Working journalists may have taken some private comfort from last week's announcement that Malcom S. "Steve" Forbes would seek the Republican presidential nomination. After all, if Mr. Forbes - a onetime reporter - could do it, then maybe any journalist could aspire to the nation's highest office.
O.K., so Mr. Forbes inherited a fortune - enough to finance a presidential campaign - as well as the top job at a major financial publication that bears the family name. That makes him something more than your average beat reporter. But no matter. Just as John F. Kennedy made it safe for Catholics to run for President, Mr. Forbes could make the notion of the reporter-President respectable.
On the other hand, there's something vaguely disquieting about the Forbes candidacy. There's lots of talented people in the news business, men and women of unquestioned integrity who can be trusted with tough, complicated stories.
But that's a far cry from saying they could be trusted with the awesome power of the presidency. The difference between the world of ideas, of story selection and the search for truth, is different by an order of magnitude from the great game of world diplomacy and nuclear strategy.
Which is why many people in this town are saying that there's very little in Steve Forbes' training to qualify him for the most powerful job on the planet. Running a magazine just isn't on a par with running a $4 trillion economy.
Yet in a nation that has decided it likes outsiders, who can say Mr. Forbes is unelectable?
And the fact is, the millionaire publisher's candidacy is of interest to the banking and financial services industry for a number of reasons. For one, he has made interest rates a major issue in his campaign.
Mr. Forbes thinks rates are too high. And he's not talking about the question of whether the Fed should trim rates by a few basis points or even a percentage point or two at this particular point in the economic cycle.
Instead, he's talking about something bigger - a return to the days of the 1950s and early 1960s when mortgage rates were 4% and 5%.
"Imagine what it would be like if you woke up tomorrow morning with a 17% flat tax that exempted the first $36,000 of income and a fixed, long- term mortgage of 4.5%," he said in the speech announcing his candidacy.
Mr. Forbes blames politicians for manipulating interest rates and in the process, turning American family life from "'Ozzie and Harriet' to 'Nightmare on Elm Street.'" Families have become slaves to high mortgage rates, he said. They are racing on an economic treadmill "and the treadmill is winning."
His solution is to tie the dollar to a fixed standard, such as the value of gold. That's not exactly a mainstream economic idea.
"The gold standard worked, until governments decided there was too much pain," said Robert Dederick, economic consultant to the Northern Trust Co. Chicago.
In other words, Mr. Dederick said, the gold standard put steel in the spines of policymakers - but only up to a point. They were always free to abandon gold once it got in the way of growth.
However, while bank economists may not be enthralled with Mr. Forbes' ideas, bankers - at least a small group surveyed at a meeting of community institutions in San Antonio - appear surprisingly receptive to his candidacy.
That's not because they've evaluated his platform in detail. Instead, some are looking to him as the kind of Washington outsider that many Americans seem to be yearning for - and a pro-business candidate to boot.
"He's his own man," said an approving Jim Lindsey, president of First State Bank, Mesquite, Tex.
"I like his basic philosophy," added A.O. Smith, a director of Pilot Point (Tex.) National Bank. "He's pro-business and he's not focused on the Republican party or the liberal or conservative establishment."
Mr. Forbes may not have what it takes to nail down the presidency. But he's willing to talk about ideas that matter to bankers, and that can only be a plus for the industry.
