FRANKLIN, La. - Campaigning in Cajun country four years ago, Pat Buchanan warned that free trade would cost American jobs. He was right.
Returning last week in his third try for the White House, the pundit-politician learned that thousands of workers were laid off when Fruit of the Loom closed a couple of nearby underwear mills.
"We need a trade policy and a foreign policy that looks out for America first," Mr. Buchanan told an enthusiastic but modest crowd from the steps of the St. Mary Parish courthouse, a spot where few other presidential contenders are likely to tread.
The 30 or so people who turned out in the warm drizzle liked what they heard.
"He's a renegade Republican. People like that," said Mayor Sam Jones, who is also the local Democratic Party chairman. "Somebody who'll stand up against popular opinion."
But with Texas Gov. George W. Bush the prohibitive leader in fund raising, even hard-core members of the Buchanan Brigades aren't terribly optimistic.
"I find him sincere, and I like the way he wants to take care of the United States," said Mary Ida Simoneaux, a hairdresser. "The people, the majority of the people, want change. I'm going to vote for him."
Shop owner Edna Straud, 70, a member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society, said she'll stick with Mr. Buchanan because he's the only candidate speaking out against the "new world order," the feared universal government that would impose foreign control on the U.S. military and economy.
"Everything he talks about is what we believe," she said.
But daughter Donna Lowry, 50, said she and her mother are realistic: "We didn't fall off the alfalfa truck. We know the poor man needs money."
Everywhere, Mr. Buchanan grapples with the expectation problem. Backers want reassurance that even though he's lost twice, they're not wasting their time and energy this time around.
A few hours up the road at a Best Western in Alexandria, one of the 70 people who turned out for an evening "town meeting" asked how many times he can run without damaging himself or the party.
"In 1996, we ran against 10 other Republicans. Only one of them beat me: Bob Dole. He's gone," Mr. Buchanan replied. "He's selling something for the Pfizer corporation now."
The crowd laughed, familiar with the ex-senator's new job discussing the impotence drug Viagra and erectile dysfunction.
With no hope of keeping pace with Mr. Bush and multimillionaire Steve Forbes financially, Mr. Buchanan is focused on grass-roots activists. He hopes to leverage strong showings in places such as Louisiana and his next stop, Alaska - states most candidates ignore - into momentum elsewhere. His third trip to Louisiana this year consisted of a three-day, 500-mile swing from suburban New Orleans to central Louisiana and back.
"Louisiana is the key to Iowa and New Hampshire, and those are key to the nation," he told the Alexandria crowd. "Let's have no coronations. If they'll give me their votes, I'll give the people the kind of fighting, populist conservative leadership they've wanted since Ronald Reagan."
He calls himself the "defending champion of the Louisiana caucuses," boasting everywhere he goes of his surprise victory over the state's presumed front-runner in 1996, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.
"We left old Phil in a bayou somewhere around here," he said, smiling.
Targeting top rivals
In speeches and with reporters, he mentions Mr. Bush and Mr. Forbes, sometimes Elizabeth Dole or John McCain, never Dan Quayle or any of the other Republicans: Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer or Lamar Alexander. It's deliberate.
He says the governor and Mr. Forbes, especially their deep pockets, are his main obstacles - though he repeats often the assertion that "I don't think that the Republican nomination is for sale or can be bought."
Mr. Buchanan talks about "young George," painting him as a befuddled foreign policy neophyte "cut from the same cloth" as President Clinton in his support for free trade, open borders and, ultimately, worldwide government.
"I don't think he knows the issues," Mr. Buchanan said, especially when compared with his father, former CIA director and President George Bush. "I used to see his father, and he'd be reading CIA cables and talking on the phone to world leaders. He loved this; he lived for all this public policy, and I don't think young George does. And I think he's vulnerable to really stepping on a land mine."
To the amusement of supporters, he recounts Bush gaffes: how the governor referred to Kosovarians and Grecians, for instance, and confused the prime minister of Slovenia with the foreign minister of Slovakia.
"Thank goodness they didn't ask him about Slovonia," Mr. Buchanan said, alluding to another rival's embarrassing effort to spell potato with an "e." "It's just one step away from stepping into the Quayle problem."
He speaks without notes in the high, insistent tones familiar to his viewers, hands clasped except when he's poking at invisible enemies, as when he decried the rush to enact more gun control in the aftermath of the Littleton, Colo., school massacre.
"You want to solve this problem," he said in Alexandria, finger jabbing the air, "you can begin by getting all the judges and the ACLU and all the federal bureaucrats out of the public schools and bring God and the Ten Commandments back in."
And then there's his wife, Shelley, the woman he hopes will replace Hillary Clinton. "Isn't she going to make a great senator from New York!" he said.
She added, "At least I lived in New York."
The Buchanans met through Richard Nixon. She went to work for him 40 years ago when he was vice president, several years before Mr. Buchanan signed on.
Mr. Buchanan often invokes Mr. Nixon and that other much-loved, much-reviled Republican hero, Barry Goldwater. In Louisiana, he throws in generous helpings of Huey Long, even visiting his statue at the state Capitol. It's not that he patterns himself after the populist Democrat, he explains, just that "I love colorful political characters."
Bruising big business
Yet he rails against many of the same enemies as Mr. Long: Big corporations. Foreigners.
"One of the things that exasperates me," he said outside in a shipyard in Avondale, just upriver from New Orleans, "and one of the reasons we're losing the Reagan Democrats is because we won't stand up for working men and women, with their legitimate demands against transnational corporations that take their jobs overseas and don't give a damn" - he hit the word hard - "about the United States of America or their workers, and I do."
At every stop, Mr. Buchanan denounced "Communist China" for quashing religion, sterilizing women who bear a second child and using trade surpluses to build missiles "made in the USA" pointed at Taiwan.
He said he looks forward to the day when, as president, he can look a Chinese premier in the eye and tell him, "You don't stop persecuting Christians, you don't stop targeting missiles at our country, you will have sold your last stuffed panda bear in any mall in the United States of America."
It's a big applause line, and just one of several points he uses to lump Mr. Bush with Democrats Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Abortion is another.
"Mr. Bush says he's not going to have any litmus test for Supreme Court justices," he said. "I'm going to have a test. Every single justice I name to the Supreme Court will be a pro-life constitutionalist and conservative."
Mr. Buchanan has raised about $2.4 million in the time it has taken Mr. Bush to collect $37 million. Over fried shrimp and catfish at Ralph & Kacoos, a Cajun restaurant in Baton Rouge, he joked to a lunch crowd of 30 that Mr. Bush raised $2 million at two meals recently in Washington, D.C., and "I just want you to know we're hoping to match that here."
Mr. Buchanan says he sees no point sending troops to Kosovo. More people are killed per capita in this nation's capital, he says, and now that Europe is prosperous, the United States' NATO allies should police their own back yard.
"The Soviet Union is dead. Russia is smaller than it was under Peter the Great," he said. "Europe is rich. . . . They can't beat up Serbia, a little country of 11 million? What about the Germans? My goodness, their tradition is not wholly pacific."
Staying optimistic
Mr. Buchanan sped across town with a police motorcycle escort for a 40-minute visit at the Governor's Mansion. Gov. Mike Foster had already endorsed Mr. Bush, but four years ago, he voted Buchanan.
"We're old friends. He's got a lot of good ideas," Mr. Foster said afterward on his shaded porch. He called it a tough choice between the two men, but added, "I sort of cast my lot with George W. early. I'm comfortable with that position."
Mr. Buchanan remains upbeat. As rivals downplay their chances in the Aug. 14 Iowa straw poll, an early test of popularity, he predicts a stronger than expected showing.
"The Grim Reaper is going to be waiting outside the fieldhouse in Ames, Iowa," he told several dozen $100 donors in a living room in New Orleans. "I think it's going to kill off several people."
Still, the money gap looms. "Any of you wants to give $50,000, you get the Lincoln Bedroom overnight," he joked.
Mr. Buchanan was talking China policy when Charles Decker, a 62-year-old pharmaceutical salesman, whispered, "We like honesty in Louisiana."
