The Week

Ted Turner is giving the United Nations $1 billion. Should buy a lot of black helicopters.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has already won one primary in the race for the next Republican presidential nomination: that of political professionals, who are eerily united in their view that he is the presumptive nominee, or at least The Man to Beat. But it is rank-and-file conservatives, not those professionals, who provide the party’s energy. They divided their support in 1996, but this time around Steve Forbes is working hard to unite and mobilize them. (Witness his enthusiastic reception at the Christian Coalition’s annual convention.) If Gov. Bush allows himself to be defined as the party establishment’s candidate, he will simply create the conditions in which Forbes or someone else-John Ashcroft? Dan Quayle?- can lead a conservative insurgency. The more inevitable Bush’s supporters think his victory is, the less it will be.

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Ted Turner is giving the United Nations $1 billion. Should buy a lot of black helicopters.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has already won one primary in the race for the next Republican presidential nomination: that of political professionals, who are eerily united in their view that he is the presumptive nominee, or at least The Man to Beat. But it is rank-and-file conservatives, not those professionals, who provide the party’s energy. They divided their support in 1996, but this time around Steve Forbes is working hard to unite and mobilize them. (Witness his enthusiastic reception at the Christian Coalition’s annual convention.) If Gov. Bush allows himself to be defined as the party establishment’s candidate, he will simply create the conditions in which Forbes or someone else-John Ashcroft? Dan Quayle?- can lead a conservative insurgency. The more inevitable Bush’s supporters think his victory is, the less it will be.