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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 8KB | 162 lines

                6»                                                        ╚NATION, Page 25

REPUBLICANS

The Thorn in Bush's Right Side


A conservative who speaks his mind, Pat Buchanan stands about
zero chance of winning, but he is certainly giving the White
House fits

By MARGARET CARLSON


    Politicians are candid at their peril; a gaffe occurs
when one of them inadvertently says what he actually thinks. By
that standard, presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan is a
veritable gaffemeister, insisting that Watergate was "a bunch
of Mickey Mouse misdemeanors," Congress is "Israeli-occupied
territory," and Ollie North is "a hero." Buchanan's pasty face
crinkles into a smile when he recalls penning phrases like
"pusillanimous pussyfooters."

    Buchanan, 53, has not trimmed his verbal sails since
beginning his effort to oust the traitorous George Bush, whose
cave-in on taxes was "the Yalta of the Republican Party." He
uses Bushspeak a la Saturday Night Live's Dana Carvey to
lambaste the President for breaking his tax pledge and begs Bush
to debate him "at the country club of his choice." His regular
stump speech extolling isolationism, protectionism and fiscal
stinginess is seasoned with attacks on "boodling" Congressmen,
upholstered think tanks cooking up cockeyed new programs, and
softheaded Trilateralists who would bail out Chinese communist
Deng Xiaoping, the "85-year-old chain-smoking communist dwarf"
but let Macy's go into Chapter 11.

    This may not be the stuff to win over the country, but it
could be enough to reclaim the Republican right. At first,
Buchanan says, he thought his America First ideas would inspire
"something more than a supper club but less than a third party."
By December, Bush's popularity was moving south, the economy was
worsening, and Bush wasn't doing anything about it. "There were
more sightings of Elvis in New Hampshire than ((of)) the
President," Buchanan said. Buchanan jumped in on Dec. 10, and
now, two months later, he is clocking in at 25% to 30% on most
polls, assuring that he will send a message, if not a bomb, to
the White House.

    Buchanan was already well known as former top aide to both
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and as co-host of Crossfire,
regular on The Capital Gang, occupier of what came to be known
as the "Yahoo chair" on The McLaughlin Group, and syndicated
columnist. His monthly newsletter, PJB, sent to 30,000 true
believers who pay $49 to $98 a year, made him a
multimillionaire.

    But now Buchanan has given up the protective cocoon of
celebrity life, a world in which he traveled by Mercedes (so
much for buying American) from his pillared mansion in McLean,
Va., to the CNN studio where, as one staffer says, "he never
actually had to come into contact with the bozos who think the
way he does." He has taken up traveling by minivan, begging for
donations, and bedding down at Holiday Inns. The speeches he
used to give at about $10,000 a pop are being delivered free in
overheated living rooms in New Hampshire.

    A little suffering fits the Buchanan Weltan schauung that
too much happiness in this life could reduce the chances of
salvation in the next -- and that has helped him pull off his
aggrieved underdog pose. From inside the Beltway, even before
there was one (he was born the third of nine children in a
comfortable Washington neighborhood), he has nonetheless
successfully positioned himself as a scrappy outsider.

    Buchanan's career is a living monument to his father, whom
he eulogized in 1988 as "quite simply the best man I ever
knew." The elder Buchanan passed along his devotion to Joe
McCarthy, Douglas MacArthur and Francisco Franco and his belief
that a sharp right to the jaw was an excellent way to make a
point. "Wild Bill" made his sons hit a punching bag 400 times
a week and cheered when Pat bloodied the nose of a first-grade
bully. He once held young Pat's hand to a lighted match to
demonstrate what eternal damnation would be like.

    Buchanan's mother, who now lives in a Washington suburb,
prefers to recall her son's intellectual side. "Pat was still
in the playpen when he recited the Hail Mary his father had been
trying to get the older boys to memorize. He was always first
in his class." After eighth grade, when the fancy sons of
lace-curtain Irish lawyers and lobbyists departed in tweeds and
cashmere for Georgetown Prep, Buchanan proudly went off in his
blue serge suit to Gonzaga, an inner-city school run by tough
Jesuits, where the basketball nets were made of chain, the decor
consisted of a crucifix on the wall, and grudges against those
who had it too easy were encouraged. A nonconformist who dared
come to school with a day's growth of beard would be collared
by Father Aloy sius McGonigol and dry-shaved until his face
bled.

    Buchanan missed his best opportunity to escape the
boundaries of religion and culture drawn by his father by opting
to go only one ZIP code away to Georgetown University. He was
suspended for a year after he punched two policemen who stopped
him for speeding. As he romanticizes the episode, "I was ahead
on points until they pulled out the nightsticks."

    After working in his father's office and at a summer job
delivering mail (he jokes that he fed people's Social Security
checks to their dogs), he graduated third in his class from
Georgetown, got a master's degree at Columbia's Graduate School
of Journalism and landed his first job at the now defunct St.
Louis Globe-Democrat, writing ripsnorting editorials that bashed
bleeding-heart liberals. In 1965 he went up to Nixon at a
reception and reminded the "old man" that he had caddied for him
at Burning Tree Country Club (where they relieved themselves in
the woods) and urged Nixon to run for President -- with his
help.

    In 1969 Buchanan went to work in the White House, where he
met Shelley Scarney. They married in 1971, and like many
couples without children, they are inseparable, to the point
that Buchanan barely ties his shoes without her. His scheduler,
secretary and chauffeur, she trails along behind him wheeling
a suitcase full of mail, setting up a mobile office wherever he
happens to be. When he stopped drinking a few years ago, so did
she. Loyalty -- to his father, the Latin Mass, Brylcreem and
the party of Robert Taft -- is all. He socializes mostly with
his family (his sister, former U.S. Treasurer Angela Buchanan,
is his campaign manager). He eats out every night (cooking is
one thing neither of the Buchanans does), and he calls a week
in Eastern Europe with a group of conservatives such as Richard
Viguerie a vacation. When he holidays at an unfashionable
Delaware beach, he spends an hour in the car every day rounding
up four national newspapers.

    It is hard for friends and colleagues to square the
private Buchanan with the public one: the Rottweiler who has
turned nostalgia for the days of Ike and Elvis into attacks on
anyone who is not white, male, Christian and straight. Even
supporters like National Review editor William J. Buckley Jr.
found it difficult to defend Buchanan after his comments about
Treblinka and the alleged dual loyalties of Jews during the gulf
war. Michael Kinsley, Buchanan's Crossfire co-host for two
years, points out that it is a pundit's business to spew out
provocative opinions like an open fire hydrant. But he insists,
as do most of Buchanan's colleagues, that the candidate is not
anti-Semitic: "I never heard him make a disparaging remark about
Jews, never noticed any difference in the way he treats Jews."

    When asked whether he's anti-Semitic, Buchanan says no,
that he tries to be "good" in the Judeo-Christian sense. He is
absolutely calm about the primary next week, at least in part
from knowing that on the issue that matters most, neither he nor
the voters will have the final word.