Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/032392/0323104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7KB | 142 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 28

Why Is Pat Still Running? He's Gearing Up for '96.


Party elders urge him to quit, but Buchanan soldiers on, with
his sights on rival rightists -- and the next election

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON


    Give Pat Buchanan this much: he has propelled himself out
of the Crossfire thunderdome and into the first tier of G.O.P.
hopefuls for 1996. He has jerked a nervous President hard to
starboard and roused the Bush-Quayle campaign from groggy
complacency. And he has single handedly destroyed the incipient
threat Bush faced from Louisiana's David Duke. Not bad for 13
weeks' work.

    Republican Party elders say it is nonetheless time for
Buchanan to do the right thing. They will bombard the TV
commentator with calls to get out of the race this week no
matter how he fares in the Michigan primary. But Buchanan is
likely to ignore pleas for party loyalty, vowing to stay in
until the California primary on June 2. From now on, however,
it will be a race with a difference: instead of running against
Bush, Buchanan will increasingly oppose rival conservatives who
he feels hijacked the movement years ago. "At this point," says
Burton Pines of the Heritage Foundation, "the target of Buchanan
really stops being Bush and becomes the pretenders for the
conservative mantle."

    Rifts on the right are nothing new. Before he became a
campaign-trail phenomenon, Buchanan was just a standard
1950s-style conservative who believed in isolationism,
protectionism and white people. The ideology he was steeped in
as a child -- some call it "paleoconservatism" -- was overtaken
during the 1960s and '70s by a more interventionist,
internationalist group contaminated by heresies like civil
rights and support for Israel. These variations annoyed
Buchanan, who for months before the race likened neocon
servatives to "fleas who conclude they are steering the dog."
When Buchanan began his quixotic presidential bid in December,
notes Tony Fabri zio, who was briefly the candidate's pollster,
"his goal was to cleanse the conservative movement of the people
who don't agree with him."

    With Buchanan's success at the polls, the paleo-neo fault
line widened into a canyon of controversy, as leading
conservatives rushed to choose sides. Neoconservatives and many
Reaganites lined up against Buchanan, dismissing his message as
negative and exclusionary. Bush haters and old-line
conservatives, particularly those disaffected by Washington's
self-important neo-con luminaries, admired Buchanan's courage
and supported him with money. Says Catholic University's Stuart
Rothenberg: "Buchanan has been confusing for conservatives. They
don't like what he says, but they're so anxious to see George
Bush punished that their reaction has been a mix of
embarrassment and admiration at the same time."

    Buchanan is joining the battle over the meaning of
conservatism in the 1990s. Will conservatives have an agenda for
minorities or merely the back of their hand? Will they support
free trade or protectionism? Will America come first, or not?
Said an influential conservative: "It's not that Pat has made
a lot of converts among conservative elites. But he has
heightened the need to give definition to a conservatism that
is neither Bush status-quoism nor the nativist regressive
approach of the 1950s." Not everybody wants to have that debate
in the middle of a closer than expected Bush re-election
campaign. The National Review, which earlier advised its New
Hampshire readers to lodge a protest vote on Buchanan's behalf,
calls in its current issue for Buchanan to get out after
Michigan to preserve his status as "one of several leaders of
a united conservative movement."

    Buchanan softened his anti-Bush line last week, promising
not to "rule or ruin" the party. But Republican National
Committee chairman Richard Bond may have unintentionally goaded
Buchanan to remain in the race when he likened him to David Duke
"in a jacket and tie." Buchanan responded by calling for Bond's
dismissal and added, "We've been driving the debate, so why quit
when we are winning the argument?"

    Buchanan's lingering presence in the race continues to
scramble the already complicated picture for 1996, when a battle
royal will take place over the Bush succession. Conservatives
such as William Bennett, Pete du Pont and Jack Kemp, urged by
supporters to run this year as a warm-up for 1996, are surely
kicking themselves for leaving the field open to Buchanan.
Worse, they must now contend with him as a 1996 front runner.
"Every day Buchanan stays in, Bennett, Kemp and Du Pont have to
work a little harder," says the Heritage Foundation's Pines.

    One unexpected beneficiary of all this may be Dan Quayle.
The Vice President has spent more time on the road, in bigger
media markets, than he would have if Buchanan had not mounted
a challenge. Buchanan's ascendance to the first tier will make
Quayle less of a lonely target in the pre-season maneuvering.
And by remaining magnanimous in the current debate, Quayle has
attempted, said an aide, to "remind the establishment G.O.P.
that there is a conservatism they can live with."

    Quayle now thinks that Buchanan will stay in the race
through the California primary, where a host of local races and
widespread dissatisfaction with moderate Governor Pete Wilson
promises a large conservative turnout. Buchanan has already
compiled what his rival admits is probably the best direct-mail
list of the decade; by remaining through California, Buchanan
could as much as double his 25,000-name list and create a
postconvention PAC capable of raising more than half a million
dollars a year -- enough to keep him on the road after November,
laying the groundwork for a '96 run.

    Buchanan is unlikely ever to become sole arbiter of a
movement as broad as American conservatism. His campaign
increasingly resembles that of Jesse Jackson, who launched his
1988 presidential bid as part of his persistent drive to become
the single spokesman for African Americans. That effort caught
fire and became a full-fledged campaign for a few months. But
after he peaked as a candidate, Jackson resumed his old crusade.
In the end, Buchanan's campaign may likewise revert from a run
at the presidency to his crusade to become Mr. Conservatism.