The Fight Is On for the Forbes Faction

Farewell, Steve Forbes, we hardly knew ye.... Or, at least, we hardly knew ye as a social conservative. The multimillionaire publisher was reported Wednesday to be quitting the race for the GOP presidential nomination after a disappointing third-place finish in the tiny Delaware primary, which he won in '96 campaigning as a flat-taxman. Governor George W. Bush handily won the primary with 51 percent — and jokingly proclaimed the event, like Senator John McCain's New Hampshire upset, worthy of the front page of the weekly news magazines (forgetting, perhaps, that he'd previously garnered his own share of covers by simply winning opinion polls). Perhaps more impressive, the mutinous McCain corralled 25 percent of the Delaware vote despite having made a tactical choice to skip campaigning in the state and focus his resources on South Carolina.

How important are the Delaware primary results? Depends on whom you ask. "As far as the Bush-McCain fight is concerned, Delaware was something of a wash," says TIME correspondent John Dickerson, who's with the McCain camp this week. "The big story Wednesday was that Forbes, who won Delaware in 1996, couldn't even pull ahead of McCain." TIME correspondent Steve Lopez, with the Bush campaign, sees the Delaware vote in a different light. "McCain will see this as another vote of encouragement," says Lopez. "And while the Bush spokespeople are playing down McCain's 25 percent and playing up Bush's win," they're trying desperately not to show any panic at McCain's insurgency.

No matter how McCain and Bush choose to paint Tuesday's numbers, the results spell disaster for Steve Forbes. And with Forbes out, Alan Keyes (who finished fourth with 4 percent in Delaware) remains the only also-ran in what's shaping up to be a take-no-prisoners showdown between Bush and McCain. The two campaigns spent Tuesday wooing South Carolina voters with TV ads in which each side depicted its opponent as a truth-twisting slick who broke a pledge to avoid negative campaigning. While Bush may be counting on collecting much of Forbes' conservative vote, it may not be that simple an equation: Although much of Forbes' support comes from social conservatives and those seeking lower taxes (both likely to back Bush), he also carried a contingent of people voting against the GOP establishment, a group likely to back McCain. As for Forbes' future, if his last repositioning is anything to go by, there'll be no surprise if he returns in 2004 — as a champion of campaign-finance reform.