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National Review, Sept 27, 1999

Campaign 2000

The Spoiler

It is not surprising that Patrick J. Buchanan should be considering a departure from the Republican party to seek the Reform party's presidential nomination. It is a greener pasture for him. Buchanan's peak performance in the GOP came in 1992, when he won 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The votes have been getting scarcer ever since. The more Buchanan emphasizes the anti-capitalist aspects of his campaign--the protectionism, the corporation-bashing--the less Republicans like it.

Buchanan took from his mentor Richard Nixon the lesson that a socially conservative, statist politics can woo working-class Democrats and independent voters. Why any conservative should want to recreate the Nixon coalition is not obvious: Nixon governed from the left over the protests of a captive Right. But it is in any case impossible to form that coalition in an America where stockowners now outnumber trade-unionists by 4 to 1. The Democrats and independents Buchanan thinks he can attract have never materialized in sufficient numbers to make up for the Republicans he alienates.

If Buchanan's coalition could be built, however, its first act would be to eject Pat Buchanan. It would be more interested, after all, in raging against foreigners' stealing American jobs than in applying Christian moral precepts; more interested in excuses than accountability; more populist than conservative. The dispossessed voters who flock to the Reform party are more secular than average. If Buchanan talks about abortion, they will tune him out.

If he does not, he will lose his base. It has been his moral views and his steadfastness that have lent him political strength. He has said in the past that he would leave the Republican party if it "became a Clinton pro- choice party." But since the Reform party is pro-choice--and since his running in a general election would help a pro-abortion Democratic party retain the White House and expand its control of the judiciary--Buchanan would be tarnishing his reputation by joining it.

If Buchanan was willing to stick with Nixon through wage and price controls and Harry Blackmun's appointment to the Supreme Court, what makes the current frontrunner, George W. Bush, so unacceptable? It does make a difference whether Republicans or Democrats control the White House; almost any Republican would improve policy on taxes, judicial appointments, defense, and a hundred other things. If he leaves the Republican party, Buchanan will be inviting conservatives, and especially Christian conservatives, to commit political suicide. We doubt that many of them will.

Waco

A Nasty Mess

The FBI has admitted that it fired incendiary tear-gas shells into the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, after six years of denying that it did any such thing. It still maintains that the shells were fired well before the final fatal blaze, which the evidence suggests was set by the victims themselves. Janet Reno has ordered an investigation. Her previous investigation of Waco was a whitewash.