Faced with another stiff round of campaign losses, Steve Forbes stopped forging ahead for a moment and looked back - at his own political legacy.

It was time for the nearly defeated to claim moral victory."Bob Dole would have just been happy to say nothing," Forbes said Tuesday in an interview here. "Now he's got to deal with real issues."

The Dole camp may view Forbes' legacy as a multimillion-dollar advertising offensive that nearly snuffed the front-runner's presidential hopes. But Forbes sees it differently: As far as he's concerned, he is the guy who has forced the Senate GOP leader to discuss the crucial issues of the day - jobs and wages and growth.

"It never would have happened," said Forbes. Dole "would have been a sitting duck in November if we hadn't challenged him."

As he campaigned in Milwaukee Tuesday, Forbes said he planned to return to Wisconsin before next week's primary. "I'm in to win the nomination. If I can't, then obviously I'll be getting out. ... I'm committed to staying in the race as long as we have a chance to win," he said during an interview.

But while Dole's other chief rival - Pat Buchanan - has mapped out a battle plan all the way to the GOP convention in San Diego, Forbes seems to be saying that his chief work is done.

"We have already changed the course of the debate," he proclaimed.

For Forbes, that seems to include a blow by the pro-growth forces of lower taxes against the "root canal" politics of balanced budgets. It's that latter strain of Republicanism that Forbes dismissed when he said: "That's where the Republicans (in Congress) lost the battle against Clinton. They sounded like they were wearing green eyeshades."

Americans will not have the political will to cut government programs to balance the budget, Forbes argued Tuesday, unless they're enjoying a far higher level of economic growth than they do now.

Forbes called the state of the economy "pathetic" and said Dole's economic message remained "kind of muddy."

"It's the reason we're still in the race."

In Chicago earlier Tuesday, Forbes had assailed Buchanan's campaign as "disruptive" and "dangerous" and at one point likened him to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan: a divisive force appealing to people's fears in hard times.

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He later backed off the comparison. Asked in the interview whether he thought Buchanan was a demagogue, Forbes said, "No. He correctly saw what's happening out there (with declining incomes)."

But Forbes decried Buchanan's "protectionist" solutions and said:

"I don't think that turning inward, trying to build walls, raise tariffs, trying to achieve some variation of cultural purity by turning people on one another is the way to go."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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