It was fitting that a crew of five gardeners was tending to the lawn of Pat Buchanan because the lord of the manor has himself been intentionally lying in the weeds.
But the man chagrined with an “open borders” immigration policy didn’t need the brown-skinned men with rakes to yank him out. With the apparent end of the Republican and Democratic presidential races, the born-again Reform Party aspirant for the White House will now surface.
Sitting down with me, posing for a Time magazine photographer in an adjoining room and appearing Sunday on “Meet the Press” are part of a reintroduction reflecting an obvious reality: There’s only so much more we can write about Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore right now.
Although most every bit of reasonable political analysis prompts the same question–why in the world is he doing this?
The man who scared the pants off Republican front-runner Bob Dole by winning the 1996 New Hampshire primary will persist–facing tactical challenges, legal dilemmas and an altered economic environment, not to mention hoping party founder Ross Perot doesn’t decide to once again run and, perhaps, crunch him like a backyard beetle.
Ever engaging and droll, the 61-year-old ex-Republican stalwart made the following points during a session at a home whose small bar area features dandy behind-the-scenes photos of President Reagan and Buchanan amid the breakup of the historic Reykjavik summit, and Reagan watching a replay of the Challenger explosion, both in 1986 (and both taken by current Tribune photographer Pete Souza, then the official White House snapper):
Buchanan predicts a heavy, but mistaken, push among the GOP Establishment for a Bush-McCain ticket. “The Establishment doesn’t care about anything but power, money and office and it will try to put that ticket together.” Such a pairing, however, would prompt legitimate charges of rank hypocrisy, he argues.
He does not believe that Perot will run, essentially leaving the Reform Party nomination for him to take. Perot has shown no interest in reprising his 1992 and 1996 endeavors but a small cadre of diehards is trying to get him to return.
He already is preparing a federal court lawsuit to attempt to force his way into the fall presidential debates, regardless of whether he can reach the required threshold of 15 percent popularity in various polls.
Members of the Bush camp have made no overtures to him, perhaps out of anxiety that he will surely steal some votes, notably from Christian conservatives, that would otherwise go to Bush. “There’s no Bush who has been in touch with me in eight years!” he said, not even when he gave President Bush trouble in 1992’s primaries.
He calls New York developer Donald Trump’s Reform Party dalliance an ego-driven flirtation he never took very seriously.
President Bush was smarter and more pragmatic, but his son “is the better candidate and more personable. He’s Skull and Bones too,” referring to the secret society at Yale University, which both Bushes attended “but there’s a little Odessa-Midland, Texas, there with the son.”
The consensus, of course, is that Buchanan is wayward and ego-driven. “I think this is a very bad environment for a candidate like him,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. “His image has gotten worse, not better.”
“The thing that propelled him to victory in New Hampshire four years ago, demonstrable concern about worker insecurity and global trade, is not really there. And there is nothing in this year’s primary vote that’s reassuring to him,” said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.
Buchanan begs to disagree, starting with the notion of millions deeming him a nasty S.O.B. “The Wall Street Journal said my negatives were 48 percent,” he told me with a certain relish. “That’s a tremendous drop!”
Upon arrival, I wondered whether his self-perception was of A) a lion in winter, B) skunk at a dinner party, C) a noisy shareholder activist, D) a David vs. Goliaths or E) a bull in a china shop.
“None of the above,” he said. “We’ve left the mother country and come to a new land and will build something new. The further I get away from the Republican Party, the more we start looking ahead, not behind. We have a party that needs to be reshaped and reformed and re-energized.”
“It’s an arduous process,” he said in a mega-understatement. “But by the [Reform Party] convention [in August], we will have a cohesive party that I think will nominate me. And I think we will get to that [15 percent] threshold or we’re gonna get the courts to get us into those debates.”
He or the party is now assured of being on 22 state ballots. To get on the others he must deal with conflicting state regulations, which may mean procuring tons of signatures, meticulous attention to detail and lots of money.
For example, you need 56,000 signatures to get on as a candidate in Texas, 37,000 as a party, and must have it all done by the end of May. It’s why the consultants’ fees for such a chore (yes, there are experts in such matters) can run past $100,000 in an individual state.
The Minnesota party, led by Gov. Jesse Ventura, has disaffiliated from the national party, which is a headache. More such moves would be an added pain. And some local parties, like Illinois’, don’t seem “particularly friendly” toward him, Buchanan concedes.
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He knows that he must get a ton of free media attention, even with the nearly $13 million in federal funds coming to the party’s candidate. It’s why the debates are virtually everything for the accomplished debater.
His upcoming court complaint will turn on federal funds going to three parties but with two “conspiring to keep the third out of the decisive event. It’s sort of like Tim Russert’s `Meet the Press’ and Sam and Cokie’s show saying CBS must reach some threshold of support before getting [on the air]. It is a conspiracy to deny the American people a right to hear a candidate they are funding with their tax dollars.”
As for the competition, Buchanan’s analysis finds Gore a strong candidate with a unified party but lacking the skills and ability to bond with people a la Bill Clinton.
On the Republican side, he gives Bush “the most improved student award” for his performance on the stump and figures Bush will head a generally united party. But he argues that McCain’s success underscores how the basic Reagan coalition has continued to crack up.
And Bush, “having run to the right, will now move to the center and adopt positions to deliberately antagonize or dishearten part of his base. And I am not sure it will work.”
He portrays a GOP so desperate to win back the White House that it will try to craft a Bush-McCain ticket. He thinks that will look bad, infuriate some governors and senators who dislike McCain, leave the Christian right feeling isolated and show the Arizonan to be no different than any other politician. Buchanan knows the general environment is markedly different this time. The anger he exploited is gone. “I don’t dispute that,” he said. But he instead claims a less overt economic anxiety about the future among the middle class.
Perot’s big issue in 1992, when he won 19 percent of the vote, was the deficit. That’s not relevant today. So Buchanan will go heavy on the perils of immigration, an interventionist foreign policy and trade agreements “in which we are being shafted,” also tagging Bush and Gore as “fraudulent reformers” on campaign finance.
He has been doing tons of high-brow reading during his period away from the public fray, and he looks fit and in good spirits. Of course, one can still wonder why the longtime CNN co-host is doing this.
“We can offer something different than these two [Bush and Gore], neither of whom has closed the sale with the American people,” he said. “We have a historic opportunity. We can be the balance of power in national politics in the most important nation in the world.”
“And that beats sitting across from Bill Press on `Crossfire”‘