Cash of the titans

Republican candidates launch class warfare against each other

January 25, 1996

From Correspondent Brooks Jackson

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Republican presidential candidates until now have been loath to attack the rich. But as the race for the party primaries heats up, they are playing the class warfare card -- not against America, but against each other.

Rich Republicans are using their rivals' personal wealth and income to chip away at each other's leads.

Publishing heir Steve Forbes, who ranks second in the GOP presidential contest, started it by attacking front-runner Bob Dole with ads that said the Senate majority leader voted to increase taxpayer-funded congressional pensions.

Dole counter-attacked. "I don't want to get into criticizing Steve Forbes," he said at the Iowa debate. "He has a lot of money, and he'll have a lot less after this election's over."

When Dole released his tax returns, Forbes scoffed, saying, "Mr. Dole has done it. And it's shown that after 35 years in Washington, he's now a multimillionaire."

	Forbes	Dole	Buchanan	Alexander	Gramm
NET WORTH	$440 million	$2-6 million	$2-6 million	$3-5.5 million	$1.3 million
INCOME	$1-$2 million	$558,000	$900,000- $1 million	$1 million	$305,000

Well, when Forbes needles someone for being a multi- millionaire, it's like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black.

Forbes is one of the wealthiest men in the United States, with a net worth estimated at $440 million by Fortune magazine, and he reports an annual income of between $1 and $2 million a year.

The man who vaulted into second place in the GOP presidential race using the flat tax platform got his massive fortune the old-fashioned way: He inherited from his flamboyant father, the late Malcolm Forbes Sr.

Dole is a multimillionaire, too, though not in the same league as Forbes. Also, much of the Dole family money belongs to wife Elizabeth. Not counting the luxurious apartment in Washington, the family's net worth is reckoned to be somewhere between $2 million and $6 million. In his 1994 tax returns, the Kansas Republican reported an annual income of some $558,000.

Class warfare is not restricted to Dole and Forbes, though. Columnist Pat Buchanan took a shot at Forbes when he said at the Iowa debate that the flat tax was dreamed up by "boys at the yacht club."

But columnist Buchanan, who talks like a populist, reported an income between $900,000 and a little more than $1 million in 1994. His net worth: between $2 million and $6 million, not counting his home.

When former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander called Forbes' flat tax "nutty," Forbes attacked Alexander's salary. Alexander rakes in about $295,000 a year from his law firm which lobbies for special interests in Washington.

Thanks to some very shrewd investments, Alexander is worth between $3 million and $5.5 million, and his tax returns for 1994 show more than $1 million as income.

Among Republican presidential candidates, Phil Gramm is perhaps the poorest, but he's still a millionaire. Gramm's wife Wendy earned most of the family income of $305,000, and their net worth is somewhere less than $1.3 million, not counting their home.

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