MYRNA, Del. - Returning to a state he won in 1996, Steve Forbes traveled through Delaware yesterday hoping that a strong showing in tomorrow's Republican primary will demonstrate that there is still credibility and life in his seemingly withering candidacy.
Only 12 delegates are at stake in tomorrow's contest. But it is an important symbolic test for Forbes, who is trying to convince his backers he can win the GOP nomination.
Having placed a distant third in last week's New Hampshire primary behind Texas Governor George W. Bush and Arizona Senator John McCain, with just 13 percent of the vote, the conservative publisher has had little to be encouraged about.
He has seen influential conservatives and conservative publications like the National Review call for him to leave the race. The media have virtually disappeared from his campaign events; no television cameras recorded a news conference he held here yesterday afteroon. One recent CNN-Time magazine poll showed Forbes trailing former ambassador Alan Keyes in the crucial primary state of South Carolina. Yesterday a New Jersey newspaper reported the indignity of a McCain fund-raiser scheduled in Forbes's home town of Bedminster, N.J., this week.
Through it all, however, Forbes has maintained a stubbornly upbeat attitude. When a questioner asked him at a town hall meeting in a Smyrna firehouse how he is holding up, Forbes grinned.
''As the kids would say, `I'm pumped,''' he told the crowd of about 120.
But while his campaign insists that Forbes is still an important factor in this race, it is not clear how he will turn around a candidacy on which he has already spent more than $28 million of his own money.
Delaware, a high point of Forbes's 1996 campaign, is one possibility. Although McCain is on tomorrow's ballot, he is not actively campaigning here. Thus, tomorrow's contest gives Forbes a chance to go more or less head to head with Bush. Under similar circumstances in Iowa, where McCain also did not compete, Forbes tallied an impressive 30 percent of the vote that briefly energized his campaign and attracted precious media coverage.
Yesterday, however, Forbes campaign manager Bill Dal Col said that while there has been no reliable polling, he thinks Forbes is currently running third here, behind Bush and McCain.
Dal Col added that there is hope for Forbes as long as Bush is reeling, leaving the GOP race in flux.
''The biggest news is still the fact that the front-runner got tidal waved in New Hampshire,'' Dal Col said. ''Seventy percent of people voted against the front-runner.''
He added that McCain's surge of popularity would also subside. ''It's biography driven, not issues driven,'' Dal Col said. ''At some point the race turns to issues - clearly our strength.''
Yesterday, Forbes scoffed at conservatives who have been pressuring him to drop out of the race, saying such calls were coming from Bush partisans who had a personal interest in seeing the Texan win the nomination.
''They're dreaming,'' Forbes said when asked if he might quit the race. ''Every single one is a supporter of George Bush. Suddenly they see the contracts they thought they were going to get, the offices they were going to get, in jeopardy. ... This is not a done deal at all.''
But the Bush campaign has pounced on calls from conservative leaders for Forbes to reconsider his vow to remain in the race until at least March 7.
''There is increasing concern that Mr. Forbes is harming'' the conservative ''cause more than he is helping it,'' Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday.
Still, even some of Forbes's faithful supporters are acknowledging how difficult it is to imagine a scenario in which he wins the GOP nomintion.
''The odds are against him,'' said Smyrna resident Conrad Hebert, 68.
''It's hard,'' said Marge Szewcyzk, 55, of Newark. ''I wish he could. I hope he can.''
Forbes was greeted in Smyrna yesterday by a band of perhaps a dozen Bush supporters, including several dispatched from the Boston area by the Massachusetts Republican Party. Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci has been one of Bush's leading supporters in the Northeast. One volunteer passing out pro-Bush fliers even sported a white Cellucci-Swift baseball cap. It was an unexpected sight in this rural Delaware town, and a reminder of Bush's still-formidible campaign army.
