Pat Buchanan is running hard for president again, rebellious
and incendiary as ever. But this time, he's a rebel without a party -- the
Republican Party.
The 61-year-old Buchanan, who was a senior aide to such Republican icons as
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and who, as a candidate for the GOP presidential
nomination in 1996 scared the daylights out of Bob Dole, walked away from the
party last October to join the Reform Party.
The reasons -- and the words -- were vintage Buchanan. The Republican Party and
its candidates, he said, were going soft, sacrificing long-held values, even
diminishing the Constitution. According to Buchanan, both the Republican and
Democratic parties had become "front groups for corporate power and special
interests."
Even worse, Buchanan said in an interview yesterday, Republicans are nearly
indistinguishable from Democrats.
"They are Xerox copies of each other," Buchanan said of Democrat Al Gore
and Republican George W. Bush, citing such issues as trade, immigration and
defense. "The Republicans have been Clintonized. It's like professional
wrestling. . . . They engage in a wild brawl and then afterward you go into a
bar and they're buying each other a beer."
Buchanan made the same point in a speech earlier this year. "Clinton hails
NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and globalization, and like trained seals, Republicans clap
in unison," he said. "Mr. Clinton favors open borders, a million new immigrants
a year and handing over high-tech jobs to low-wage workers from foreign lands.
Bush and (John) McCain cheer him on, and the congressional Republicans applaud."
While he walked away from the party that sustained him for so many years,
Buchanan did not abandon the views that make him such a political flash
point. Indeed, those views remain the anchor of his long-shot presidential
campaign.
He opposes racial preferences in any form, promises to "defend our borders" and
slash the number of immigrants entering this country. He wants to sharply reduce
foreign aid, void global trade agreements such as NAFTA and put an end to more
liberal commerce with China. He would severely limit U.S. military involvement
in places such as Kosovo. He would loosen America's ties to the United Nations.
Critics accuse Buchanan of being an isolationist, a charge he rejects. "I
think America ought to be involved in the world," he said in the interview. "All
I want to isolate America from is from wars that don't involve U.S. interests."
Buchanan vows to be tough on crime, underscoring that pledge with one of
his best applause lines. "When I raise my hand and take that oath of
office, I promise you, the first thing I do, I'll turn to Bill Clinton and
say, 'I'm president, sir, and I'm the chief law enforcement officer, and
you have a right to remain silent.'"
What he wants, in short, is to take a right-hand turn from the "cattle-fed
conservatives inside the Beltway" who control today's Republican Party...
Still, the support he inspires burns hot. It includes influential -- and
rich -- conservative insiders such as Roger Milliken, a billionaire textile
magnate from South Carolina who has stood with and financed Buchanan for years.
"He's not the handmaiden of any other interest except the nation's
interest," said Jock Nash, Milliken's representative in Washington. "We
love the guy. He's for America first, friends second and everything else
third. He's his own man. He doesn't give some stock answer written for him
by some technocrat. He's without guile."
Buchanan vehemently disputes suggestions that he traffics in
discrimination. He rejects charges that he is locking arms with
anti-Semites or far-right militia groups.
But in the tone that made him a nationally known television personality on
such shows as CNN's "Crossfire," Buchanan refuses to apologize for his
beliefs.
"Our campaign and our Buchanan brigades and our new Reform Party, they are
folks who want to fight," he said during a news conference last week. "They are
folks who are willing to stand up and go down to defeat. They are folks who
don't care what The Washington Post or the Washington press corps says about
them. They believe ideas and ideals matter."...
"Neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were sent
overseas to finance the boom market of the 1990s that the rest of us
enjoy," he said in his farewell speech to the Republican Party.
His glory days, however, appear to be behind him. This year, he is fighting a
bitter battle within the Reform Party to earn its nomination. He is also
fighting -- on the airwaves as well as in court -- a decision by the Commission
on Presidential Debates to lock him out of the fall contests.
"Two Beltway thugs have ganged up to be beat up the new boy on the block,"
Buchanan said during a July 20 news conference. "Why are they reflectively
hostile to the idea of third parties? Quite simply, they don't control us.
They don't have a golden hook in us. We speak our own minds; we speak our
beliefs."....
If he earns the nomination and, more important, gets into the debates,
Buchanan is confident the votes will come. "I think these issues will
resonate, I think we can make a persuasive case."
