The boys on the bus - media coverage of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign

SHERMAN may have spared this city the worst during his terrible march through Georgia, but we members of the press covering the GOP primaries appear to be making up for anything the Yankees missed. Late this Sunday evening at the Holiday Inn, the simultaneous arrival of four dozen reporters, cameramen, and sound specialists reduced the lone check-in clerk to tears. The absence of a hotel bar led to a search party's being dispatched to ferret out potential watering holes. Hey," said one weary soul, giving voice to a rising apprehension, "I hope it's not one of those counties."

This is the team assigned to follow Pat Buchanan on his own march through the South, and most of these poor devils have spent the previous week riding through Georgia on an old Greyhound bus dubbed "Asphalt One." I joined midway through, and because there are always more people and equipment than seats there was a debate on whether one of the remaining slots should be taken by me or another passenger's cameras. The irrepressible Greg Mueller, Buchanan's press secretary, sided with me. But there was strong sentiment for the cameras, and I have to think that though I won the seat I lost something in the comparison.

But it was well worth the effort, if only to see how the Buchanan phenomenon is playing out on the ground. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater has characterized the challenger as appealing to "the instincts of hate and divisiveness," but if so Buchanan is doing a lousy job of it. There may well be the dark side everyone is talking about, but that is not what people are responding to. Everywhere he spoke the theme was the same: "George Bush has abandoned the heart and soul of the Republican Party, and we can turn this little rebellion into a middle-class revolution that will take this party back." Even a few days of watching Buchanan play this theme with his crowds is more than enough to understand that he connects with people in a way that Reagan used to do and that only Bill Bennett matches today.

In an odd way this is reflected in the press corps. At each stop they trundle off the plane, duly record the stinging attacks on the liberal Washington establishment (of which they are a prominent part), and reboard the plane with the usual banter and goodwill. Occasionally one or two might whisper astonishment at some quotations their home offices had dug up from a Nexis search of old columns-that he believes in God and the outdated concept of right and wrong, that he holds homosexuality unnatural, that he still thinks the Clean Air Act of 1990 was unnecessary-but by and large they get along. Partly this is because he always gives them good copy, but equally important is that they sense a genuineness and a sense of humor totally devoid of personal animosity. Of course, there's always the awkward moment when someone starts to lead the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing "God Bless America" and they have to decide whether to stand or sit.

This is not to say that there aren't certain distortions. Because of the charges leveled against Buchanan, unpleasant stories are magnified while more interesting ones are ignored. In Atlanta, about two dozen Jews protested a Buchanan rally with such signs as "Pat = Defender of Nazis" or "Pat = Duke Without the Sheets." Certainly this is news. But it seemed to me equally newsworthy the next day when black children in the audience at Florence Christian School in South Carolina, about 10 per cent of the crowd, were cheering him with the rest; fourth-grader Alex Dejon, who had been waving a Buchanan placard, told me he supported Buchanan because of what he said on abortion. I like that." Granted, this was not characteristic; outside the press entourage there were virtually no blacks at most of his stops. But the Atlanta protest, the only one of its kind, was equally unrepresentative. Is there any doubt that had those schoolchildren been white supremacists instead of black Christians they would have been on all the networks?

In other words, the story that everyone is missing has less to do with Pat Buchanan than the people Pat Buchanan reaches. Having tracked the news reports and columns, I half expected to find goose-stepping mobs and burning crosses. But the crowds coming out to see Pat Buchanan are not wearing white sheets or egging him on to stick it to Israel (indeed, every time the subject came up it was raised by fundamentalists who strongly support Israel and are concerned by his criticisms). If the exit polls are to be believed, only a fraction of those who voted for him were even motivated by his attacks on quotas.

Most typical were people whose favorite personality is Rush Limbaugh and who refer to Buchanan as "Pat." They are nice folks, like the man at the Ramada Renaissance victory party who said he didn't know much about politics but he knew something was wrong when he heard a 14-year-old girl on the radio complaining that she could get free condoms at her school, but she didn't have the freedom to pray at a football game. Or Dee Cox, who showed up at Brunswick Airport in a polka-dot dress with four cute kids and a lemon cake she gave to Pat. Asked what attracted her to Buchanan, she's clear and to the point. "Down here," she says, "we're real concerned about family, abortion, and keeping your word."

Exactly. Which is why the President's "apology" was so blockheaded. For most of these people, their beef with President Bush's 1990 budget deal was not a reduced paycheck (though Buchanan did visit a boat factory in Valdosta that saw some 250 people laid off because the luxury-boat tax reduced production of their biggest boat by 92 per cent). The real anger over the budget deal is moral. Under Ronald Reagan the cutting of tax rates was popular not only because it gave taxpayers a break but because it signaled that in the battle between Us out here and Them up there in Washington, the Republicans were fighting for Us. When Bush broke that pledge, and then committed his whole Administration to defending his apostasy up until primary day in Georgia, he established himself as a Them.

The White House crew still haven't got this into their heads, and they keep attacking Buchanan in a way that only confirms the suspicion that Bush is an unregenerate Them. I often wonder what would have been the response if, after Buchanan's stunning show in New Hampshire, George Bush had come out and said, "Well, Pat ran a gallant race, and you know we have these family squabbles every four years. That's what Republican primaries are about. But I'm counting on Pat Buchanan's full support when we go up against the Democrats." That would have been a classy way of saying "I won" while retaining a presidential loftiness and fatherly concern for the party. Instead, he issued a cold statement and reminded everyone that according to the rules of arithmetic anything over 50 per cent wins.

This same miscalculation marks the President's use of surrogates and TV ads. Now, "negative" ads are a part of political life, and the ad with former Marine Commandant P. X. Kelley saying he took Pat Buchanan's positions on the Gulf personally and the other ad quoting a 1983 Buchanan column saying that women were "less equipped psychologically" to last in the workplace were legitimate. But that doesn't mean they were wise. Certainly the latter ad contributed to the 75 to 25 vote for Bush among GOP women in the Georgia primary. But Bush is on the same end of the gender gap as every other Republican presidential candidate, which means that his extra margins in GOP primaries are provided by people who won't necessarily vote for him in November. Ditto with the charges of "hate" and "racism" over Buchanan's attacks on quotas. The press will have a field day crying "hypocrisy" come autumn, when Bush will be essentially forced into running the same campaign against the Democratic nominee that Buchanan is now running against him.

The worst of it is that the personal attacks on Buchanan threaten Bush's ability to court the voters he will need in the general election. Before the Southern primaries, Buchanan appeared on Brinkley and all but said he would pull out if his figures started dropping and the perception was that all he was doing was helping the Democrats. Instead of taking this as an olive branch, Sam Skinner the next day went down to the Washington Times to accuse Buchanan of antiSemitism, and more personal attacks followed. Relaxing between stops at a hotel room in Charleston, Buchanan expresses disbelief at the reaction.

"When they call you an anti-Semite, when someone else starts taking about 'fascism,' and another calls you KnowNothing, you don't exactly get up in the morning and say to yourself, Now how can I help George in the fall?'"

In the long run, this kind of campaign may destroy Buchanan, aided, to be sure, by the challenger's unwillingness to help his would-be defenders by at least saying that he never meant to imply many of the things attributed to him. In human terms this would be a tragedy, because virtually all who know Patrick J. Buchanan first-hand, even those from the opposite side of the ideological divide, know him to be a decent man.

If there's a political price to pay for this, however, it will be borne not by Pat Buchanan but by George Bush. The President has no serious challenge to his renomination; this, after all, is the party that nominated Gerald Ford in 1976. But a Republican base alone won't carry the day in November, and of all the crossover Democrats, angry independents, and disaffected conservatives who are casting their votes for Buchanan in these primaries, somewhere between a third and half are saying they will not vote for Bush in November. Even Buchanan concedes that absent some strong changes from the Administration, he could not guarantee to deliver these people to Bush even if he wanted to. In the Macon Airport I ask a Buchanan supporter in his late fifties if he could really vote for a Bill Clinton, or if Sam Skinner wasn't right when he told the Heritage Foundation that people like him had no place else to go. "He might be right," the man conceded. "But we might do what most folks do when they have no place to go. We might just stay home."

Mr. McGurn is NR's Washington Bureau Chief.

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