Forbes ASAP: The last election underscores the need for a presidential candidate with ideas. But are ideas enough?

Forbes may not be the first choice of religious conservatives in 2000, but they won't veto him either. The overtures to them also strengthen the Right by building bridges between its economic and moral factions. Neither is the cultural significance of someone of Steve Forbes's background inveighing against infanticide to be taken lightly. Prominent business leaders don't often address "The Moral Basis of a Free Society" (the title of a Forbes speech published in Policy Review).

Forbes has broadened his message in other ways, too. As in 1996, he attacks Washington and proposes the flat tax as a weapon against the imperial city. But since that idea has become familiar, he can talk more about other ways of transferring power to individuals: school choice, Social Security privatization, medical savings accounts. Missile defense, opposition to racial preferences, and freedom for the Internet have also entered Forbes's mix of issues. His positions mirror those of right-wing think tanks (at whose fund-raisers he is often the keynote speaker). Like other supply-siders, Forbes shows little enthusiasm for cutting government spending, except indirectly- competition and choice are to cut costs in Medicare and Social Security.

Forbes has modified his approach to taxes, as well. He still declares, without a trace of irony, that the tax code is the greatest obstacle to the pursuit of happiness. But he is starting to treat the flat tax the same way he treats the Human Life Amendment: it's the ultimate goal, but for now smaller reforms-rolling back the 1990 and 1993 tax increases, for instance-will move us in the right direction. Forbes has also suggested that taxpayers should be allowed to choose between paying the flat tax and filing under the old system, thus eliminating one of the flat tax's political disadvantages (the possibility that it would harm some taxpayers) and one of its substantive ones (the difficulty of transition to the new system).

Only "masochists," Forbes suggests, would choose the current tax code. Still, eliminating the deduction for interest on mortgages may be a political task for a masochist. Forbes has changed the national debate in the Nineties more than anyone but Ross Perot. But as with Perot's obsessions with the deficit and campaign-finance reform, it's not clear that tax reform will serve conservatives well.

And whatever the appeal of the Forbes message, his credibility as a messenger is open to question. The heir to a vast fortune may not be the most persuasive proponent of lower taxes on investment. And temperamentally conservative voters may blanch at the idea of the presidency as an entry-level position. Forbes responds to this concern by citing his Reagan-era service on the board of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: "I've seen the way bureaucracies work in a nitty-gritty way that certainly you don't see in the Senate or in the House-the fights you have grappling with OMB, interagency battles you have with USIA, State Department, NSC, VOA. And bluntly put, in those bureaucratic battles, we won all of them." But this sounds both weak and off-message (Steve Forbes, bureaucratic empire-builder?).