Jude Wanniski, who does not bother with the pretense of false modesty, calls himself "the most influential political economist of the last generation." He's right, too. This is a man who single-handedly transformed the discombobulated murmurings of a fringe sect into the central idea of modern economic conservatism. The idea was called supply-side economics, and it was, not very long ago, considered antithetical to every principle of conservative economic theory. Wanniski's pet idea gave Republicans, and conservatives, what they had been lacking for fifty years: a taxing policy that could compete in popularity with the Democrats' vote-getting spending policy. Supply-side theory may not make fiscal sense, but it certainly has worked politically: people naturally appreciate a theory that validates not paying taxes. For this, one would think that conservatives owe Wanniski a lifetime of thanks and honor.

And yet here is the strange thing. Intellectually triumphant, Wanniski finds himself now personally forsaken. His fellow conservatives want no part of him. They regard him as an embarrassment. When they speak of him at all, it is to question his sanity. The Weekly Standard, edited by Republican strategist Bill Kristol (who in a 1993 National Review article described Wanniski as one of "our leaders on economic thinking"), has in the last year published a profile and seven short items devoted to ridiculing the former leader. Having embraced the essence of Jude Wanniski's nutty economic theory, the Republican Party has now concluded that Wanniski is ... a nut.

"Now, what does `nut' mean?" asks Wanniski, emitting a low cackle. "Thomas Edison was a nut, Leibniz was a nut, Galileo was a nut, so forth and so on. Everybody who comes with a new idea to the conventional wisdom, comes with an idea that's so far outside the mainstream, that's considered nutty." There is a deeply satisfied note in Wanniski's voice as he says this. He takes the charge of nuttism as a sign of his worth, proof that he is, as he has so many times explained so patiently to so many people, absolutely right in all that he says. . . .

The deliciousness of all this is that Wanniski has always been a bit of-- whatever you want to call it--a nut, a crank, a crackpot, a flake. And it was precisely this quality that gave him his strength. There is no courage of conviction quite like that of the fruit loop. Many Republicans embrace supply- side theory for the cover it affords them in doling out tax breaks to upper- class constituents and financial backers. Wanniski never harbored an ounce of such cynicism. He has always been impelled by a nearly monomaniacal conviction that his ideas are absolutely right and absolutely moral.

When Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley hired him in 1972, Wanniski had already undertaken an informal series of tutoring lessons with a young right-wing economist in the Office of Management and Budget named Arthur Laffer. Laffer entranced Wanniski with his notion that a tax cut could cure the inflation of the mid-1970s and actually raise government revenues. Mainstream economic thinking across the spectrum rejected this possibility. Before supply-side economics, conservatives differentiated themselves from liberals mainly by their suspicion of deficits. During the Great Depression Herbert Hoover enacted a tax increase. Gerald Ford proposed one as late as 1974. The classic conservative position is known today as the sensible center. Laffer's theory defined a new position on the right, ultimately revolutionizing the terms of economic debate.

At the time, though, Laffer didn't grasp this. He had nothing more than a disparate set of unconventional observations, gleaned in part from another renegade academic named Robert Mundell. Wanniski recognized the implications of Laffer's idea. It meant the agonizing trade-offs that consumed economics-- restraint versus stimulus, inflation versus unemployment--simply did not exist. Poverty and malaise owed their existence not to any underlying economic weakness but to the simple ignorance of the nation's political and economic leaders. If they could be made to understand Laffer's revelation, prosperity beckoned. "At that moment," Wanniski later recalled, "I became a true zealot."

Wanniski converted Bartley first. The two, along with Laffer and Mundell, held regular dinner meetings to synthesize the new theory. Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol prodded Wanniski to set out his views in his quarterly journal, The Public Interest. Bartley and Wanniski pounded away on the Journal's pages. These forums allowed the true believers to reinforce each other without criticism or peer review from nettlesome skeptics. This intellectual insulation, a hallmark of crankism, fostered the overbearing certainty that characterizes the supply-siders.

Only such a cloistered environment could have yielded so confident a manifesto as Wanniski's subsequent The Way the World Works, whose funding Irving Kristol arranged. The book has a modest aim. It reinterprets human history as a function of tax rates.

Wanniski's editorial writing job metamorphosed into an evangelical mission. He spent his days stalking the halls of Congress, collaring anyone who would listen. During one legendary dinner he instructed Laffer to scribble on a cocktail napkin a curve purporting to demonstrate that lower taxes would reduce the budget deficit. Wanniski's tireless evangelism was infectious, particularly among those whose lives had been hitherto unencumbered by ideas. One day, Wanniski wandered into the office of Congressman Jack Kemp, an ex- quarterback with national ambitions but little--beyond past football glories-- to offer the bluecollar district that had narrowly elected him. The two spoke all afternoon and long into the night, and Wanniski had his first really important political disciple.

And Wanniski's zeal paid off in policy terms, too. He helped engineer the Kemp-Roth tax cut, a bill that narrowly failed in Congress but later won the backing of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign and was signed into law in 1981.

Even while churning out supportive editorials, Wanniski worked the Hill on Kemp's behalf. Congressmen complained to the Journal's news staff that Wanniski had threatened editorial censure if they voted no. The dual role infuriated the newsies. The Journal's then-executive editor Warren Phillips, warned Wanniski to desist his political activities. He didn't. At a commuter train station in New Jersey, Wanniski handed out pamphlets endorsing the candidacy of another of his proteges, Jeff Bell, for the United States Senate. One of the commuters, Phillips's deputy, Ray Shaw, saw him. That ended Wanniski's tenure at the Journal. The incident was quintessentially Wanniskiesque, demonstrating his naivete and commitment. Even after ascending to one of journalism's most powerful perches, writing a book and advising powerful congressmen, Wanniski was willing to risk his job to engage in the classic democratic act of pamphleteering.

The pattern has repeated itself throughout his career. The same gregarious, forthright certitude that propels Wanniski into the corridors of power betrays and banishes him later. After a brief stint advising Ronald Reagan in 1980, Wanniski could not help but elucidate to the press--in a straight interview, not anonymous leaking--the importance of keeping the candidate's mind free of the doubts whispered by non-supply-side advisers, and of course Wanniski's own role in this struggle. Reagan's furious staff quickly cast him out. By 1996, with Kemp not running for president, Wanniski had maneuvered himself nearly entirely out of influence. He had managed a short, weak interest in Bob Dole, but Dole was not a zealot's man; Wanniski deserted him for publicly questioning tax cutting in 1995. The brief candidacy of supply-side publishing heir Steve Forbes provided a last gasp of power in (more or less) mainstream politics, with Wanniski joyfully propagandizing on Forbes's behalf. Wanniski not only devised the Forbes candidacy; politically speaking, he devised Forbes himself. Every thought to which Forbes gave breath had been hatched in Wanniski's mind. But Wanniski's old penchant for the impolitic did him in fairly soon. After Wanniski responded to Christian Coalition attacks on Forbes with a broadside against Ralph Reed--political suicide in the Republican primaries--campaign manager Bill Dal Col repudiated Wanniski and shut him out of the headquarters.

Once Dole added Kemp to the ticket and endorsed a tax cut, Wanniski happily joined his old pupil's camp. But the campaign blamed Wanniski for continuing friction between the two candidates. Kemp refused to perform the customary vice presidential role of pit bull, lest it distract from his tax-cut proselytizing; why quibble over FBI files when you've discovered the key to eternal bliss? During the convention, Kemp resisted touting the tax cut's individual savings. He didn't want to reduce a noble idea to tawdry vote- buying. For the pragmatists, of course, vote-buying was the point.

The cynicism of Wanniski's Republican allies has always made his standing within the party fragile. Twenty years after publishing Wanniski, Irving Kristol confessed in The Public Interest that his support for supply-side economics had no bearing in conviction: "The task, as I saw it, was to create ... a Republican majority--so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government." Kristol's son, Bill, began tormenting Wanniski in the Standard only after founding a small outfit called Project for the Republican Future. Bill Kristol, like Wanniski, devoted himself to faxing advice to powerful Republicans. But, while Wanniski rambled on about monetary policy and the evils of taxing capital gains, Kristol's faxes focused on tactics to the complete exclusion of moral considerations. One memo famously urged the GOP to reject a health care bill "sight unseen" on the grounds that successful reform would help Democrats. Kristol, in short, would not be caught dead pamphleting train commuters in New Jersey.

Wanniski's systematic alienation from the party professionals during the last election has brought him perilously close to political oblivion. Virtually no politician besides Kemp takes him seriously any longer. If Kemp becomes president, Wanniski will be the most powerful man in America who is not president. But if, as seems fairly likely, Kemp does not become president, Wanniski will suffer the indignities heaped upon less fortunate cranks, those whose fevered missives to politicians and journalists procure impersonal letters penned by snickering interns.

Such a fate doesn't faze Wanniski; nothing can shake his cheerful conviction that he is absolutely right about absolutely everything, and that one day the world will see that. Interviewing Wanniski for this article, I asked him about his relationship with the right-wing conspiratorialist Lyndon LaRouche. Most people in politics would play down that sort of acquaintanceship. Wanniski happily detailed his efforts to settle his differences with LaRouche through a series of dinner meetings, monomaniac a monomaniac. "The Laffer Curve essentially is what differentiated us," he reports. In other words, the two failed to reach agreement on just one issue, a question on which LaRouche was actually less crazy than Wanniski.

Wanniski is so blessedly, nuttily, sure of himself that he can afford to forgive his critics with a blanket magnanimity that others in politics could only envy. Shortly before this article was written, a Wanniski memo to the editor came in over the fax machine. It seemed clear, the memo said, that the article's author had already "made up his mind before he called to develop a Farrakhan-LaRouche-Wanniski fruitcake story." Never mind, though, Wanniski wrote: "I want you to know in advance that I forgive you both for whatever polemics are produced at tnr."

And, in the end, the great joke is that Wanniski's not crazy to act this way. Wanniski is right about his place in history. After all, his theories continue to influence even those Republicans who think he's off his rocker. Wanniski's nemesis, the Standard, defended Dole's supply-side tax cut by relying on the theories Wanniski pioneered. The Republican Party today harbors no forthright opposition to supply-side tax cutting--just varying degrees of fervor. The only countervailing force on the right, budget balancing, itself derives from Wanniski: if the supply-siders hadn't done to the federal deficit in the late 1970s and early 1980s what they did, the budget hawks of the 1990s would have no reason to exist. The only two economic ideas that matter today both owe their existence to a man who his own party now acknowledges to be a nut. But it's too late. The nut's won.

(Copyright 1997, The New Republic)