Grading Buchanan

National Review, April 27, 1992

PAT BUCHANAN's presidential campaign has entered its endgame. He will contest some more primaries, and may do well in California. But, having failed to win a single primary or caucus, he has promised to direct his remaining fire at the Democrats like a good Republican. Everything from now on lengthens his mailing lists, nothing more.

Our post-mortem of the Buchanan campaign is inevitably bound up with our analysis of it while it was active. We urged conservatives to cast a tactical vote for Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire and in later primaries, through Michigan. But we also criticized a number of his positions and attitudes, and urged him to take corrective action. How do we grade him?

The answer is at best, mixed. Candidate Buchanan had fewer responsibilities than President Bush, and in some respects he handled them better. He campaigned with spirit and eloquence. But even as George Bush has squandered much of the political legacy of Reaganism, so Buchanan has failed to articulate an attractive and coherent conservatism for the post-Reagan era.

--"Is he or is he not an isolationist?" we asked in the December 16 NR. The answer is, Who knows? Candidate Buchanan was willing to commit the American military when constituencies loyal to him were involved, i.e., to save Croatia (a position we shared). But he maintained his opposition to the Gulf War, and he was willing to indulge in bumptious anti-Japanese rhetoric. In short, an isolationism none the better for being erratic and inchoate.

--"Is he or is he not a protectionist?" (NR, December 16). The answer here is clearer. Buchanan told Detroit it had to cut union featherbedding. Otherwise, his rhetoric on Japanese auto imports was indistinguishable from Dick Gephardt's. Buchanan also criticized fast-track negotiations with Mexico, making him indistinguishable from Jerry Brown and sharply distinguishable from Ronald Reagan.

--"NATIONAL REVIEW has consistently taken the view that Mr. Buchanan, though not himself anti-Semitic, has nonetheless said things that have given rise to suspicion among reasonable people that he is. We have therefore called on him to reflect on his past statements, to retract the relevant phrases, and to apologize to those he has offended" (NR, March 30). Silence. We also said (same editorial) that Buchanan "is entitled to evidence that a retraction and apology would be heeded sympathetically," and there has been precious little of that. But Buchanan is the man who wants to be President; the ball is in his court.

--Ronald Reagan "understood very well that conservatism is a broad church." But "Buchanan regards neoconservatives as domestic liberals and thus heretics" (NR, March 2). As a presidential hopeful four years from now, Buchanan must stake claims against potential rivals. That is different from freezing out advocates and idea men who in fact agree with him on many issues. Buchanan has made no gestures--of the kind that Reagan, supremely, and even Bush, occasionally, made--to that part of the right-wing world.

--Last comes spending, an issue which NATIONAL REVIEW did not pose to Buchanan pre-emptively, on the assumption that any challenger to Bush from the right could scarcely flunk it. Buchanan has not flunked it rhetorically, bashing Bush's big spending at every opportunity. But when it came time to list his own cuts, Buchanan picked a few symbolic small potatoes--foreign aid, the National Endowment for the Arts--while standing vocally by budget busters like unemployment insurance and Social Security. In this, as David Frum argued in The American Spectator, he was little different from Bush (or, for that matter, from Ronald Reagan). Maybe it is impossible for honest conservatives to run for office in a democratic age. But we note that Buchanan was no more courageous than his peers and less candid than those he labels "big-government conservatives" for the same offense.

Buchanan galvanized a 30 per cent protest vote, and he pulled Bush to the right. Moreover, he accomplished both in a season when other conservatives--Jack Kemp, William Bennett, Pete du Pont--chose to spike their guns. A more effective challenger, however, would have hammered on taxes, quotas, and liberalism's war against America's poor families, without getting bogged down in pre-Fifties side issues. He would have sought to unite a dispirited conservative movement, instead of trying to lead it in new and eccentric directions. In the course of doing so, he might have won more than a third of the vote somewhere. George Bush heads for November only slightly more seasoned than in New Hampshire. If he wins, it will be a victory by default--a victory of management, not of philosophy. There will be a large vacuum at the heart of Republicanism, and over the next four years it will be up to the conservative movement to fill it.