Pat Buchanan, populist Republican

National Review, August 14, 1995 by Robert D. Novak

WHEN Patrick Joseph Buchanan announced he would run another guerrilla-style presidential campaign lacking funds, organization, and much chance for ultimate success, I asked a mutual friend this question: Why would he, for the second time in three years, abandon his comfortable life as a newspaper columnist and television commentator?

"For the same reason that you go to basketball games," our friend replied. "He likes it."

Indeed, to the surprise of people who have known him for years, Buchanan found great enjoyment in his first experience as a candidate, when he challenged President Bush. Always thought of as a private person, he discovered he derived pleasure from shaking strangers's hands and hearing their stories. He is one of the few campaigners I have seen in four decades of trailing them on factory tours who takes real interest in what he is being told.

But there is more than self-gratification to why Buchanan runs. As a remarkable number of notable conservatives decided not to run for President, Buchanan began to think that, just possibly, he might be nominated after all.

He may be displacing Senator Phil Gramm -- whom he calls a "bogus" contender to lead conservatives -- as the principal threat on Senator Robert J. Dole's right. (Gramm, who holds a PhD in economics, has declined to debate Buchanan on the grounds that he does not duel with unarmed people -- meaning that a mere television interviewer cannot match a professor's knowledge of economics.)

Still, as a realist immersed in big-time politics for nearly three decades, Buchanan understands how remote his chances are. Rather, he seems to be involved in a task that transcends 1996 -- the transformation of the base of the Republican Party. But would that be an enlarged or a diminished base?

The trail-blazing Republican conservatives of the past thirty years, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, were, each in his own way, engaged in the business of enticing new voters into the Republican fold. But they were not consciously reaching out to a wholly new constituency with ideas that differed substantially from those of their rivals inside the party. It is a different conservatism that Buchanan is preaching: not merely much more conservative than that of most of his rivals but different in kind as well.

"I'm populist, I'm traditionalist, I'm conservative," Buchanan says. While it is hard to imagine either Goldwater or Reagan ever calling himself a populist, Buchanan pastes on that label first. Beyond labels, he differs from other Republicans in appealing -- as Democrats do -- to the losers in the game of life, and he states the difference in blunt terms: "There are too many losers in America who have been forgotten by our Republican Party."

"If I'm the President of the United States," he continues, "the Republican Party will be a Buchanan party entirely. The constituency of the Buchanan party would be poorer, less well-educated, and further down the social ladder."

I TRAVELED with Buchanan recently, campaigning in two states vital to his prospects -- South Carolina and New Hampshire. What I saw is a 1996-model Buchanan looking markedly different from the Buchanan of years past, and from other Republican hopefuls of 1996.

Until recently, Buchanan was no more a populist than Joe McCarthy, Douglas MacArthur, or Francisco Franco, the trio elevated by his beloved father, the late William B. Buchanan, as the household gods of his upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family in Washington, D.C.

Rather, he was a highly orthodox postwar conservative Republican, a Cold Warrior who left no doubt that the struggle against international Communism was his first priority. As a speechwriter in the ideologically divided Nixon White House, he was part of the band of conservatives who seldom prevailed and seldom surfaced publicly.

The nation's first chance to observe Buchanan's virtuosity as a communicator did not come until the Nixon Presidency had begun its death throes, in September 1973. Testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee in its fifth month of televised hearings, Buchanan became the first Nixon aide to take the measure of the investigators -- defending himself against flimsy evidence imputing "dirty tricks."

When Nixon fell, President Gerald Ford rejected the recommendation by Nixon's last chief of staff, Alexander Haig, that Buchanan be nominated as ambassador to South Africa. That refusal left the way clear for the launching of Buchanan's successful career as a political commentator, leading him back to the White House as communications director in Reagan's second term.

His role under Reagan was much as it had been under Nixon: a resident conservative, with the emphasis on fighting the Cold War.

When Buchanan turned up in 1987 at Lafayette Park, attacking congressional Democrats for defunding the Nicaraguan Contras, it was obvious his days as a White House aide were numbered. He was seriously considering a campaign for the Presidency.

Late in 1987, conservatives from around the country were crowded into Buchanan's home in McLean, Va., in a contentious meeting. Many present were ready that very day to begin a campaign for Buchanan as the lineal descendant of Goldwater and Reagan. But others heatedly responded that the mantle belonged to Jack Kemp, and pleaded with Buchanan not to stand in his way.