Bauer vs. Forbes : The fight for third place.

IN early November, Steve Forbes decided to pull out of the Louisiana caucuses. The official story is that he wrote it off as a minor-league affair, since neither George W. Bush nor John McCain would be competing there. But that explanation won't wash. The Forbes campaign had been saying for months that a win in Louisiana on January 15 would give it the momentum it would need to do well in the Iowa caucuses nine days later. And Forbes didn't need to wait for announcements by Bush and McCain to know those two weren't playing. Besides, there are actual delegates at stake in Louisiana, not just bragging rights. No underdog candidate-no candidate, period-would throw away the chance to scoop up 21 delegates, out of pride. The likely reason Forbes bowed out? He was afraid he would lose to Gary Bauer.

With only weeks to go until the primaries, Bauer and Forbes are fighting a bitter contest to determine who will be the conservative challenger to Bush. Forbes aides deny there is a battle; Bauer is "not a factor," they uniformly insist, and Forbes is gunning for Bush. But Forbes doesn't have a clear shot at Bush, not least because Bauer is in the way.

Expectations for Forbes have dropped dramatically. For most of this year, candidates such as Dan Quayle and McCain were banking on Forbes's negative ads to take Bush down a few notches. "We're getting ready for nuclear winter," a McCain adviser said in July. Forbes's spinners were saying that it was a Bush-Forbes race in reality, a Bush-McCain race only in the fantasies of the establishment media. Now McCain is rising in New Hampshire-with no assistance from Forbes-and Forbes's spinners are counting on McCain to bring down Bush there.

Part of Forbes's problem may be that he came out of the gate too early. No presidential candidate had a better 1997 than Forbes. He was everywhere: speaking at the Christian Coalition, writing a big essay in Policy Review, running ads against partial-birth abortion, denouncing congressional timidity. But now that reporters have received three or four faxes a day from Forbes for three years, they are no longer interested in what he's going to say next.

Also, Forbes's overtures to social conservatives passed the point of diminishing returns. It may have been when he declared that ending abortion was a higher priority for him than cutting taxes; or when he urged the Republican party to deny funding to candidates who support partial-birth abortion; or when he defended the Kansas state school board on evolution. At some point, Forbes's words stopped ringing true. In 1996, suspicion of Forbes by social conservatives crippled his campaign in Iowa. The lesson should have been, as one Republican strategist puts it, "next time I'll be friends, not next time I'll be baptized by immersion."

In 1996, Forbes had appeal as a fresh face, a businessman with a product- the economics of growth-that nobody else was selling. Since then, he's gone from being a nonpolitician to being a bad politician. In national polls of Republicans, he's hovering in the single digits. Running negative ads may not help him. The political culture, adapting to the pacific temper of the times, has turned against negativity. And Forbes's own reputation for running "slash-and-burn ads" ensures that his opponents and the press would come down hard if he tried it now.

Forbes's disappointing performance has the Bauer camp writing his political obituary. Frank Cannon, Bauer's campaign manager, remarks, "I think the numbers are showing after millions of dollars there's an upper limit on interest in Steve Forbes." Bauer has called on Forbes to leave the race. This might be held rather cheeky, since Bauer himself is stuck in the low single digits. But Jeff Bell, an adviser to Bauer, explains that Bauer's numbers aren't as damning as Forbes's-because Bauer isn't as well known. Although he's influential among social conservatives, Bauer has never had an audience in the millions, as Pat Robertson and James Dobson do.

Bell and Cannon were among those encouraging Bob Casey, the former governor of Pennsylvania, to mount a pro-life campaign against Bill Clinton in the 1996 Democratic primaries. Casey balked for health reasons, but Bauer has given them a second chance to run the campaign they had envisioned. The key idea, as Bell puts it, is a "different way of talking about abortion." This approach, developed by Robert P. George, a professor of politics at Princeton and yet another veteran of the Casey effort, emphasizes an American tradition of widening the circle of democracy- granting legal protections first to white men, then to blacks and women, and now to the unborn. They hope that a pro-life position framed this way will be more appealing than one that focuses on regulating women.

Bauer has started to run ads on this theme in Iowa. If they work, the campaign plans to follow them up by broadening Bauer's message to include economics, where he offers a style of populism starkly different from that of Forbes. Forbes's populism takes the form of empowering individuals with medical savings accounts, privatized Social Security, and the like. Bauer's is a more traditional populism in which the state intervenes to protect the vulnerable from powerful corporations.

Bauer, for instance, declared that "the little guy won" when the Department of Justice beat Microsoft in court. (Forbes, no doubt, would have said that, up against the federal government, Microsoft was the little guy.) Bauer favors a "patient's bill of rights." While declaring himself a free-trader, Bauer has occasionally used protectionist rhetoric. He rejects Social Security privatization. His version of the flat tax reduces taxes on labor income even more than Forbes's plan would-but raises taxes on capital gains and business investment.

There is a conservative case for many of these positions. Plenty of conservative lawyers and economists are rooting against Microsoft; conservatives have at best mixed feelings about HMOs, seeing them as creatures of the state. Taken together, however, Bauer's emerging politics amounts to Buchananism lite-an attempt to attract the blue-collar social- conservative vote by playing down free-market economics. "I think there is receptivity on the campaign trail for conservatives willing to fight for Main Street against Wall Street," says Cannon.

Bauer is setting himself in opposition to the establishment not only of the Republican party, but also of the conservative movement. This stance will win him the admiration of those social conservatives unhappy with the terms of their alliance with economic conservatives. Whether it will help Bauer in the primaries is another matter. It's one reason that conservative celebrities such as Bruce Herschensohn and Armstrong Williams have been flocking to Forbes, not Bauer.

The Bauer-Forbes contest has already gotten ugly. In the most bizarre episode of the campaign to date, in late September Bauer accused the Forbes campaign of spreading malicious rumors about him. In fact, it was Bauer's own former aides who were making nebulous charges against him; one of these aides had moved to the Forbes camp, but spoke to the press only after Bauer made his accusation. There are hard feelings on both sides. "I think there is a distrust of the Bauer campaign," says Brent Bozell, a Forbes supporter who accuses the Bauer forces of engaging in "Clinton tactics."

Bauer's attacks on Forbes, meanwhile, have gotten more personal. In mid November, Bauer characterized Social Security privatization as a "big- shot, big-money Wall Street type of approach" that Forbes favors as the "son of a tycoon." Bauer explained that he, as "the son of a janitor," was "not going to forget where I came from." The Bauer-Forbes race will test, among other things, how much appetite there is for class warfare among social conservatives.

The battleground will be Iowa. Bauer knows he has to beat Forbes there. Working in his favor will be the desire of social conservatives for a spokesman: Bauer is more articulate than Forbes and has deeper roots among social conservatives. Forbes supporters argue that their guy has the resources to win. "I don't believe that Gary or Alan [Keyes], who I admire and agree with, can go the distance," says Paul Weyrich, who supports Forbes. Bauer, of course, makes the same argument about Forbes; and odds are, both sides of this argument are right. Says a Republican strategist: "It's going to be a Texas chainsaw massacre over basically a molehill."

If neither Forbes nor Bauer has much chance of winning, are they at least moving the debate rightward? It's hard to see any conservative position that Bush or McCain has been forced to take because of them. Their chief influence has been on each other. "Forbes has come 80 percent of the way to Gary's position on China," says Cannon, "except that Steve still can't get the words 'no MFN' out of his mouth." Forbes boasts that because of him, all the Republican candidates support some kind of flat tax-with the not exactly minor exception of George W. Bush. Forbes and Bauer have moved the Republican party toward them on Social Security and China, respectively, but their impact preceded the 2000 race.

Forbes is leading Bauer in the race for third place. But Forbes has adopted a frontrunner strategy akin to the one Phil Gramm used against Pat Buchanan in 1996. Gramm did not deign to address Buchanan's ideas on the merits; he ignored him, saying he was more electable because he had more money. In December 1995, Gramm's campaign manager, Charlie Black, was explaining that Buchanan would have to leave the race in weeks. Two months later, Buchanan knocked Gramm out of the race.