Waning Cry from the Right
Trying to tap voters' anger, Patrick Buchanan has turned off as many as he's turned on. That neatly sums up his world view: 'Them or us'
As his first term ended, the catcalls on the president's right grew louder. Even after two terms as vice president, true movement conservatives did not trust him. His economic and foreign policies were liberal apostasy. The New Hampshire primary approached, and that beacon of the right, the Manchester Union Leader, joined the criticism.
It was 1971, and Richard Nixon was under siege. His opening to Red China and his imposition of wage-and-price controls were sins to William F. Buckley and the Manhattan Twelve, the prominent conservatives behind the Republican primary challenge of Ohio Rep. John Ashbrook. To woo them back, Nixon sent a conservative speech writer, barely 33 years old, to plead with Buckley. When Buckley skeptically joined Nixon's 1972 mission to China, the speech writer went, too. As the two dined in Beijing, the young aide urged his intellectual hero to stay loyal. Buckley agreed, but it mattered little. Ashbrook won barely 10 percent of New Hampshire's vote, and soon his bid fizzled.
The GOP's soul. Twenty years later, another president gazes north and worries about his right. This time, Patrick J. Buchanan isn't a loyal speechwriter manning the barricades. He's storming them, hoping at least to triple Ashbrook's total and bloody George Bush. But that is not likely to happen. Buchanan must grapple not only with the president's well-tuned political machine but with the weakness of his own message and the blunderbuss way he conveys it. His motto is "America first." But with a sour economy, New Hampshire voters are being swayed by candidates with long lists of specific remedies, not by sound bites. Still, Buchanan calls his quest a "battle for the soul of the Republican Party." So it's logical that as the primary nears, the nation is beginning to ask what politicos have long wondered: What lurks in Pat Buchanan's soul? What explains why a man who cherishes the novels of Walker Percy can calculate his own words to hurt and provoke?
Much has been made of Buchanan's anger. Less is understood about how it is arrayed. The most important clues lie in his loyalties--some fixed, some flexible. He sees himself doing for the nation what his idol, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, did by ripping "the bandages off the underlying wound in America's body politic: them or us." For Buchanan there is always a "them." Not long ago he blustered that the Israeli "defense ministry" and its "amen corner" in America were the only supporters of waging war against Saddam Hussein. But personal loyalties can supersede ideology. Buchanan's remarks are widely considered antisemitic, but at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, he lived in the international students dorm and laughed and argued over dinner before knocking back a few at the West End bar with his Jewish friend, Jon Kapstein. During the 1980s, when he railed against Nicaragua, he still embraced Miguel D'Escoto, his former J-school classmate-turned-Sandinista minister, when they met at a New York reception. D'Escoto laughs: "He said, 'Oh, Miguel, you haven't changed!' " The lack of deep personal ties between Buchanan and Bush may help explain Buchanan's candidacy. Buchanan says principle compelled him to run when Bush backed "quotas" by signing last year's civil-rights bill. Yet Buchanan stuck by Nixon, despite Nixon's role in creating affirmative action. Fidelity, born of years at Nixon's side, kept him from bolting even during Watergate's dark days.
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