THE BUCHANAN CHALLENGE

It will require both men to abandon hopes that a well-oiled political organization or clever gimmicks can substitute for a substantive message. They must rise above the campaigns they have run so far, and rise above their own conventional instincts. They must engage Buchanan on high ground. They must show Republican voters that they can speak to the concerns of those decent people who are tempted to pull the lever for Pat Buchanan because he is somehow speaking to and for them. And yet they also must repudiate the ideological and political morass that is Buchananism. For Buchananism is a corrosive anti-institutional populism that threatens to undo the gains of 1994 and trap the GOP in an anti-American, anti-capitalist swamp — the very swamp into which the Democratic party stumbled in the late 1960s.

What went wrong. Buchanan’s reception is yet another sign that the Republican party’s triumph in 1994 — when it found a way to join the social conservatives with the Perot voters and come up with a unified agenda for conservative governance — has not been fulfilled to the voters” satisfaction.

Obsessed with getting the deficit under control, the party failed to emphasize the centrality of tax relief in the “Republican Revolution” — even though tax relief was the only part of the Contract with America that promised immediately to improve the lives of those who voted Republican in 1994. And when it came to the presidential race, only one candidate entered the fray with taxes in mind. That was Steve Forbes, and his early success testified to the enduring potency of the tax issue. But Forbes was, to his grief, more interested in the delightful simplicity of a single 17 percent rate than the pressing need to help relieve some of the financial burden of those American households feeling the so-called “middle-class squeeze.”

Term limits failed in Congress, though that was the only part of the Contract with America that promised real change in the workings of the legislative branch. But rather than focus on this simple measure with massive public support, Lamar Alexander just kept repeating his soundbite-driven solution to the legislative woes of the United States: cutting Congress’s pay and sending members home for six months out of every year. Oh? And what if President Alexander had to consider sending troops somewhere at some point during those very inconvenient six months off?

And though everybody in Washington read the famous memo by pollster Fred Steeper indicating that the 1994 election was primarily about “social issues” — issues from abortion to crime control that really reveal the ideological fissure between the two parties — somehow they seemed to inspire a kind of ideological flight. This was most stunningly revealed in the notorious statement that probably cost Phil Gramm his candidacy: “I’m not running for preacher,” he told social conservatives Gary Bauer and James Dobson, among others, even though Gramm couldn’t stop himself from delivering long preachments to the American congregation on just how much ready money he had in the bank for his presidential campaign. If Gramm hadn’t proved so allergic to the social issues, we might not be talking about Buchanan today.

A new Republican era that began with such amazing promise has come to this: Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over. We won. And yet we are now in danger of losing.

Clinton’s decision to accept the idea of a seven-year balanced budget was the political equivalent of shorting out the one flashlight that the leading Republican candidate, Bob Dole, had to guide him through the pitch-blackness of a presidential year full of scary debates and position papers and stirring speeches and ideology — you know, the stuff he’s just not too good at. All Dole had to do, it had seemed, was point to Clinton and say, “Balanced budget, ” and he would take the White House. Not anymore. There’s been a lot of talk that, until he was frightened by Buchanan in Iowa, Dole was already beginning to run a general-election campaign. Really? About what?

How Buchanan emerged. And through it all, there was Buchanan, so easy to dismiss (as most of us did) — in part because almost all his policy proposals deserved to be dismissed. His anti-immigration position got an early tryout from a more conventional candidate — Pete Wilson — who soon high-tailed it back to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. Buchanan’s protectionist message was going to be a big loser in Iowa and New Hampshire, since their economies are export-driven. His isolationism did seem to have a following in the party, but nothing terrible has happened to American troops in Bosnia or Haiti, so it appeared relatively harmless. And, let’s face it — he didn’t have much money, and he had no organization. An intellectual brain trust so wildly conservative that its members were too right-wing for the Washington Times! All he had was a database and one undeniably principled position: his unambiguous, uncluttered belief that the life of the unborn is a sacred trust.

Now, without endorsing Buchanan’s characterization of his supporters as ” peasants,” we have to confess that Buchanan understood something about a substantial part of the Republican electorate that eluded many up here in the Washington establishment “castle.” He knew that they were thirsting for attention and respect. He knew they felt disenfranchised by the Republican presidential field. And he knew they were right.

Oh, sure, Bob Dole has been tight with Ralph Reed and the organizers of the Christian Coalition. He and Gramm have spotless pro-life voting records. But with the same weird faith he showed in the power of “organizing,” Dole seemed to think that his seduction of the Christian Coalition leadership meant that he had their followers sewn up. Well, once again, contra the notorious Washington Post assertion in 1993, those voters proved they are not so easily led, not even by their actual leaders.

They knew the top-tier candidates were running away from them (in large measure, we think, because the demands of fund-raising skew a candidate’s efforts toward the most moderate part of the Republican party, the sector of the GOP most hostile to the social conservatives who make up the Buchanan base). They knew that they were being dissed by a process in which the candidates who spoke in moral terms (Buchanan and Keyes) were considered outre for doing so.

Recent history suggests social conservatives don’t demand very much. They are mostly hard-headed about the long road before them and sober about the limits of what can be accomplished through government in the near term. But they do ask that they and the issues they believe in be treated with due deference and respect. Since they live in a world in which the media treat them like monsters, they are sensitive to the slings and arrows of outside opinion. When pro-choice senatorial candidates like Paul Coverdell and Kay Bailey Hutchison came to them with outstretched arms, asking for their help and promising to consider their ideas, the social conservatives accepted and supported them.

In other words, what the social conservatives ask, to borrow from Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, is to be recognized. To be told that their views are important ones, that these views can and must play a role in the larger debate. To be treated with respect. Not patronized, as Steve Forbes tried to do in Iowa. Not thrown scraps from the table, as Dole evidently intended to do by following up his triumphant Hollywood speech with . . . nothing.

And to take up the cudgel for their issues — school choice, judicial appointments, more room for religion in the public square. And, yes, abortion. They need to be engaged, as Lamar Alexander falls short of doing when he describes himself as pro-life and yet hesitates to assert that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and that he will appoint judges who will adhere to a strict reading of the Constitution. Such positions would be consistent with Alexander’s rejection of a human-life amendment to the Constitution; and though advocating such views would make him more “moderate” on the issue of abortion than Buchanan, they would at least demonstrate that he recognizes the overriding seriousness of this central Republican concern.

The stupid economy. In addition to engaging the social conservatives, Buchanan has tapped a vein of middle-class resentment and worry whose existence no American politician could possibly be surprised to discover — except maybe Bob Dole, who professed, amazingly, that he hadn’t realized the economy and jobs were going to be issues in New Hampshire. And yet there Dole and Alexander stand, without much to say to those Americans who feel the middle-class squeeze.

Buchanan does have a lot to say on these matters, even if almost everything he says is wrong, or misleading, or deliberately demagogic. We find it impossible to believe that Republican voters really endorse Buchananite measures like punitive tariffs or the use of the tax code to “punish” companies that eliminate jobs — thus leaving it to one of those Washington bureaucrats Buchanan professes to hate so much to determine what the appropriate level of employment is at any individual company in the United States. This is not a Republican message. It’s not a Democratic message. It’s old-fashioned populist demagoguery, plain and simple.

To combat Buchanan on this front, Dole and Alexander need to talk to the American people like adults — to appeal to the conservatism of the head, not the “conservatism of the heart” Buchanan talks about. They need to make the point that, in macroeconomic terms, the nation is in remarkably good condition and likely to get better. Interest rates are low, and an eventual balanced budget will drive them lower and free up needed capital for research, development, and investment. We stand, for example, on the cusp of a gigantic acceleration in the world of communications, fueled in part by the passage of the so-called telecom bill deregulating a part of the economy that has labored under the government yoke for six decades. Voters need to be told that things are good, and that under Republican economic policies the big picture will only get better.

But voters don’t live in the big picture, and we are in a time of economic transition. Here, too, candidates must be able to provide some relief to those who wake up at 3 a. m. in a cold sweat over bills and mortgages and student loans. Some of that relief can come from measures everybody in the race agrees on: portability of health care, medical savings accounts, and expanded IRAs.

And, of course, tax cuts. They are vital because tax cuts go to the core of what unites all Republicans: the simultaneous belief that the government is too large and that it takes too much (morally, socially, and financially) out of the hide of the American people. But where is tax relief in 19967 Lamar Alexander wants to repeal the Clinton and Bush tax increases, and yet he mentions this less often than he says, “Cut their pay and send them home.” What about a full-throated public defense of the $ 500-per-child tax credit that is still part of the Republican budget plan? What about an increase in the personal exemption? Yes, all this would cost money. So talk about cutting more deeply into federal spending. That’s what Republicans do.

And maybe, if Bob Dole wanted to be really daring, he might start talking about payroll-tax relief, which would require reopening the supposedly Solomonic deal that saved Social Security in 1983 — a deal he can talk about reopening because he was in on it in the first place.

We don’t mean to give specific advice to the candidates, only to point out that Buchanan’s potential voters around the country might be convinced to look elsewhere if Dole and Alexander give them something to look at. Politics abhors a vacuum. Buchanan has temporarily filled it. Republicans ought to be concerned that this temporary situation may become permanent — that Buchanan in 1996 might be the Republican analogue to George McGovern in 1972.

Yes, the vision thing. Lamar Alexander is now attacking “Buchananism,” while Dole talks about the “politics of hope against the politics of fear” (” hope and fear,” Dole repeats immediately afterward, in case we didn’t hear him the first time). Buchanan has the wrong ideas, Alexander says. He’s right.

But just as Buchanan has determined that he is speaking for the “voiceless,” so too must Dole and Alexander speak for the 70 percent or so of the Republican party who don’t want to pull the lever for Pat Buchanan. This is a tricky game, we know, because the party needs those Buchanan voters back. That is why they need to separate Buchanan’s issues from Buchanan himself.

And they must go farther. They must make the case that we are not living in Pat Buchanan’s America, a place in which jobs are scarce and opportunity scarcer. A place so consumed with its own resentments that it cannot be expected to hold high the banner of freedom outside our own borders, or represent a beacon of freedom to suffering masses yearning to breathe free. Are we yet living in a country that needs a Great Wall of San Diego to save us from the Spanish-speaking hordes?

Above all, Buchanan’s opponents must make the case that we don’t want to live in Pat Buchanan’s America. The Buchanan campaign is, in fact, the most powerful anti-American voice this country has seen in two decades or more. It’s not just the conviction that American power can do no good in the world, and shouldn’t try. (“Come home, America” was, after all, George McGovern’s campaign slogan.) Remember when the Left succeeded in making capitalism a dirty word? Buchanan is attempting to revive that definition. Remember the old Marxist theory that American workers were forced to buy consumer goods they did not need by hypnotic advertising that sank them into deep consumer debt similar to sharecropping? That is the hidden corollary to Buchanan’s middle-class economic message — that people who have two cars and three VCRs and five telephones and a computer are worse off than they were 20 years ago, manipulated into costly consumerism by forces outside their control. And all this together adds up to the true New Left quality of Buchanan’s message: that because of phenomena as various as abortion and corporate downsizing, America has become morally diseased. (Substitute “Vietnam” for “abortion” and “greedy oil companies” for “corporate downsizing” and the parallel becomes obvious.) $

Shouldn’t someone in this race be sticking up for the United States? Where is the patriotic indignation that helped the conservative movement find a coherent message to attack the left-liberals who were running America down? We don’t believe for a moment that it has vanished in the wake of the Cold War; it awaits only a standard-bearer.

The challenge to conservatism. When Buchanan’s counterpart, George McGovern, rose in 1972 to challenge liberalism from the left, he was able to do so because liberalism truly was exhausted. It could no longer fulfill its promise of a happy, secular, progressive future. Is it possible that Buchanan’s rise signals a similar exhaustion in conservatism?

We are certain the answer is no. Recall that the last time there was a thoroughgoing ideological realignment — in the 1930s — it was accompanied as well by a rise in populist demagoguery. Huey Long and Father Coughlin posed the same kind of threat to the New Deal that Buchanan poses to the Republican Revolution — taking a positive desire for political change and turning it into a force for resentment.

Just as FDR and the Democrats had to beat back the populists to ensure the success and survival of the New Deal experiment, so too do today’s conservatives have to find renewed political strength and intellectual vigor in the course of beating back Buchananism. This is the challenge, not just to Dole and Alexander, but to all of us.