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                                                                                NATION, Page 21

REPUBLICANS

How Bush Will Battle Buchanan


Despite the New Hampshire results, the President faces less
of a threat from the conservative columnist than from the
problems he inflicts on himself

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Nancy Traver
with Buchanan


    On the morning after the New Hampshire primary, George
Bush's campaign advisers were trying hard not to act badly
shaken. Running against a field of fringe candidates led by
conservative columnist Pat Buchanan, the President had managed
to win only 53% of the vote. The confusion about what to do next
was obvious. Bush began by implying that he would not stoop to
personal attacks on Buchanan, then immediately dredged up a
nine-year-old article in which Buchanan called for making Social
Security "voluntary." A day later, Bush changed tactics again.
Campaign officials explained that Bush would not squander one
of his bigger campaign assets -- the dignity of his office --
by getting down and dirty with a man who once crafted verbal
spitballs for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

    Once their hearts stopped fibrillating, Bush's aides
remembered that the primary deck is stacked heavily in their
favor. "The real struggle," said a Bush official, "is not to
overreact." Nearly all the contests during the next 30 days
award delegates on a winner-take-all basis, virtually assuring
Bush of a sweep. In states where delegates are apportioned
according to the vote, Bush has his opponent hopelessly
outorganized. Unless Buchanan wins somewhere soon, last week's
burst will soon be a memory: G.O.P. rules require that a
candidate must win a majority of delegates in five states before
his or her name can be placed in nomination at the convention.

    Still, Buchanan poses several formidable problems for Bush
at a time when he had hoped to breeze to renomination. As in
New Hampshire, Buchanan could become a lightning rod for voters
eager to send the President an angry message about his inept
handling of the economy, and Buchanan might attract enough
right-wing votes to erode Bush's fragile conservative base.
Worse yet, Buchanan's attacks have turned the primary season
into a referendum on Bush's performance, highlighting weaknesses
that the Democrats can exploit in the fall. Says a campaign
official: "Buchanan is not the problem. We are."

    To be sure, Bush sometimes acted as if he were secretly
Buchanan's campaign manager. During the early months of the
recession, Bush refused to even acknowledge that the country was
suffering hard times. He made three hurried campaign swings in
hard-hit New Hampshire but never attempted to mask the political
expediency of his visits. Said he, with typical inelegance: "But
the message -- I care." His deliberate attempts to mix with
ordinary Americans seemed uncomfortable and awkward. Bush's poll
numbers dropped every time he visited the state. Meanwhile,
Buchanan exploited the President's decision to exclude a
proposed $500 increase in personal income tax exemptions from
the latest budget request he submitted to Congress. "Don't be
fooled again," intoned a hastily put together Buchanan ad. "It
is George Bush himself that's taxing and spending your future
away." In a fit of hairsplitting, Bush denied that he had ever
taken the New Hampshire pledge in 1988.

    The string of blunders probably accounted for Buchanan's
surge in the final days of the campaign. "The President," says
a top campaign official, "was paying the price for a very poor
economy and a perception of noninterest, noninvolvement and
nonunderstanding of the recession over a lengthy period of
time."

    For a few hours, when early exit polls showed Buchanan in
a dead heat with Bush, the President's advisers feared that he
might be defeated. Campaign manager Robert Teeter telephoned
Bush to warn him. Realizing that male voters were turning out in
disproportionate numbers for Buchanan, Bush officials issued an
emergency order to the campaign's massive phone banks: Call only
women voters.

    The next Bush-Buchanan showdown is set for March 3 in
Georgia, where House minority whip Newt Gingrich believes the
challenger may strip as much as 30% from the incumbent's vote.
Though it hardly seems possible, Buchanan has escalated his
rhetorical blasts to new heights of populist rage. Late last
week Buchanan was appealing to racial resentments by accusing
Bush of signing a civil rights bill that would sanctify reverse
discrimination against whites. "If you belong to the Exeter-Yale
G.O.P. club, that's not going to bother you greatly because, as
we know, it is not their children who get bused out of South
Boston into Roxbury," Buchanan complained. "It is the sons and
daughters of Middle America who pay the price of reverse
discrimination advanced by the Walker's Point G.O.P. to salve
their social consciences at other people's expense."

    Parrying Buchanan's bombast will require finesse. In New
Hampshire, Bush declined to attack Buchanan directly and never
mentioned him by name. The decision, according to a campaign
adviser, was based on the belief that "people voted for Buchanan
as a protest, so it wouldn't have mattered if we had gone
negative on him in New Hampshire. Even if they'd thought
Buchanan was a kook, they still would have voted for him." The
same danger lurks in the South, especially in such states as
Georgia, Mississippi and Texas, where Democrats are allowed to
vote in G.O.P. primaries. Moreover, the President cannot afford
to alienate conservatives whose support he will need in
November, particularly in the South, where former Ku Klux Klan
wizard David Duke may be able to slice off several percentage
points should he run in the general election.

    Thus the job of pummeling Buchanan will fall to Bush
surrogates, including Vice President Dan Quayle and former
Marine Corps Commandant General P.X. Kelley. They will
crisscross the South, appealing to the region's patriotism by
depicting Buchanan as a neo-isolationist who opposed the Persian
Gulf war.

    As he has long preferred, Bush will stick to the high
road, stressing his handling of the Persian Gulf war and other
foreign policy issues. In recent speeches, Bush has maintained
that he was too busy personally turning "the world around"
during his first term to devote himself to domestic problems.
In his second term, he promises to do better. As he put it last
week in Knoxville, "We stand today at what I think most people
would agree is a pivot point in history, at the end of one era
and the beginning of another."

    If only by sheer attrition, Bush will prevail over
Buchanan and win renomination. In the meantime, the question is
whether Bush's advisers can prevent the struggle from
diminishing the President's chances in the fall. If Bush faces
Bill Clinton in November, the President's aides think that their
boss's World War II heroism and image as a devoted family man
will compare favorably to the Arkansas Governor's record on at
least those two scores. But the Democratic nominee, whoever it
turns out to be, will be harder to beat if Buchanan keeps
knocking the President off balance. Teeter likes to say that
Americans "understand that George Bush is not about to let the
wheels come off." If voters come to feel that Bush's stability
is just another word for inertia, anything could happen this
fall.