REPUBLICAN HOPEFULS TRADE SHOTS\Rivals make Forbes, Dole targets in Iowa.

Byline: Richard L. Berke The New York Times

Sharing the stage with Sen. Bob Dole for the first time this year and the last time before the votes are cast in the Iowa caucuses in 30 days, the rivals for the Republican presidential nomination sharpened their attacks on the front-runner Saturday, saying he lacked the vision and leadership to defeat President Clinton.

At times the attacks were personal, particularly from fellow Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and from Lamar Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee. But Dole was also used by his rivals as a symbol of their more general attacks on Washington.

While much attention focused on Dole, who is leading the pack, another juicy target was Steve Forbes, the multimillionaire magazine publisher, who has spent at least $10 million of his own money since his late entry in the race and is No. 2 behind Dole in many polls. Several candidates ridiculed Forbes' centerpiece proposal, a 17 percent flat tax.

In a 90-minute nationally televised forum in this state, where the first caucuses will be held Feb. 12, the nine candidates talked about cutting the federal budget, race relations, the cost of education and other domestic issues. Foreign policy hardly came up as the nine candidates were peppered with questions from readers of The Des Moines Register, which sponsored the forum.

Less a debate much of the time than a series of sound bites, the forum represented the first chance for Iowans and for a national audience to see all nine of the Republican contenders together on one stage.

Although the candidates have been out on the road for months, spending millions on travel and television commercials, Saturday's event was the opening of the real race for the Iowa caucuses, which will be the first nominating contest in which all the Republicans are entered.

Dole's eight rivals used much of their time in a quest to knock the senator off stride and stand out with pithy remarks that they hoped would catch on with the voters here.

But while his opponents said Dole's time had passed, the majority leader sought to turn his experience into a virtue and behaved as if he were already the nominee. Rather than engage in the intramural scrimmage, Dole devoted much of his time to taking on Clinton about the negotiations for balancing the budget, and he emphasized his experience in Washington.

Turning to his opponents on the podium at the Iowa Public Television studios in this suburb of Des Moines, Dole, a Kansan who leads the field in Iowa by more than 30 percentage points, asserted: "There's one senator here, one member of this family who has been making tough decisions every day for a long, long time. And I'm very proud of that."

But as the retorts grew more lively, Dole could not help but direct a few barbs at his opponents. At one point, he made fun of Gramm's failing three grades in school when he mentioned a student's question: "She's passed every grade she's been in." On the stump, Gramm frequently boasts about failing three grades, as evidence of the hard work it took for him to earn a doctorate in economics.

Alexander, who has campaigned in this state for at least two years but shown almost no movement in the polls, was most aggressive in suggesting that at age 72, Dole is too old to be president.

"We need to say, with respect, to Senator Dole that it may be your turn but it's not your revolution; it's not your time," Alexander said. "It's time we moved outside Washington. It's time we moved on."

But much of the give-and-take, which was carried live by CNN and C-Span and on Iowa Public Television, focused on Forbes. The questions were written by readers of The Des Moines Register and posed by the newspaper's editor, Dennis Ryerson.

Gramm, a former economics professor, was the first to question Forbes' flat-tax proposal, saying Forbes was not committed to balancing the budget. Forbes interrupted the senator, but Gramm insisted: "You've written it three or four times, Steve."

Alexander was even more forceful against Forbes, offering one one-liner after another about the flat tax, saying it was "a truly nutty idea" that would "cause a real estate crash" and was "going up there like the Great Pumpkin - it's going to solve every problem that we have." He later raised the subject again, saying to Forbes: "The only thing you've ever run is a magazine you inherited, and you raised the price of your magazine." The candidates broke up in laughter.

With all the talk about balancing the budget, even Dole made a crack that the government could "borrow money from Steve Forbes."

All the attacks on Forbes led Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative commentator, to say: "Since everyone's piling on Steve Forbes here, I want to be fair and join in the piling here, too."

But Forbes, clearly savoring the attention, responded that subscriptions to his magazine are voluntary. Forbes said he was the subject of such sniping because his message was taking hold.

"These lifetime politicians don't get it," he said, "and will never get it."

Asked how much he would save under his flat-tax plan, Forbes said that it would be about $150,000 but that he had "invested 200 times that" to get his message across in the campaign. He said Washington opposed his proposal because it would "take away their principal source of power."

With the arguing over the federal budget dominating the news from Washington for weeks, the forum's moderator tried at the outset to pin down the candidates on what specific programs they considered sacred and would not touch in trying to balance the budget.

Some answered directly, like Gramm, who cited Social Security and said he would look for waste in military spending.

Others, like Buchanan, who gave himself honorary membership in the freshman class of the House, did not answer directly. Instead, Buchanan talked about what he would cut. He said he would begin phasing out foreign aid and cancel the $50 billion bailout of Mexico. He also attacked the system of automatic and generous congressional pensions, saying he would end this "looting of the American taxpayer." He said Rep. Patricia Schroeder, the Colorado Democrat, was retiring - to the applause of the country, he suggested - with a pension worth a total of $4.2 million.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana said balancing the budget required raising revenue as well and said changes in the tax system were necessary.

Morry Taylor, a businessman from Michigan, said that he would take Medicare and Social Security off the table and that the federal bureaucracy should be cut. He, too, said congressional pensions were excessive and that as president, he would eliminate one-third of federal jobs that pay annual salaries between $50,000 and $143,000. "Look at where the real money is," he said, adding "on all sides of me, I got a few million dollars in pensions here."

Rep. Robert K. Dornan of California said the military and Social Security were off the table. Alan Keyes, a former State Department official who is a radio show host, said that nothing should be off the table and that he supported "the marriage-based, two-parent family."

Alexander said the focus should not be on the budget so much as on the "real world." He added: "If all we talk about is Washington, D.C., instead of neighborhoods," Clinton will be re-elected, and the Democrats might also retake the House.

Forbes said Social Security for current recipients should be off the table, but that a new system should be started for younger people. And he made a pitch for the flat tax that he has made so popular in this campaign.