Pat the Bunny

And yet, does anyone seriously believe he would be jumping to Reform if it didn’t have that $ 13 million? After all, there is another third party Pat could have signed up with, Howie Phillips’s Constitution party. Unlike Reform, it is pro-life and agrees with Buchanan on pretty much everything else. With the attention and support Buchanan would bring, the Constitution party could have made it onto all 50 state ballots. But Pat wouldn’t have had the money or the credibility (if one can call it that) of Reform, which did after all attract a substantial number of voters in the last two presidential elections. So Pat’s signing up with Ross instead of his old friend Howie.

According to Buchanan, he has no choice but to jump ship: In the Republican race the “fix” is in, the process is “almost closed and rigged.” Really? The GOP has debates, and primaries, and rules. Pat’s jumping to a party where the fix really is in, and the rules truly are rigged. Or at least so he hopes.

Buchanan’s real problem is that in the Republican party, he has increasingly found himself a demagogue without a demos. In his first primary in New Hampshire in 1992, he reached 37 percent of the vote. It’s been downhill from there. He never did as well again in 1992, and after his victory in New Hampshire in 1996, his campaign fell apart. This year, he won 7 percent in the Iowa straw poll, down from 18 percent four years ago, and he is running at about 3 percent in national surveys of GOP voters. Apparently, the more Republicans see of Pat, the less inclined they are to support him.

This is not to say Buchanan has been without influence in the GOP. For example, he and his supporters helped block attempts to water down the language of the pro-life plank in the Republican platform in 1996. Next year, too, the question of how firmly and uncompromisingly the GOP is to be pro-life will be on the table. One might think Buchanan would want to play a role in that struggle. After all, in 1996, Pat assured his supporters that he was “not going to walk away from the unborn. It is a commitment I made to my people in the campaign. I told them I would go out there, and would do my best to keep our party pro-life.” But now Pat is walking away from the fight to keep one of the two major political parties in America seriously pro-life. And he is walking toward a party whose platform takes no position on the issue of abortion.

The Reform party is sympathetic to the motley collection of foreign policy and trade doctrines summed up by Pat as “America First.” He is undoubtedly sincere about these views. But part of Pat’s attraction to America First is that it puts Pat first. Consider the dedication of his new book: “To the loyal men and women of the Buchanan Brigades of ’92 and ’96, I will never forget you.” Isn’t it a little unusual to dedicate a book to your (eponymous) followers? And what about the melodramatic “I will never forget you,” rather than an expression of thanks or gratitude?

How are Republican leaders reacting to the departure from their ranks of a not particularly powerful demagogue whose views range from the foolish to the dangerous? For the most part, stupidly and cravenly. They’re pleading with him to stay in a party he has come to despise, and which, by all rights, ought to disdain him. Thus John Kasich: “I don’t want to see him leave the party. I think we need a guy like him. He and I are very similar with kind of populist, blue-collar messages, and we don’t want him to leave the party. I have to tell you that I never heard George Bush even talk negatively about Pat Buchanan. Pat’s a hard guy not to like. He’s got a good personality, a lot of ideas, a lot of enthusiasm.” And so on.

Dan Quayle said last week that the Republican establishment should regard Buchanan’s defection as a “wake-up call” from frustrated conservatives. There are, in fact, legitimate grounds for conservative frustration with the GOP. But the last thing one ought to do is to identify real conservative concerns with Buchanan’s self-serving defection. Indeed, Buchanan’s departure from the GOP offers Republicans an opportunity to set forth a strong conservative agenda and to distinguish it from Buchananism. This would be healthy for conservatism both substantively and politically.

There have been several third-party candidates in recent decades, but to find a useful analogy to Buchanan one needs to go back a half century to Henry Wallace. Wallace, vice president only four years before, was in 1948 a more substantial and prominent figure than Buchanan today. His defection seemed to threaten Truman far more seriously than Buchanan’s does Bush. Yet Wallace, who started out like Buchanan amid widespread expectations that he would win a serious and disruptive share of the vote, ended up with 2 percent. The Democrats held the presidency and won back Congress. Why? They helped themselves by defining themselves against Wallace.

Harry Truman, in particular, didn’t plead for Wallace to stay. He didn’t say Wallace was a nice guy or praise his past contributions to the party. He did insist on his party’s support for those legitimate causes that Wallace and his fellow travelers tried to hijack, especially civil rights. But above all, Truman denounced Wallace. In March 1948, at a time when he trailed Dewey in the polls and was even at some risk of being denied renomination by his own party, Truman said: “I do not want and I will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists. If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat. These are days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too much for me to pay. I am not buying.” Are Republicans capable of being as courageous and astute as Harry Truman was half a century ago? Or will they continue to cower before Pat the Bunny?

William Kristol