regulars at Chuck’s seem grumpy. In the chem-lab argot of polltakers, they are ““volatile.’’ Their first choices aren’t running. They’re sick of the vicious TV ads but have absorbed the negative messages. The customers in Chuck’s aren’t sure what the Republicans should be about now that even Bill Clinton says the era of big government is over. Mark Grazier, a Raytheon sales manager, yearned for Colin Powell. He will settle, probably, for Bob Dole. ““Of the list of candidates who are running,’’ Grazier says, ““Dole has the best chance of winning.''
How’s that for enthusiasm? It’s good enough for Dole, but GOP insiders fret that their presidential campaign is a mess: a weak field tearing itself apart to the benefit of just one man, Clinton. In New Hampshire, the situation late last week was approaching entropy. Internal campaign polls showed no candidate with more than 20 percent of the vote. ““There’s a sort of manic-depressive attitude in the party,’’ says GOP guru William Kristol. ““People feel good about our long-range prospects but are quite depressed about this campaign.''
Republicans now realize the death of liberalism isn’t necessarily good news. The party needs to define conservatism for a new age. It can’t rely on front runner Dole to do it; he’s eschewing vision to campaign on ““experience.’’ There are risks in letting the zealots – Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan – speak for the party. Forbes’s radical capitalism can be unsettling, as his weakening poll numbers showed. Even conservatives aren’t against government if their jobs are at stake. In fact, Nashua prospered in the ’80s when Reagan’s military buildup poured billions into the area. Job fears are helping give Buchanan ““mo’.’’ Preaching a pro-life and ““America First’’ message, he won in Louisiana and built strength in Iowa and New Hampshire. But his hard-right positions on social issues tend to scare moderates. ““We need a new synthesis,’’ says Kristol, ““and we don’t have it yet.''
Meanwhile, an acrid odor rises from the campaign trail. GOP primary candidates used to at least pay lip service to the ““11th Commandment’’: speak no ill of a fellow Republican. This year GOP attack artists are ripping into each other. When Forbes and his millions entered the race last fall, he bought attention – and rising numbers in the polls – by savaging Dole as a tax-raising Washington dealmaker.
That set the tone, and now it’s a free-for-all. The Dole campaign aired an ad featuring its most important New Hampshire ally, Gov. Steve Merrill. In the spot, the governor says Forbes’s flat tax would cost the ““typical’’ New Hampshire family $2,000 more per year in federal taxes. The ad was effective – and wrong. It was based on a skimpy study by New Hampshire real-estate brokers who oppose the flat tax. Once Forbes assailed the spot, NEWSWEEK has learned, Dole considered pulling it. But Merrill and campaign manager Scott Reed, who had by then realized the ad was flawed, argued to keep it on. To concede error could be fatal, they said. And Forbes, they contended, had no credibility on accuracy. Dole went along.
And that was just TV. As political hit men know, you save your nastiest stuff for phone banks. The victim last week was apparently Forbes, who accused foes in Iowa of making ““distorting’’ calls on social security, abortion and gay rights. Forbes blamed Dole, Buchanan and Pat Robertson – by name. All denied involvement.
Consultants also know your allies don’t need to be told what to do. Campaign sources tell NEWSWEEK that religious activists in Iowa, led by a newsletter publisher in Des Moines, were indeed making thousands of such anti-Forbes calls. They didn’t get – and didn’t need – orders. The general, anti-Forbes ““word’’ had long since gone out.
But every trend produces a countertrend. Voter disgust with the tenor of the campaign is rising. One beneficiary of the backlash in Iowa and New Hampshire is Lamar Alexander. After months of trying to prove that he was an outsider, he finally found a way to do so, positioning himself as the leader of a Legion of Decency. His crowds were large, his poll numbers ticking up, and Dole aides said that anti-Dole moderates who had soured on Forbes were moving to Alexander.
Hence a last-minute rush to ““go positive’’ – like Lamar. Dole, hitting stride, was all sunshine on the trail. Forbes grew angry for the first time. He was battered by social conservatives on everything from abortion to the fact that his father hung a Mapplethorpe photograph in the family yacht. So he went to ground in New Jersey to film an infomercial about his career and ideas. He paid $1 million to air it in Iowa.
All of this was happening the week Ronald Reagan turned 85. At Chasen’s in Los Angeles, friends and family toasted him. In Iowa and New Hampshire, those who would succeed him evoked his legacy. Ads showed candidates talking with the Gipper, being praised by the Gipper, walking with the Gipper. But no one has yet showed that he could connect like the Gipper – the cheerful conservative who broke out of the pack. And unless someone does, the mood isn’t likely to improve on Main Street in Nashua, or anywhere else the Republican Party calls home.
