race that seems destined to give us a choice between TweedleBush and TweedleGore, almost the only interesting question is whether Patrick J. Buchanan will abandon the GOP and seek the presidential nomination of the Reform party. He must feel enormously tempted to do so, for ample reasons.
If Buchanan is indeed to defect, he must make up his mind soon — by December at the latest. "Sore loser" rules mean that he cannot run in GOP primaries and then switch to another party for the general election. And because the media have played up the possibility of his departure, some of his grass-roots supporters are themselves switching to other candidates, such as Dan Quayle. With the risk of his own organization imploding, and the fact that the internal politics of the Reform nomination are themselves highly fluid, he would be well advised to decide earlier than December.
Republican operatives certainly assume that he is thinking hard about it. Their anxiety that a third-party Buchanan would damage the prospects of George W. Bush in the general election explains the recent mass posting of valentines to him. Bush himself made a "gracious" appeal that his rival stay in the party. A bullyboy and sinister force only a few years ago, Buchanan is now a gentleman, an orator, the soul of the GOP. Pat, go? Heaven forfend.
Buchanan himself is weighing the odds very cautiously. With the example before him of Sen. Bob Smith, whose third-party bid foundered on general lack of interest on the part of third parties, he must wonder about his chances of getting the Reform nomination. For that too is, at least potentially, a crowded field. The omens — in modern parlance, opinion polls — are good. A National Journal poll asked 1,000 voters how they would vote if Bush were the GOP nominee, Gore the Democrats', and various "fancied runners" the Reform candidate. Buchanan headed the Reform field — with 16 percent against Bush's 39 percent and Gore's 35 percent. Other Reform ratings were Warren Beatty with 11 percent, Ross Perot with 6 percent, and Lowell Weicker with 4 percent.
What was especially significant was that Buchanan beat Gov. Jesse Ventura, who scored 12 percent. For if anyone is likely to frustrate a Buchanan bid for Reform's leadership, it is Ventura. Not only is he the party's new poster boy, he recently got his candidate elected as Reform party chairman over the opposition of the party's founder, Perot.
Until now, Ventura has denied any personal ambition for the presidency. His candidate has been the former Connecticut governor, Weicker — a most unlikely Reform nominee since he is the quintessence of the Eastern establishment's impudent snobbery whose most famous accomplishment was imposing an income tax on his state. Against a high-octane candidate like Buchanan, "Mr. Four Percent" would have little chance. If Ventura wants to secure control of Reform, therefore, he himself will have to run against Buchanan.
And then it gets interesting. Buchanan denies that he has spoken to Perot about an alliance against Ventura (whom he likes and from whom he senses no great ideological separation). Sometimes, however, a conversation is quite unnecessary. If Buchanan and Ventura were competing for the nomination, then the coincidence of interest between Perot and Buchanan would be so clear as not to require the signing of a treaty. The resulting battle might be bloody, but also profitable. A struggle between Buchanan and Ventura in the primaries (or, still better, at the convention) would rivet the nation, push the primaries and conventions of other parties into the shade, and give the eventual winner a tremendous boost entering the general election.
But the conventional wisdom is that Buchanan would be at a disadvantage both in the primaries and in the general election because Reform's voters are not really Pat's people. They are, it is argued, secular-minded libertarians, whereas Buchanan is the candidate of the religious Right. That misunderstands both Buchanan and Reformers. Buchanan certainly has moral conservatism in his mix of politics, but he is not solely defined by it. Protectionism and a nationalist foreign policy have been his major themes in recent years.
As for Reform voters, a study by Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute suggests that, like most voters, they do not have sharply defined ideologies. What they have is a collection of general leanings that they are quite happy to ignore in particular instances. Thus they are skeptical of the efficacy of government, but support government programs in health and education. They are mildly libertarian, but favor traditional family values over non-traditional families by 70-19 percent. They favor lower taxes, but not if it means increasing the deficit. And so on. Where they differ from other Americans — and they rarely differ much — is that they tend to be more anxious about the future and about the state of the nation. Neither principled libertarians nor strictly religious conservatives, they are "social-fabric conservatives" who fear that our schools, our institutions, and our neighborhoods are going to hell in a handbasket.
These general leanings are, by and large, compatible with Buchananism. And because they are leanings rather than fully-worked-out philosophies, Buchanan would have some leeway in shaping his followers by incorporating their themes in his overall message. A Buchanan Reform party would hope to solidify this initial support with strong and firmly delineated policies promoting national sovereignty, the protection of America's basic industries, an anti-interventionist foreign policy, immigration reform, and traditional American culture and identity as against multiculturalism. It would then seek to poach voters from the two major parties by winning religious conservatives from the GOP with a strong moral conservatism, and converting Reagan Democrats from Al Gore with a strong economic nationalism. True, the Buchanan coalition, if it could be formed, would involve tensions; only small coalitions lack tensions. But it would also create tensions and divisions in the other two parties by stressing policies that their supporters like but their leaders oppose.
And Buchanan himself would be re-born as a candidate. At least one reason for Gary Bauer's stronger showing in Iowa (apart from the strong Christian Right presence in the state) is that Bauer put a fresh face on the politics of moral conservatism. Pat Buchanan was running as the Right's favorite son for the third time. Even though his message remained distinctive, it was no longer novel. And after two gallant defeats, Buchanan himself was beginning to look slightly shop-soiled.
A campaign for the Reform-party nomination would change all that. By the mere fact of his defection, he would shed all the social baggage of Republicanism — its reputation as the self-interested ideology of the country-clubber and the coupon-clipper. Nor would he any longer be regarded as the extreme Right of the GOP; instead (with a little help from the now-friendly media) he would be redefined as the voice of the "angry Middle," expressing a politics of sharp disagreement with the two-party establishment on everything from Kosovo to racial quotas. And, finally, once he was a leading figure in a credible third party, attacks on him by Republican hacks such as Rich Bond would no longer carry much of a sting. They would be no more than the common coin of partisan politics.
Even so, it remains overwhelmingly likely that the next president will be either a Republican or a Democrat. But that is a deterrent to Buchanan's switching parties only if he has a chance of winning the GOP nomination. And he has a much better chance of winning the presidency as the Reform-party nominee than of winning the Republican nomination in the first place. So the political mathematics are clear: GO, PAT, GO!
