o put it gently, it takes imagination to see Steve Forbes in the Oval Office. He doesn't have Ronald Reagan's easygoing glamour or Bill Clinton's gifts of empathy and rhetoric. He lacks the bearing of a natural commander. He has never held serious political office. And as of last weekend's Boston Globe poll, he is supported by 7 percent of New Hampshire voters, less than John McCain (12 percent), Elizabeth Dole (14), and George W. Bush (44).
Forbes has heard it all before.
''Look at past presidents,'' he says, taking a break after marching in Milford's Labor Day parade. ''Initially people couldn't see them becoming president. Harry Truman. JFK - too young. Jimmy Carter. Nixon after '62. Ronald Reagan - even in '79, east of the Mississippi it was considered inconceivable that this guy could become president. Once you wear the mantle, people think, `Oh, of course.' But before? You look very human.''
True, ''can't-win'' candidates often seem viable only after the votes are counted and they've won. And true, just because something hasn't happened before, it doesn't mean it can't happen now. Still, Americans have been electing presidents for 210 years, and no one has ever vaulted from the world of business to the presidency. With the exception of Wendell Willkie, a utilities executive who ran against FDR in 1940, no corporate leader has even won a major party's nomination. What makes Forbes think he can accomplish what no businessman in US history has accomplished?
He doesn't really answer the question. ''This country always breaks precedents,'' he says, pointing out that before JFK defeated Richard Nixon in 1960, it was axiomatic that no Catholic could win the White House. He notes that some of the nation's most influential presidents had meager political careers. ''Look at Lincoln - two years in Congress, two years in the state Legislature. That's not the usual pattern. His predecessor, Buchanan'' - an awful president - ''had the more traditional resume: a whole lifetime in appointed or elected office.''
To be sure, ironclad political ''laws'' are sometimes broken. There was the ancient jinx that kept sitting vice presidents from winning the top job in their own right. Then came George Bush. There was the hard-and-fast rule that you couldn't win the White House unless you had won the New Hampshire primary. Then came Bill Clinton. Maybe Forbes is going to prove that you don't need at least some political experience - or a brilliant military career - to become president. But how?
And how, for that matter, is he going to surmount another axiom of modern presidential politics? Since at least 1968, the candidate with the support of the GOP establishment has always gone on to win the nomination. Reagan couldn't dislodge Gerald Ford, the establishment candidate in 1976; four years later, when most party leaders coalesced behind Reagan, Bush couldn't dislodge him. Bush, in turn, easily fended off Bob Dole and Jack Kemp in 1988, and in 1996, when party mandarins decided it was Dole's ''turn,'' Pat Buchanan and Forbes didn't stand a chance.
But never has the GOP establishment united in support of a candidate as overwhelmingly as it has sworn fealty to George W. Bush. Hundreds of elected Republicans have endorsed him, many sight unseen; he has shattered every record for preprimary fund-raising; he tops every Republican preference poll. Can Forbes compete against that?
Possibly not. But if he does make a real fight of it, it will be by offering Republican voters the one important thing they won't get from Bush: powerful Republican ideas.
In 1996, Forbes's call for drastically reforming the Internal Revenue Code with a simple flat tax was widely and hotly debated. He repeatedly championed medical savings accounts as a way to give Americans more control over their own health care. He was the first presidential candidate to suggest that workers be allowed to channel their Social Security taxes into personal investment accounts. Forbes's proposals were scorned by other GOP candidates in 1996. Today they are mainstream Republican thinking.
Forbes argues that the Republican revolution in Congress failed not because the GOP tried to do too much but because it failed to dare enough. During the pivotal 1995 budget fight with Clinton, he recalls, ''our guys were going on TV and saying, `We demand Congressional Budget Office-certified estimates for fiscal year 2003.' Wow! Now that's really the way to get people pumped.''
Buchanan's protectionist isolationism aside, the Forbes operation is the only Republican presidential campaign in which ideas are uppermost. The media obsess on Forbes's wealth, on the high-tech whiz-bangery of his traveling road show, on his lavish tent at the Iowa straw poll. What they fail to focus on is what really distinguishes him from the rest of the field: Forbes is the only candidate who is running for president because of his beliefs.
One belief above all. ''Genuine political freedom exists only when the powers of the central government are limited, checked, controlled, and balanced,'' Forbes writes in his new book. ''As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.''
There could hardly be a better premise for a Republican presidential campaign.
Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist.
