CAMPAIGN '96: KNOCK 'EM FLAT

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But it is more accurate to say that Forbes is the best thing that ever happened to Dole. Like Colin Powell before him, he has soaked up attention that the other candidates desperately need. At one point, Dole's staff referred to Forbes as Darth Vader, because he was killing the Senator's enemies. Now Dole operatives like to reassure themselves that Forbes stands little chance of actually defeating Dole in Iowa, where organization is still supposed to count for more than advertising. "You can spend $25 million of your own money and buy yourself a position in the polls," says Dole campaign staff member Darrell Kearney, "but you can't buy caucus attendance."

Dole, a perpetual candidate in that state for the past decade, has campaign chairs in all 99 counties and is close to having chiefs in the 1,600 to 1,700 of Iowa's 2,142 precincts he's deemed necessary to win. Less than a month before the big night, Forbes has 26 county chairs signed on and 750 volunteer precinct workers, as well as a professional phone bank making 4,000 calls for him daily. Forbes supporters tend to be mainly independents and moderates with weak party ties who are younger than Dole's or Gramm's backers by at least 10 years and less likely than the diehards to haul themselves to a caucus on voting night. "My observation," says Gramm's pollster, Linda DiVall, "is that the Forbes vote is a place holder where people are parking their vote because they haven't seen Gramm or Alexander on the air to the extent they have seen Forbes."

So it is possible that this week will turn out to have been Forbes' 15 minutes of fame. But that has not kept the rivalry between Forbes and Dole from taking on the quality of shadowboxing. Both Forbes campaign manager Bill Dal Col and Dole campaign manager Scott Reed were once Kemp staffers, and they have kept in touch over the years. Early on, Dal Col would routinely let Reed see the text of Forbes' ads before they ran, "but no more," he says. "Things have got too hot. They're crazed about the ads." Reed notes that Forbes was the first to go negative, and with misleading information. He ran one ad attacking Dole for voting to raise lawmakers' pensions, then denounced Dole for denying he ever did it. In fact, Dole voted to raise salaries, and since pensions are tied to salaries, it was effectively the same thing. That might have been no more elastic with the truth than other negative ads--except that Dole actually supported a measure that would have, for the first time in decades, reined in federal pensions, something Forbes omits to mention.