Campaign Notebook

Thursday’s developments on the presidential campaign trail:

Advisers under scrutiny

The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, which linked Pat Buchanan adviser Larry Pratt with white supremacists and right-wing militias Thursday, also criticized advisers to the other leading presidential candidates. Among the findings:

Lamar Alexander, who has taken on the mantle of “outsider,” is the protege of Washington “insider” Howard Baker, the former U.S. Senate majority leader and fellow Tennessee Republican. Baker brought Alexander into his law firm and pays him $295,000 a year as a consultant, even through Alexander campaigns for president virtually fulltime.

Nearly 20 advisers or aides to Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, the front-running Republican candidate, have been through the “revolving door,” meaning that they went from government service to lobbying, sometimes representing foreign governments.

Moreover, the report questions the Dole campaign for taking on Mark Goodin as a senior adviser. Goodin was forced to resign from the Republican National Committee in 1989 after he circulated a memo suggesting that then House Speaker Thomas Foley, a Democrat, was a homosexual.

Steven Forbes, the Republican magazine magnate, gets informal advice from Tom Ellis, a North Carolinian who has been associated with theories of racial genetic superiority.

Bill Clinton, even when he ran as an outsider four years ago, has always surrounded himself with advisers with ties to major business and industry interests. Lawyers and lobbyists are the single biggest group contributing money to Clinton’s presidential re-election campaign, and many of Washington’s most powerful lobbyists boast close ties to the White House, the report says.

The candidates

Alexander scoffed at suggestions his private financial dealings paralleled Hillary Rodham Clinton’s much-criticized commodities windfall. “I plead guilty to being a capitalist,” Alexander said. The former Tennessee governor said the 1981 deal in which he turned stock in The Knoxville Journal he obtained at no cost into nearly $620,000 probably would have been available to him even if he hadn’t been the state’s chief executive.

Forbes is president and a board member of a foundation that gave $15,200 to a group that provides abortion services, a charity publication says. The Chronicle of Philanthropy says the Forbes Foundation gave the money to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates from 1990 to 1994. Forbes, who opposes abortion, told the journal the foundation “includes many members of the Forbes family who have different interests.”

Dick Lugar repeated his position that abortion should be legal only in cases of rape or incest or when a mother’s life is in danger.

Was it a TV comedy?

New Hampshire voters who sat down with a moderator to watch Thursday’s televised GOP presidential debate laughed at the one-liners, took careful notes and in some cases came away still undecided on which candidate to support.

“It got into so much mudslinging, it was funny and ridiculous,” said one.

A moderator told participants to avoid judging winners and losers and to focus on whether issues of interest to them were discussed. But the discussion often focused on judging one-liners and funny moments instead.

One voter suppressed a laugh when commentator Buchanan spoke about putting a wall up along the Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration. Most of the panel laughed when Dole noted that Buchanan’s discussion on illegal immigration had come in response to a question about Social Security.

As the debate wore on, the laughter got louder.