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<title>The Peddling of Pat Buchanan</title>
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<p><font color="#FFFFFF" size="3" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="1"><b><font size="2">The
Peddling of Pat Buchanan</font></b><br>
Free travel, jobs for sidekicks, lucrative talking-head contracts....
On his third White House bid, professional candidate Pat Buchanan
is enjoying a fail-safe gig Even though he'll lose he'll still get
what he came for: money fame, and airtime. <br>
</font></font><font color="#FFFFFF"><i><b><font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif" size="2">By
Timothy Noah</font></b></i><font size="2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">
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<p><font color="#E0E0E0" size="2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Pat
Buchanan is preaching to the faithful, about two dozen mostly male,
mostly elderly, and mostly white people sitting in the back lounge
of the Uptown Café in Charles City, Iowa. The room is hedged with
evergreen trim where the wall meets the ceiling, and Buchanan, standing
beside the bar, is defending the family farm. “Agriculture is in
a depression!” he booms to the crowd. The prices farmers are getting
for corn, for milk, for hogs don’t match what it’s costing them
to produce these goods. Buchanan blames agribusiness firms such
as Cargill and Continental, which “own more and more of production.”
He also blames foreign countries, which he says are not buying sufficient
quantities of U.S. farm products. He bashes the North American Free
Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs,
for which “my Republican party” is “as responsible…maybe more so
at the national level, than Clinton.” The crowd loves it. “You’re
just like you are on <i>Crossfire</i>,” one woman tells Buchanan.
</font></p>
<p><font color="#E0E0E0" size="2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">When
the speech is over, the Uptown Café owner, Jim Brunner, who has
been watching Buchanan from behind the bar, puts his hand on Buchanan’s
shoulder. Brunner, himself an ex-farmer who lost his land, tells
Buchanan that there’s “something you shouldn’t do—use the ‘family
farm.’ They’re nonexistent today.” He says this without a trace
of bitterness, just a little practical advice from someone who once
lived the dream that Buchanan likes to talk about. </font></p>
<p><font color="#E0E0E0" size="2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Brunner
is missing the point: A Pat Buchanan campaign isn’t about practicality.
What could be less practical than to give up a lucrative gig as
a Washington-based TV commentator to run for president—not once,
not twice, but three times? About the only thing less practical
than that is to make economic doom the central theme of your campaign
during a year when the nation is generally believed to be drowning
in prosperity. Even in Iowa, where farmers are really suffering
through wrenching economic times, the message isn’t selling. A few
weeks after his Uptown Café peroration, Buchanan will come in fifth
in the Iowa straw poll—ahead of two candidates from the Republican
party’s social-conservative wing (Alan Keyes, Dan Quayle) but behind
a third (Gary Bauer). On CNN, political analyst William Schneider
will proclaim, “Gary Bauer is the new Pat Buchanan, in the sense
that he…could become the standard-bearer for the religious right.
Pat Buchanan is last year’s Pat Buchanan. I mean, he looks like
a guy whose time has come and gone.” </font></p>
<p><font color="#E0E0E0" size="2" face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">But
don’t count him out yet. If his last two presidential bids are any
guide, the sometime co-host of CNN’s <i>Crossfire</i> could end
up surpassing the expectations of political prognosticators, who
tend to overlook the value of Buchanan’s TV celebrity, the power
of his rhetoric, and the urgency of his message to a significant
minority of Americans who share his belief that their lives and
incomes won’t improve until the nation restores the values it held
dear in the 1950s. This time out, Buchanan’s venue is less likely
to be the continued pursuit of the Republican nomination than a
third-party candidacy. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” he tells
me a week and a half after the Iowa straw poll. “You’re up against
two people [George W. Bush and Steve Forbes] with $100 million.”
Buchanan’s sister and campaign chief, Bay Buchanan, has referred
to a Reform party run as “an incredible opportunity.… Pat is seriously
considering it.” When asked about one pundit’s prediction that the
Reform party nomination will be a battle between Buchanan and Warren
Beatty, Buchanan points out that the Reform party “gave me a dozen
roaring standing ovations” when he appeared at its convention four
years ago. “I don’t think the Reform party and Warren Beatty are
a good match. He’s an extreme leftist.… If he ran for it and I ran
for it and it were wide open, I would bet on me.” Buchananism isn’t
likely to sweep its namesake into the White House anytime soon.
But it is a genuine political movement. Amid the general prosperity,
there’s a strong sense that the good times are disproportionately
benefiting the wealthy and are scarcely being felt by many blue-collar
workers, particularly in cities whose industrial heydays are behind
them; many of those feeling the pinch identify with Buchanan’s social
conservatism. </font><font color="#FFFFFF" size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
<br>
<b><font size="2"><a href="pat2.htm">More &gt;&gt;</a></font></b></font></p>
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