Pat Buchanan and divisions with the Republican Party - 23 February 1996

About a month ago I was in Washington, mainly to see old friends, the ones, the very few, I should say, who are, as my old golf pro puts it, above ground and mobile. It was before the first of the presidential primaries, but there were I think, then nine Republican hopefuls already crunching around the small snowbound state of New Hampshire, which as I mentioned a week or two ago, is wildly unrepresentative in population, economy, politics, of the country as a whole, but is immensely important as a trial election because...because the country's come to believe that it is important.

I was spending an evening with my oldest American friend just as the early polls were coming in telling us what was going to happen in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, and there was then no question that Senator Dole, the party's leader in the Senate, would go roaring ahead in all the primaries, on to his coronation at the convention in San Diego in California, and on to November to meet, guess who.

That's one guess that, saving death, destruction or an act of God, is bound to be true. There's not a Democrat alive who even thinks of challenging the incumbent president and anybody who thought of it has surely changed his mind, since Mr Clinton went off around the country, campaigning, travelling, speechifying, showing himself to be more informed, more inspiring and manufacturing more impressive indignation than anyone campaigning for president.

He has trouble, as you may have noticed, being president, but way back there a month ago, the future what we call scenario, had been written and approved. The previous day I had lunch with one of the most influential of the Washington pundits and he said it crisply: "In November it will be Dole versus Clinton and Dole will win." So, next evening, I put to my old friend a question, which I do believe he must have thought so airy and irrelevant that by now he has probably forgotten it. I said, about these polls and the chances we're all discussing of Dole and the multi-millionaire Forbes and the conservative Southerner Senator Gramm, I don't understand why we haven't seen a bigger straw vote for Pat Buchanan?

Pat Buchanan, a volatile, quick-witted, bitingly sarcastic, passionate Irishman, a Reagan acolyte and speechwriter with a gift of the gab and of swingeing sentences, which he passed on – the sentences, not the gift – to Ronald Reagan. He proudly swears – he swore it also four years ago – that he's the only real dynamic conservative in the Republican party. I think his fundamental appeal is that he says a lot of things, airs a lot of prejudices, that are hiding inside people's minds, which they don't care to confess to, and he says them swiftly and bluntly.

He is passionately against the prevailing devotion, in both parties, to free trade, abominates the North American Free Trade Treaty, would slap a blanket 10 per cent tariff on everything that comes out of Japan. As a Catholic he regards abortion, under any circumstances, as murder, is absolutely against homosexual rights. He wants to close the borders to immigrants for a while, bring the troops home from Bosnia, leave the United Nations and he talks, shouts, all the time about this as a Christian country. He thus runs foul of all but the most extreme, you might say the most hysterical, conservative Americans.

Mr William Buckley, the scribe 30 years ago of the conservative revolution, is an old friend of Mr Buchanan, but he wrote that to examine Pat Buchanan's writings and speeches can lead to no other conclusion than that he's also anti-Semitic. The passing flashes of all these prejudices in a thunderstorm of a speech at the Republican convention four years ago, was enough to fracture the party, throw the old guard into despair and the fringe extremists into ecstasy. There's no doubt, I think, that Pat Buchanan delivered a severe wound to George Bush and powerfully affected his loss of the presidency. Need I say, the Republicans, whose mascot is an elephant, do not forget. Yet I was surprised at Buchanan's low showing, almost no showing at all, in the early polls, in spite of his extremist, populist views on immigrants, homosexuals, feminists.

What I had in mind was this. That he was the only candidate who said then, and still says out loud on every occasion, what I think is the central anxiety of most ordinary middle class Americans. It's the fear of losing their job and this goes through all society, from part-time carpenters to presidents of corporations. It's a feeling quite apart from the dreadful feeling of being unemployed and it's come about slowly and spread through, well we'd better say income groups, all classes, because we've been reading about it every day and seeing it every night for certainly two or three years.

It's expressed most crudely and most frighteningly by the news that some big corporation has just laid off 30,000 employees from all ranks, in the cause of the new great mission known as downsizing – making corporations leaner and meaner and, they claim, more productive. At the same time, sometimes as a footnote, sometimes as a separate parallel story, is the news that the chief executive officer and a couple of vice-presidents of the grand old firm have just received bonuses for services rendered of say $3,000,000 apiece. As Mr Bogart said, "I kid you not".

To bring up this rude contradiction in, shall we say comfortable company, is an error of taste, like mentioning the word cancer in a Victorian drawing room. But it's true. In a fairly wide acquaintanceship with people in all sorts of jobs from the top to the bottom – I'm not claiming to be a missionary, only a reporter all my life and you do run into everybody. I asked a young woman secretary I've known a long time, if she's happy in her job and she says, well, so far. So far, you say, but you've been there six years. Yes, she says, but that's no guarantee of a seventh year.

A fish-loader down on Fulton Street thought he was there for life. He's not. A machinist in a Connecticut factory, 44, wife, two children, been with no other firm. Got the pink slip a month ago. Round my corner is a bounding, genial character, every right to be. Senior vice-president of a famous bank. Until a month ago. His bank merged with another and the other senior vice-president, the board decided, would be more suitable as the senior vice-president of the new conglomerate.

This is a new kind of jitters. The anxiety of people of all classes, in early middle age, sometimes well along in middle age. Pat Buchanan is the only candidate who thinks of them and talks to them, pounding away at the loss of, by now I suppose, a quarter of a million jobs. The disappearance of what used to be known as a steady job and the hurtful accompanying news that the fat cats have just had the big bonus.

Buchanan bemoans in blazing rhetoric, the plight of American workers earning $4.50 an hour, competing with Mexican workers earning 25 cents an hour. He goes on very persuasively about how many of the clothes, the shoes, the dolls, the cars we buy were manufactured with virtual slave labour in Asia or Mexico. He echoes the powerful chant of Ross Perot four years ago, remember? You hear a great sucking sound coming up from the Rio Grande. My friends, it's American workers' jobs being sucked away into Mexico.

What Buchanan stands for delights some people and terrifies more, including the central and side branches of the Republican party. But what his victory in New Hampshire made blindingly clear was that the two opponents who have come to matter, Senator Dole and the former Governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, talk in abstractions about moving America forward again, representing the people and not Washington, whatever that means. Senator Dole is a puzzle, He's the most successful legislator in the Congress, 28 years in the Senate, a man of vast experience, a canny leader who knows better than any American alive what it takes to reconcile opponents, disputed policies and put together the best compromise possible. Yet his speeches sound like a man mumbling his way through a telephone directory. In the age of television it obviously doesn't do.

So a month ago the conventional wisdom was that Senator Dole was the runaway Republican candidate and might beat Clinton. The wisdom now says the Republican party is for the moment badly hurt by the early triumph of Buchanan but that he's too extreme for the whole party and will fade in the later primaries, will never make it to San Diego.

The same wise men however have started wondering whether Dole or Alexander is to be the one to rescue the heart and soul of the party. While the two men fight each other in a gentlemanly way. Fencing dolefully with wooden swords, Pat Buchanan sweeps from state to state, as the resurrected Robin Hood, crying, I quote: "You watch all the knights and barons riding into the castle, pulling up the drawbridge, real fast, but all the peasant are coming with pitchforks too".

You'd suppose there'd be champagne and happy toasts in the White House over all this. For so many years it was the Republicans who looked on from the outside, delighted to see the Democrats fighting like, as Abraham Lincoln put it, like cats on the midnight tiles, killing each other. But Lincoln added, beware, they're not killing each other, they're making more cats.

The White House is of course, so far, happy over the Republican divisions but I hope there are old heads with long memories who can see that the terror of Buchanan may only serve to mobilise the mass of Republican voters around one man, who can represent the large establishment Mr Buchanan delights to mock. I don't know who that man might be. I do know that already all the Republicans except the extreme right would sell their souls if it could be General Colin Powell, who could have had the crown for saying so, but turned it down, once.

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