Pat the Bunny
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
EDITORIAL Pat the Bunny A successful demagogue needs the ferocity of a lion and the cunning of a fox. Thankfully, Pat Buchanan doesn't quite measure up. He's just Pat the Bunny, hopping around on...
...Or will they continue to cower before Pat the Bunny...
...In his first primary in New Hampshire in 1992, he reached 37 percent of the vote...
...He did insist on his party's support for those legitimate causes that Wallace and his fellow travelers tried to hijack, especially civil rights...
...This would be healthy for conservatism both substantively and politically...
...I think we need a guy like him...
...Thus John Kasich: "I don't want to see him leave the party...
...Really...
...Yet Wallace, who started out like Buchanan amid widespread expectations that he would win a serious and disruptive share of the vote, ended up with 2 percent...
...Consider the dedication of his new book: "To the loyal men and women of the Buchanan Brigades of '92 and '96, I will never forget you...
...Dan Quayle said last week that the Republican establishment should regard Buchanan's defection as a "wake-up call" from frustrated conservatives...
...He didn't say Wallace was a nice guy or praise his past contributions to the party...
...His defection seemed to threaten Truman far more seriously than Buchanan's does Bush...
...For example, he and his supporters helped block attempts to water down the language of the pro-life plank in the Republican platform in 1996...
...But Pat wouldn't have had the money or the credibility (if one can call it that) of Reform, which did after all attract a substantial number of voters in the last two presidential elections...
...Isn't it a little unusual to dedicate a book to your (eponymous) followers...
...Harry Truman, in particular, didn't plead for Wallace to stay...
...And what about the melodramatic "I will never forget you," rather than an expression of thanks or gratitude...
...This year, he won 7 percent in the Iowa straw poll, down from 18 percent four years ago, and he is running at about 3 percent in national surveys of GOP voters...
...They're pleading with him to stay in a party he has come to despise, and which, by all rights, ought to disdain him...
...With the attention and support Buchanan would bring, the Constitution party could have made it onto all 50 state ballots...
...This is not to say Buchanan has been without influence in the GOP...
...And yet, does anyone seriously believe he would be jumping to Reform if it didn't have that $13 million...
...Indeed, Buchanan's departure from the GOP offers Republicans an opportunity to set forth a strong conservative agenda and to distinguish it from Buchananism...
...Wallace, vice president only four years before, was in 1948 a more substantial and prominent figure than Buchanan today...
...He's just Pat the Bunny, hopping around on the fringes of American politics, wiggling his nose in the air and nibbling away at whatever carrots our political system offers up for his purposes...
...These are days of high prices for everything, but any price for Wallace and his Communists is too much for me to pay...
...He is undoubtedly sincere about these views...
...But above all, Truman denounced Wallace...
...But part of Pat's attraction to America First is that it puts Pat first...
...It's been downhill from there...
...He and I are very similar with kind of populist, blue-collar messages, and we don't want him to leave the party...
...Pat indignantly rejects the notion that he's interested in the Reform nomination because of the federal matching funds: "I don't think anybody that knows Pat Buchanan believes he ever got into politics because of money...
...I am not buying...
...The biggest carrot in Pat's sight right now is the $13 million of public funds available to the Reform party in 2000...
...According to Buchanan, he has no choice but to jump ship: In the Republican race the "fix" is in, the process is "almost closed and rigged...
...There have been several third-party candidates in recent decades, but to find a useful analogy to Buchanan one needs to go back a half century to Henry Wallace...
...Apparently, the more Republicans see of Pat, the less inclined they are to support him...
...There are, in fact, legitimate grounds for conservative frustration with the GOP But the last thing one ought to do is to identify real conservative concerns with Buchanan's self-serving defection...
...After all, there is another third party Pat could have signed up with, Howie Phillips's Constitution party...
...One might think Buchanan would want to play a role in that struggle...
...And so on...
...They helped themselves by defining themselves against Wallace...
...The GOP has debates, and primaries, and rules...
...How are Republican leaders reacting to the departure from their ranks of a not particularly powerful demagogue whose views range from the foolish to the dangerous...
...Buchanan's real problem is that in the Republican party, he has increasingly found himself a demagogue without a demos...
...Buchanan got into electoral politics because of vanity, not money...
...In March 1948, at a time when he trailed Dewey in the polls and was even at some risk of being denied renomination by his own party, Truman said: "I do not want and I will not accept the political support of Henry Wallace and his Communists...
...Unlike Reform, it is pro-life and agrees with Buchanan on pretty much everything else...
...William Kristol...
...Pat's a hard guy not to like...
...Pat's jumping to a party where the fix really is in, and the rules truly are rigged...
...And he is walking toward a party whose platform takes no position on the issue of abortion...
...So Pat's signing up with Ross instead of his old friend Howie...
...If joining them or permitting them to join me is the price of victory, I recommend defeat...
...Next year, too, the question of how firmly and uncompromisingly the GOP is to be pro-life will be on the table...
...For the most part, stupidly and cravenly...
...Are Republicans capable of being as courageous and astute as Harry Truman was half a century ago...
...He's got a good personality, a lot of ideas, a lot of enthusiasm...
...He never did as well again in 1992, and after his victory in New Hampshire in 1996, his campaign fell apart...
...I told them I would go out there, and would do my best to keep our party pro-life...
...I have to tell you that I never heard George Bush even talk negatively about Pat Buchanan...
...The Democrats held the presidency and won back Congress...
...It is a commitment I made to my people in the campaign...
...But now Pat is walking away from the fight to keep one of the two major political parties in America seriously pro-life...
...After all, in 1996, Pat assured his supporters that he was "not going to walk away from the unborn...
...That isn't the accusation, exactly...
...And so all of a sudden he is looking to make a new home for himself in Ross Perot's rabbit hutch...
...The Reform party is sympathetic to the motley collection of foreign policy and trade doctrines summed up by Pat as "America First...
...Or at least so he hopes...
Vol. 5 • September 1999 • No. 2
