UNTIL NOW, LAMAR ALEXANDER has been the Canada of politics. He’s got some radical ideas — like ending the welfare state or adding another branch to the Pentagon — but everything he touches turns boring. Pat Buchanan calls on his followers to “Lock and load!” For Alexander, it would be “Chip and putt!” Buchanan screams, “Ride to the sound of the guns!” For Alexander, it would be “Drive to the sound of Zamfir on the pan flute!”
Still, even Canada gets its great moment every century or so, and the next two weeks are Alexander’s time in the sun. He has about 14 days to prove that he is the real alternative to Pat Buchanan. He has to beat Bob Dole in Arizona or South Carolina, the two states in which he has enough money to be competitive. By the ides of March, Alexander will either be closing up shop or riding a tidal wave to the nomination.
On the night of the New Hampshire primary Alexander met with William J. Bennett, guru Mike Murphy, and the rest of his campaign brass and concluded that the way to win mainstream Republican support was to beat up on Pat Buchanan more effectively than Bob Dole. Alexander came out swinging at a press conference the morning after, with a much tougher tone than he had used the night before. He went on to a successful rally in South Carolina, which drew four times as many people as expected and generated a good deal of spontaneous check writing.
The Buchanan surge solves one of the central contradictions of the Alexander campaign. Alexander has posed as an outsider, wearing those phony flannel shirts and overdoing the tinny populist rhetoric. But fighting Buchanan, he can now run as a mainstream Republican. That’s a role that suits him. He’s wearing dark ties. The gimmickry has been toned down. He’s beginning to appear presidential.
Trashing Buchananism also keeps Alexander focused on policy substance, not political strategy. Even more than the other candidates, Alexander has too often sounded like a consultant more than a candidate. His “ABC — Alexander Beats Clinton” theme not only fails to sway voters; it distracts from his alleged vision for America. And his call for Dole to get out of the race on primary night in New Hampshire was presumptuous and embarrassing.
Alexander is basing his post-New Hampshire strategy on the emergence of the New South, or what he calls the “progressive South.” He believes there is now a majority of southern Republican voters who, far from being the Bubbas of old, welcome international investment — suburban cosmopolitans rather than isolationist peasants. If the Buchanan mob carries pitch-forks and assault weapons, then Alexander is counting on a counterforce in minivans. Alexander is hitting Buchanan on protectionism foremost; as the former governor of a state he made a magnet for overseas investment, he believes he can hit from strength.
But he is not trying to scare the bejeebers out of voters. He doesn’t label Buchanan extremist or intolerant, as Dole does. That’s because Alexander likes Buchanan. Their friendship goes back 25 years, to when they were both working in the Nixon White House. His problem is that he still can sound like a Gerber Republican, so mainstream that he comes off predigested and bland. Alexander’s mantra over the past few days has been in support of free trade and less regulation, not exactly the “fresh ideas” he brags about. Moreover, he doesn’t directly address the problem that Buchanan has put at the center of the agenda — wage stagnation. People in the Alexander campaign argue that most voters aren’t actually frustrated by their stagnant pay packet. Rather, they are worried about losing their jobs. The way to address those anxieties, Alexander believes, is to offer a voucher-based job-training scheme so that someone who lost a job as, say, a computer programmer could get work as something else. If you didn’t just fall asleep over the words “voucher-based job-training scheme,” you are exactly the sort of person Alexander wants on his fund-raising list.
Googoo Republicanism of this sort is Alexander’s weakness. It appeals primarily to the kind of Republican businessman who wants to bring effcient management techniques to the schools or put a computer in every classroom (an Alexander project when he was secretary of education). Goo-goo Republicans are forever warning about the dangers of isolationism or protectionism, the sort of point that wins pious nods at Chamber of Commerce dinners. Similarly, bashing Buchanan is an extremely polite thing to be seen doing. It is safe, but it is not a positive agenda.
The Alexander problem the Buchanan surge hasn’t solved is his utter inoffensiveness. His life seems to have been constructed to win universal admiration, rather than deep admiration from a specific group. Even in the heat of the campaign, he seems to be always thinking about how such and such a statement will play out in the media. This inoffensiveness can become offensive and explains why so many reporters are hostile to him. If he’s going to discover a way to generate enthusiasm, he’s probably going to have to learn at least one thing from Pat Buchanan: how to serve up raw meat.
by David Brooks
