The Way the Jude Works
FERGUSON, ANDREW
The Way the Jude Works By Andrew Ferguson With the disastrous showing of the Forbes campaign in the New Hampshire primary on February 20, different political soothsayers have reacted in different...
...His grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner and dedicated Communist who gave his grandson a copy of Das Kapital at high school graduation...
...Moving, however slightly, closer to earth, he worked tirelessly for the conversion of Jerry Brown in late 1991...
...Wanniski first plunged into presidential politics with Ronald Reagan in 1979, having tried unsuccessfully to convince Jack Kemp to make a run-a quadrennial exercise in pointlessness Wanniski shares with many Republicans...
...For the explanation is indelibly Jude-like: The bad news is really good news, thinly disguised, and even if the bad news really is bad, a white knight is arriving to make it good...
...A Perot Presidency would be a colossal event in the history of the world," Wanniski wrote in those happy days of June 1992, and he has brought the same extravagance of speech to the Forbes campaign...
...Even if the white knight is a retired and obscure United States senator from a state with half the population of San Antonio...
...And, to the best of my knowledge, Wanniski never spoke to Reagan again, and never...
...Twenty years after he emerged as the chief pamphleteer of "supply-side economics," he continues to roil Republican politics, having flirted with the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Bob Dole, and now Forbes...
...he cried to acquaintances at the time...
...The Dole courtship, curious as it was, is not the strangest Wanniski has engaged in over the years...
...I tried to teach him," Wanniski told me bitterly, "but he just couldn't cut it...
...He'll go full time into the operation...
...Wanniski also claimed a healthy tax cut would reduce prostitution, pornography, drug use, divorce, and abortion...
...He owes his continued viability to several factors...
...Delusional...
...Rollins's acceptance was the last piece of information I needed...
...When I asked Wanniski why his prediction of a Perot victory had gone awry, he grew bitter again...
...It's a silly question, really, since the answer is so obvious...
...I remember, if he hadn't gotten any response from Dole for a while, he'd come down here and just sit in the press office," says a Dole staffer...
...All my work...
...Disdaining conventional wisdom in all its forms, he is eminently quotable, making him a favorite of financial journalists hoping to juice up a story...
...Wanniski wrote that he "could safely make these predictions on the information that [campaign consultant] Ed Rollins had accepted Perot's offer to be co-campaign manager...
...Thrilled...
...I still think Steve is going to be the nominee...
...And above all there is his persistence, a tenacity of almost superhuman proportions, on behalf of his causes, which range from the absolutely immediate necessity of a reduction in the capital-gains tax rate to the absolute inevitability of a Forbes presidency to the absolutely catastrophic consequences of a failure to return to the gold standard...
...Now he's sending faxes to her too...
...For Wanniski, former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and now an economics consultant, certitude is the stock in trade...
...Review them now for Larry King...
...The Forbes campaign is a test of one of his central hypotheses, that tax cuts are the surest path to electoral victory...
...Publicists of lesser gifts could not have survived the humiliation, but Wanniski is the Consultant Who Will Not Die...
...He offered his picture of a Perot cabinet: Ann Richards or Wallop as vice president, zillionaire Ted Forstmann as Treasury secretary, and Jesse Jackson as secretary of state, who would "focus his energies on pro-growth policies everywhere...
...It has happened with Laffer, Bell, even Kemp, who has been locked with Wanniski in an intense intellectual symbiosis for 20 years...
...But he'd get hold of Dole...
...how, in the mid-70s, he took Arthur Laffer and then-White House deputy chief of staff Dick Cheney out for drinks and encouraged Laffer to explain supply-side economics by drawing his eponymous curve on a napkin...
...Ross Perot will be elected President of the United States, probably by a landslide...
...In his Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal, Edward Scharff devotes nearly a chapter to Wanniski and recounts much of the legend: how Wanniski reported to his new job at the National Observer in 1962, driving up to the offices in a silver Buick Riviera convertible wearing a gold lam...
...That incorrigible optimism explains, in part, Wanniski's appeal...
...He is a publicist in the old sense of the term, a popularizer and dramatizer, who has applied his gifts not least to the story of his own career...
...Iwish," George Will once said of Wanniski, "that I were as confident about something as he is of everything...
...My guess," says one supply-sider who has felt the lash, "is that he'll turn on Steve when the campaign finally fails...
...All my work down the drain...
...But the relationship was ill-starred, as anyone familiar with Dole, who makes no secret of his contempt for supply-side theory, would have guessed...
...He lionizes people to an absurd extent," says a former Wanniski favorite...
...In a March 1995 profile, the New York Times Magazine quoted Dole making unflattering remarks about tax cutters...
...His newsletters are studded with insinuations of his intimacy with the great and powerful-Treasury officials, Capitol Hill players, Fed governors, and especially the big guy himself, Alan Greenspan...
...I fax it along again...
...The fax drew a sharp rebuke from Forbes campaign manager Bill Dal Col: "We cannot be held responsible for what he writes or says...
...The candidate was his fellow supply-sider Jeff Bell, and the man Wanniski canvassed was one of his own bosses at the Journal...
...To pieces...
...Bob Torricelli, a liberal Democrat whose ideology seems to intersect with Wanniski's at a single point-a desire to cut the capital-gains tax...
...Optimistic...
...Wanniski was crestfallen...
...The left-wing journalists Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway published an interview with Wanniski in the Village Voice, under the title "The Battle for Reagan's Mind...
...In preparation for the 1980 campaign, Wanniski, Laffer, and others privately briefed Reagan on the benefits of a taxrate reduction, which Reagan, counseled by Bell, had advocated as early as 1976...
...Its message will be of use on Meet the Press...
...We can now confidently predict," Wanniski faxed his clients in June 1992, "H...
...Dole never paid him much attention, though...
...To certitude and eccentricity you may add indiscretion...
...He has the resources to go on," Wanniski said...
...The Coalition, he wrote, "is one of the most active money changers in the temple atop Capitol Hill, always careful to ask for more than Congress can deliver...
...When he was hired, that's the point I knew it was over...
...No accounting of it would be complete without essential anecdotes...
...And when he did, Jude would just...
...From his office in Morristown, New Jersey, he faxes to favored clients and reporters and policy-makers a breathless series of notes, memos, bulletins, and newsletters...
...Jude himself was raised in Brooklyn-the Dodgers are a recurring motif in his writing-and became a newspaperman, working in Alaska and then Las Vegas...
...Dole asked the assembled reporters...
...Some have asked: "What will Steve Forbes do now...
...Did you read my little piece in the Morristown newspaper...
...If you're a politician and you return his phone call," says an old associate, "he'll decide you're savior of the world...
...The Way the Jude Works By Andrew Ferguson With the disastrous showing of the Forbes campaign in the New Hampshire primary on February 20, different political soothsayers have reacted in different ways...
...He got Elizabeth's fax number, I don't know how...
...Given that it comes from George Will, this is a statement of amazing power...
...To dismiss Wanniski's post-New Hampshire assessment as the cynical cheerleading of a spin doctor is to misunderstand the man...
...Even in print, he has enlisted some odd fellows in the supply-side cause...
...It was enormously influential to a generation of tax-cutting and gold-bug policy wonks-"It totally rearranged my electrons," one said recently-and remains, 18 years later, Wanniski's great achievement...
...sports coat and mirrored sunglasses, a Las Vegas showgirl on his arm...
...Do you still have the memos I wrote when I tried to get you to do the [Jesse] Jackson show...
...Wanniski wrote in anticipation of a Dole appearance on CNN...
...He's clearly the best man to be president...
...Others have asked: "What will the pro-growth, low-tax, social moderates do now...
...Which returns us to the question, What will Jude do now...
...By this time Wanniski had gone the route of all supply-siders: He had set up a lucrative consulting business, wooing businessmen away from their demand-side delusions...
...So, just as crucially, is eccentricity...
...In public, however, Wanniski "overreached"-the generous term used by Martin Anderson in his history of the Reagan years, Revolution...
...For a brief period beginning in 1994, Wanniski turned his attentions to Bob Dole...
...The story of the supply-side movement is to a large extent the story of other supply-siders' falling in with Wanniski, followed by the inevitable falling out...
...And then when you fail him, he turns on you with an unbelievable viciousness...
...He has the ear, in particular, of Robert Novak, the most influential political reporter in the country, and limited access to his old outlet, the Journal editorial page...
...The memo's inspiration seems to have come from the fact that Perot had granted Wanniski an interview the week before...
...and how, in 1978, he was fired at last from the Journal for canvassing a suburban New Jersey train station on behalf of a political candidate...
...The candidate was not amused...
...Which may say as much about the Republican party as it does about Jude Wanniski...
...He thinks in terms of entrepreneurial capitalism," he told the Journal at the time...
...played any role in the development and implementation of national economic policy after Reagan was elected president...
...Alas, he has become one of the nomenklatura in the Kremlin on the Potomac," Wanniski wrote in 1991, in response to some now-forgotten apostasy...
...He is optimistic, forward-looking, without a trace of the frustration that comes when the world doesn't work the way it's supposed to...
...Today he speaks of Dole with undisguised contempt...
...Forbes's vote totals in Iowa and New Hampshire-10 percent and 12 percent, respectively-conform roughly to those of Kemp in 1988, the last candidate to make tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign...
...He has written often in praise of Karl Marx: "emphatically a gold-standard free-trader...
...With a distant fourth-place finish and 12 percent of the vote in a state Forbes earlier had a chance of winning...
...I'm sure Greenspan will take his calls, say, once every six months," says a Greenspan friend...
...For now, Wanniski shows no sign of doing so...
...Ed Rollins," he said...
...For the most part, Wanniski's romancing of Dole consisted of offering unsolicited advice...
...Another journalist recalls meeting with Dole in '94...
...Aside from Forbes, his political heroes of the moment are Robert Bennett, a nondescript senator from Utah who flirts with gold buggery, and New Jersey Rep...
...Alan's a pretty accessible guy-he'll take your call if you have any standing at all...
...What's with Wanniski, anyway...
...Wanniski," wrote supply-sider Bruce Bartlett at the time, "seemed to take credit for inventing the Laffer curve, inventing the Kemp-Roth bill, and . . . making [Jack Kemp] a major national spokesman...
...He recently told Business Week that Lyndon LaRouche is "a gold-standard guy" whose followers are "not trained in demand-model economics," which may be why Wanniski has hired several of them at his consulting firm...
...The evidence so far is not good...
...And others, those of us entranced by the frivolities of American politics, have asked: "What will Jude Wanniski do now...
...To the same end he had also written an entertaining popular exposition of supply-side economics, called with characteristic grandiosity, The Way the World Works...
...Wanniski-the man called (by himself) "the most influential political economist of the last generation" and the strategist credited (mostly by himself) with launching the Forbes campaign-will continue to be Wanniski...
...The Voice article was the first iteration of what became, for Republicans, an inconvenient caricature throughout the 80s: of Reagan the marionette, tugged this way then that by opportunists of various colorations...
...Wanniski, according to a Forbes insider, has been barred from the campaign headquarters...
...And then Jude can write about it for the next six months: 'Well, I've been talking to Greenspan...
...He is simply indefatigable," says one journalist who has been the object of Wanniski's barrages, "both in his self-promotion and in his attention to whatever his cause of the day is...
...well, 'tackle' isn't the right word...
...He knew Dole would have to show up sooner or later...
...But only in part...
...Steve is a secular Christ," he told me...
...He wrecked that campaign...
...Forward-looking...
...The romance was reciprocal in a uniquely one-sided fashion: Jude would offer Dole advice, and in return Jude would praise Dole in his newsletter...
...Reagan and his campaign staff immediately dropped Wanniski," wrote Anderson...
...And the good news is he's brought in Malcolm Wallop [the former Republican senator from Wyoming], who has superb political skills...
...When the Christian Coalition began attacking Forbes in Iowa, Wanniski fired up the fax machine...
...Believe me, all the Forbes enthusiasts were thrilled to pieces with the results in New Hampshire," Wanniski said, 48 hours after the vote...
...Its director, Ralph Reed, is clearly willing to bear false witness against his neighbor, Steve Forbes, as he did yesterday, the Lord's Day...
Vol. 1 • March 1996 • No. 24
