The world he’s selling is stark and certain, a safe place for ordinary Americans worried about jobs and family. But Pat Buchanan’s appeal is built on fear, and his raw campaign is troubling the party he hopes to lead. ..MR0-
HEAR THIS, ESTABLISHMENT: PAT Buchanan is right where he wants to be. It’s the presidential suite of the best hotel in a city Sherman burned. Hours after winning New Hampshire, Buchanan had flown to South Carolina to begin campaigning for Saturday’s pivotal, first-in-the-South primary. Running on the adrenaline of victory, he’d worked an adoring crowd in a Columbia ballroom. “We’re going to take back America!” he’d shouted. “The “Dixie Express’ is ready to roll!”
Afterward, upstairs in his rooms, Buchanan savored the moment. Warm Piedmont sun streamed through the tall windows. The local papers trumpeted his Good News. Here he was in a city the Yankees sacked, where the state capitol proudly bears bullet holes from the War Between the States and the Stars and Bars fly from the flagpole. It’s the hub of the state in which the modern Republican Party was born: where Strom Thurmond led the Dixiecrats, a White House aide named Harry Dent invented Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Lee Atwater learned to play politics red, white and rough.
Though he’s a Washingtonian born and bred, Buchanan hopes to be crowned king of sun-belt Republicanism–to win by preaching to fears no one else has the courage to name, sounding fire bells for the loss of the America in which he was reared. His views can be extreme, his language incendiary. But America is listening, and not entirely in horror. For this street tough of politics locked in on the very things Americans dread most: the specter of corporate downsizing and the decline of the once traditional family.
And he won’t back down. Let foreigners call him the American Zhirinovsky. He won’t retreat from views his rivals label “extreme,” including a ban on all abortions, a five-year moratorium on immigration, an end to participation in U.N. peacekeeping missions. He won’t apologize for his over-the-line remarks. “It’s not me,” he told NEWSWEEK, as if that’s all that need be said. Nor does he care much about endorsements. “I want to win it by myself,” he said. “Then I’ll go and say: “I don’t owe anybody anything’.”
At the very moment Buchanan was saying this, the inner council of what used to be called “the Republican Revolution” was meeting in Washington. It was a session of the “Speaker’s Advisory Group.” On that morning, the acronym–SAG–was ironically appropriate, as was the place they met: a plush room in the Library of Congress, a beaux-arts monument to the Gilded Age. “Everybody tried to focus on plans for the legislative year,” one source told NEWSWEEK. “But you know what they all were thinking about: how to deal with Buchanan.”
It won’t be easy. A struggle is under-way for the soul of the Grand Old Party. The NEWSWEEK Poll shows Republicans evenly, agonizingly, divided: 38 percent think Buchanan has the “right answers to the country’s problems,” 39 percent do not, and 23 percent are unsure. Moderates, led by Colin Powell and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, denounced Pugnacious Pat. Conservatives were in a quan-dary. Aside from his trade protectionism, they tend to agree with Buchanan on issues. But they think his raw campaigning could cost them control of Congress.
The GOP establishment’s collective nightmare comes in three versions: Buchanan wins the nomination, loses but makes a spectacle of himself or leads his brigades out of the convention in San Diego. From the the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal to the smoke-filled radio studio of Rush Limbaugh, the concern is real. “People are panicked,” said William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Weekly Standard. “If they’re not,” he adds, “it’s only because they don’t know what’s going on.”
The shape of the GOP race is now clear: Pat versus Stop Pat. Calling Buchanan’s views “extreme,” Bob Dole is running as the only man with the experience, national organization and financial wherewithal to block him. Dole’s attack brought rebukes from conservative-movement leaders, including an erstwhile ally, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. A quietly desperate Dole pressed on. “I’m the candidate,” he said. “They’re not.”
It’s an article of faith among foes of Buchanan that there is a “ceiling” on his support. “As soon as this becomes a two-way race, it’s over,” insists Charlie Black, manager of Phil Gramm’s now defunct campaign. Maybe so, but it’s not yet a two-way race and the field is weak. Lamar Alexander finished a strong third in New Hampshire. As the only Southern “moderate” in the race, he hoped to do well in South Carolina and elsewhere. He staked his all on a million-dollar ad buy, leaving his entourage to ride in old city buses. Steve Forbes has the cash to stay the course. His campaign gained new vigor with a victory last Saturday in Delaware, another embarrassing loss for Dole. Forbes was competitive in this week’s Arizona contest.
The ceiling theory also ignores the power of Buchanan’s appeal. He offers certitude amid fin de siecle uncertainty. He offers specific enemies. The list is long: Mexican immigrants, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto, supply-side theorists, K Street lawyers and the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. He selects his targets to fit the state he’s campaigning in. In Arizona, where he was rising in the polls, he denounced Mexican illegals and championed a law to make English the official language. In the Bible-belt South, he stressed opposition to abortion, affirmative action and “corporate butchers” in the ranks of textile executives.
In South Carolina, Dole and Alexander hoped to derail Buchanan on the trade issue. Former governor Carroll Campbell, flying down to Columbia from his lobbying job in Washington to take control of the Dole campaign, charged last week that Buchanan’s views on trade would cost export-oriented South Carolina at least 80,000 jobs. But Buchanan’s “America First” theme runs far deeper than trade. It’s not trade protectionism–it’s cultural protectionism. The decline he laments is not just a matter of wages, but of a middle-class way of life: a breadwinning father, a stay-at-home mother, obedient kids taught to honor God and country.
He’s a shrewd campaigner who relishes the fight. “Richard Nixon would love this!” he exclaimed to his family on election night in New Hampshire. He apprenticed with Nixon, traveling with him as an aide-de-camp and speechwriter during the Old Man’s arduous return to power in the ’60s. Buchanan was at Spiro Agnew’s side during the tumultuous midterm elections of 1970, and with Nixon again in 1972.
From Nixon, Buchanan learned timing and tactics. He bet everything on defeating Gramm in a Louisiana caucus that the Texan had engineered as a setup. Instead, Buchanan won with the support of the Christian Right–and white supremacists whose sub rosa help he denounced, but only after the fact. His campaign is a tight-knit, fast-moving operation: his sister Bay Buchanan; his wife, Shelley, who began her career as a secretary to Nixon; media aide Greg Mueller; campaign manager Terry Jeffrey and Buchanan himself.
This is a candidate made for the bitter environment he helped create. Agnew’s ‘70 campaign against “amnesty, abortion and acid” was a model for all cultural jihads to follow–and Buchanan wrote his share of Agnew’s most vituperative speeches. As a cohost of CNN’s “Crossfire,” Buchanan learned the savvy TV skills he now uses with such a vengeance. His rivals sound dull by comparison. The Dole crowd argued that the crowded “March Madness” primary schedule favors them. But it also favors a hot, camera-ready candidate with the ability to dominate the “free media.”
So it all could come down to South Carolina. Alexander was finding good crowds there last week, and hopes to draw on suburbanites who think Buchanan’s message is too harsh. Dole, as usual, is relying on endorsements. They include Campbell, Thurmond and the current governor, David Beasley, whose roots are deep in the Christian Right. But Buchanan seems to have the support of many Bible-belt shock troops, and has the tacit backing of fundamentalists at Bob Jones University in Greenville.
Buchanan also has the faith of the Crusader who thinks he’s about to reach Jerusalem. Whatever happens, he says, he will remain true to his image of himself: a bare-knuckled, nearsighted kid nicknamed Patty Joe, trained in combat by the Jesuits and his own father, now grown into a fearsome foe of the powers that be. “The establishment’s up there in Washington, staying up late, burning up the fax machines,” he says with a grin. “I can reach out, pull the party together.” Pause. “But we win first.”
The Republican nomination could be decided in March. (If it isn’t, the GOP will face its first “open” convention since 1920.) The battle unfolds in 26 primaries in 25 days. In that breathtakingly short span, a decisive two thirds of the delegates will be chosen. A primer:
Soul of the Confederacy and birthplace of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which Buchanan helped invent. “New Hampshire of the South” a must-win for all the major contenders.
Region went for Clinton in ‘92. Alexander must hope it responds to his moderate message. Dole relies on D’Amato machine in New York, but Forbes is on ballot.
Biggest single day on the calendar. The Bush brothers–who despise Buchanan–are key in megastates: Gov. George W. in Texas, popular Jeb in Florida.
Grouped together for the first time, could put Dole over the top if he hasn’t collapsed elsewhere first. But Buchanan’s “America First” isolationism could play well.
The Big Enchilada is not natural Dole territory. Pete Wilson won re-election using cooler versions of the themes Buchanan now pursues on immigration, crime and culture.
March 2: South Carolina, Wyoming
March 3: Puerto Rico
March 5: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington
March 7: New York
March 9: Missouri
March 12: Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas
March 19: Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin
March 25: Utah
March 26: California, Nevada, Washington
