A BRASS-KNUCKLED GENTLEMAN: STEVE FORBES

STEVE FORBES MAY BE THE ONLY man ever to run for President who behaves as if it's bad manners to introduce himself to strangers. On the campaign trail, he approaches voters with disarming politeness. "Hi, I'm Steve Forbes," he says softly, and then extends a delicate, manicured hand as though he's reaching for a wine glass. He doesn't plunge into crowds; he tiptoes through them, smiling apologetically, as if he doesn't want to be a nuisance.

But Steve Forbes has not been shy about bankrolling a campaign that is anything but polite. In the two months since he announced his candidacy, Forbes has inched up to second place in New Hampshire, where most polls show him with about 10% of the g.o.p. vote vs. front runner Bob Dole with 37%. And in Iowa, Forbes is tied for second with Pat Buchanan and Phil Gramm at 7%, according to a poll of likely caucus participants by PSI, a research firm. That's largely because of message and money. Forbes, who heads the magazine-publishing company founded by his grandfather, has been writing generous checks for compelling commercials in those states. Having spurned federal matching funds, he has spent several million dollars of his own money. In New Hampshire alone, he has dropped far more than $600,000, the limit imposed on candidates who accept matching funds.

More telling is the tilt to his commercials, which have gone negative long before the first sign of snow. Among his ads blanketing New Hampshire and Iowa, one is the sharpest attack so far against Dole; it accuses the Senator of voting for 16 tax increases in the past 13 years, a charge that nettled Dole when Forbes himself made it in a cnn debate two weeks ago in Florida.

Above all, Forbes is the smiling face in a dour Republican race, an economic optimist using sunny, supply-side theory to brighten up what he describes as the "sourpuss views" of his Republican rivals. Yet for all his patrician good humor, Forbes' message and his campaign have begun to show a hard edge:

Despite his frequent protestations that he understands the needs of the average Joe, his flat-tax proposal would reward wealthy investors while leaving the burden on middle-class families.

Just last week Forbes told WMVU radio in New Hampshire that he advocates a federal version of California's Proposition 187, a measure championed by Governor Pete Wilson forbidding illegal immigrants to receive government benefits. This is a turnabout from his views in 1993, when in his Forbes magazine column he equated Wilson's scapegoating of illegal immigrants with the interning of Japanese Americans during World War II and castigated Wilson's stance as "morally wrong."

While Forbes generally shuns the politics of exclusion, he has nonetheless attracted to his organization two veterans of Jesse Helms' race-baiting campaigns. When asked whether he was disturbed by the resumes of these two men, Forbes replied that one must hope for redemption, citing the aphorism "Every saint has a past and every sinner a future."