ne of the most curious phenomena on the political landscape is Steve Forbes's presidential campaign. The New Jersey Republican has spent $60 to $75 million of his own money in the past four years, with little to show for it but a 5 percent or so standing in the polls.
The 52-year-old former publisher may have even relinquished control of the family magazine to his brothers and sister, having sold them portions of his shares to raise cash to finance his campaign.
Originally he held 51 percent of the voting stock and 35 percent of the capital stock, The New York Times reported last month, but no longer is he the majority shareholder of the intensely private firm.
He can't simply buy back his shares after the election for fear of having the earlier ''sale'' ruled an illegal campaign loan, at least according to analysts consulted by the Times.
A pleasant, self-effacing man, Forbes didn't seem, as Tucker Carlson wrote the other day in the National Standard, ''like the kind of guy who would blow his family fortune ego-tripping through a midlife crisis.''
So what's going on?
One plausible motive might be power. The money he has spent on negative advertising has given him a fearsome reputation as a kind of Republican death-star.
The malign effect began in 1992 when Forbes quietly joined others to forcefully back former New York congressman Jack Kemp's challenge to incumbent president George Bush. The sniping from the tax-cut right eventually cost Bush the election.
When Kemp declined to run for the Republican nomination in 1996, Forbes jumped into the race himself. The negative advertisements he unleashed against Bob Dole in the Iowa primary that year still reverberate on the hustings. Forbes won the Delaware and Arizona primaries but found himself without influence at the Republican convention.
His effectiveness in 1999 seems to have been limited to alarming George W. Bush into forgoing federal matching funds to be able to match Forbes dollar-for-dollar during the primary season if Forbes ''goes negative'' again. An advertising blitz is apparently in the works for New Hampshire and Iowa next week.
(Forbes himself routinely has declined federal matching funds - which would impose spending ceilings and disclosure requirements - to reserve his option to spend his personal fortune without limit.)
The trouble with such influence is it persists only as long as does Forbes's willingness to spend his own money.
What then about the hope of a good appointment if he folds his hand? Forbes served for a time as chairman of Radio Free Europe under Ronald Reagan. Perhaps he hopes that George W. Bush will appoint him secretary of the Treasury if he joins the team and helps in the general election.
Not much chance of that, in the view of most observers of the Bush campaign.
Most likely Forbes is running because he really believes that his ideas eventually will strike a responsive chord. Though he has surrounded himself with well-regarded - and highly paid - Republican political specialists of all sorts, Forbes still seems to depend for his ideas mainly on a handful of policy intellectuals who came to prominence in the mid-1970s.
Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer apparently are chief among them. Robert Bartley, editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, is a sympathetic fellow traveler. The star of each climbed highest and shone brightest in the year or two after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
Thus Forbes continually laments the passing of ''the Reagan Revolution.'' Standing next to a piece of the Berlin Wall in front of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum last week, Forbes solemnly intoned, ''Now is the time to tear down this tax code.'' He pushed school vouchers and medical savings accounts.
''With Ronald Reagan's banner of freedom drifting toward the floor of the political stage, someone had to pick it up and carry it forward - and carrying it is what I'm doing in this campaign.''
When Forbes first turned up on the campaign trail in 1995, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in a profile in a recent issue of The New Yorker, ''the press made a sport of of trying to describe his extraordinary inadequency as a candidate.'' Writing in Time, Calvin Trillin had compared his appearances to a comedy club sketch of a ''dork robot,'' Kolbert noted.
Forbes has improved his performance on the stump. But reporters once again have begun competing among themselves to convey their sense of the hopelessness of Forbes's quest. The first primary is just over a couple of months away.
But one further possibility is worth keeping in mind. With the market value of Forbes the magazine estimated to be around $1 billion, the net worth of Forbes the candidate might be as much as $440 million, the Times concluded. But even if it were substantially less, his claim on the company's stream of earnings could be considered to be growing at the rate of, say, 10 percent before taxes annually, even toward the end of a long boom.
That appreciation would be more than enough to cover his political spending to date without dipping into capital, even though the magazine temporarily has stopped paying the candidate an annual salary of about $3 million.
Might Forbes magazine be planning on some sort of financial restructuring? Rumors of plans to offer shares in its Internet site,
Forbes.com, have swirled around New York for more than a year. The magazine has bet heavily on its Internet coverage in the last few years.
Could the family be planning to tiptoe away from the magazine altogether? Perhaps. It's an unusual family whose interest survives intact beyond the second generation - especially amid such spectacular financial success. There are three other brothers who have taken over day-to-day management of the firm, and many great-grandchildren of founder B. C. Forbes in the next generation. There are estate taxes to consider. Just possibly the Forbes story is mainly a business story after all.
