a difference?

Politics

Will Forbes make a difference?

By David North

The next president of the United States may be a man who owns an island in Fiji.

The fast-rising presidential candidate is multimillionaire Steve Forbes, 48, a New York publisher and a conservative seeking Republican nomination.

The island is seven-square-mile Laucala just off Taveuni, Fiji’s fourth largest island. Laucala is some 200 miles north and east of the capital Suva, and has a private airstrip of its own. It was the favourite private resort of Forbes’ late father, senator Malcolm Forbes, once the most colourful of America’s rich publish ers. The senator is buried on Laucala.

But with the exception of one very unfriendly piece in the Washington Post, Laucala has not been mentioned in the younger Forbes campaign. The version of his media biography faxed to PIM did not mention it, nor did his campaign, as requested, come up with any material on the island.

The Post article covered the history of the island in a few lines, mentioning, in passing, King Cakobau as a “brilliant can nibal.” The thrust of the article was to compare the candidate’s island to a highly

popular American television comedy

series of a few years back, Gilligan’s Island . Post writer said Forbes’ role on his real-life island was like that of the stuffy, demanding millionaire of the tele vision show.

Politically, Steve Forbes was unknown six months ago. Then he decided to enter American politics at the top, as did Ross Perot four years ago, by running for presi dent. Like Perot he has a strong ego, and a willingness to spend millions of his own dollars on the campaign.

And like Perot, his millions got him the public’s attention; people started to listen

to his somewhat simplistic message. At this writing, he was giving the Republican front-runner for the nomination, Senate leader Bob Dole of Kansas, a tight race for the lead in the early primaries in lowa and

New Hampshire.

it help the region to have this Pacific landowner in the White

House?**

Forbes has three things going for him: He is a genuine outsider, with no

Washington ties.

Since he is spending his own money, a major loophole in US election laws allows him to outspend his opponents who must rely on contributions and matching grants from the government.

He advocates a popular (if potentially damaging) policy, the flat income tax.

The US income tax, because it tries to be fair, is a nightmare of complexities.

Richer people pay at higher rates than poor ones, generally, but many deductions make the picture more complex, and the task of filling out the income tax forms is time-consuming and a test of mental agili ty most people do not welcome. (The rich usually hire others to complete these forms for them.) According to Forbes’ critics, the flat tax would cut taxes sharply for the rich (including the candidate in question) and would, at the rates suggested by Forbes, lead to the same situation America had

during the Reagan years, when the White House backed lower taxes of the rich, and got them, along with a rapidly growing deficit. Some calculate that Forbes’ 17 per cent rate would increase the national deficit by S2OO billion a year.

But despite his populist stance on taxes, his ready money, and polling num bers that place him second to Dole in many states, and first in Arizona, Forbes may be shunned by the Republicans for several reasons.

First, he, alone among the major candi dates for president, has refused to release his own past income tax returns. This is a mainland ritual, so far unknown in the island, in which major candidates release photocopies of the past income taxes - to show they have nothing to hide, financial iy- Forbes has also been hurt by his wood en personality. Further, his total lack of public sector experience turns off many leaders of local Republican organisations who have spent years working up to be a mayor, a sheriff or a state legislator.

Had young Forbes followed in his daddy’s footsteps in local government, he would not have this final disadvantage.

I knew his father - we both ran for the

New Jersey state legislature, in adjoining

counties, in 1951. But the older Forbes, after beating the local political machine, made it into the State senate as a Republican while my Democratic race for

the Assembly ended differently.

The state senator had earlier been elect ed to the village council in the New Jersey suburbs after knocking on virtually every door in the community. After arriving in the state senate he made two vigorous, but unsuccessful, races for the New Jersey

governorship.

In later years, Malcolm Forbes would become known as the nation’s most dash ing millionaire, with his motorcycles, his

hot air balloons, a fabulous, celebrity studded, multi-day party in Morocco, and his dates with actress Elizabeth Taylor. After his death an alleged homo sexual lover materialised.

Laucala’s indigenous population was

pretty much wiped out during tribal wars

in pre-British Fiji. Nearly empty and

beautiful, it had been owned for years by Morris Hedstrom, the Australian firm.

Senator Forbes bought it in 1972 for $ 1,000,000 and then proceeded to spend five times that much on creating a resort for his family, and his vision of a model community for its Fijian residents, who worked at the resort and who produced copra.

Towards the end of his life, the sena tor started sharing the island with a few paying guests. They were picked up by a Forbes private plane at Nadi, and then housed in their own private cottages, with a chef coming around each evening to fix dinner.

But will it help the region to have this South Pacific landowner in the White House? I doubt it.

On the positive side, it would assure the region that the president had some sense of the geography of the South Pacific, famously missing in many American politicians.

But the negatives with Forbes are overwhelming. He apparently has not been to Fiji since his father’s death.

His lower-the-taxes-for-the-rich stand suggests he is less interested in an active government than most candidates, and it is only activist governments that reach out to distant parts of the globe, like the insular Pacific.

More narrowly, his close relations with US corporate interests would sug gest no change in the current sugar importation policy, favoured by those interests, which virtually bars both Fiji and PNG from shipping sugar to the US.

As further indication of his lack of interest in the region, we tried to get his campaign press office to respond to the Post’s use of the term “brilliant canni bal” in the previously mentioned column

Nothing happened.

Maybe the Forbes campaign, anyway, still thinks in terms of the cannibal islands. ■