Bashing Bush From Right: David Duke Meets His Peer : Politics: Columnist Pat Buchanan wants to take on the President, but don’t expect what’s needed--a principled conservative attack.

It is now, for all practical purposes, a done deal. Patrick J. Buchanan, the blustery right-wing columnist, has decided to challenge President George Bush in the New Hampshire primary and has authorized his sister, former U.S. Treasurer Angela (Bay) Buchanan, to get out the word. The formal announcement is expected around Thanksgiving.

“It’s a go,” Ms. Buchanan chirped Wednesday night. “He’s so excited.” A great many other right-wingers must be giddy as well. For some months, the so-called Conservative Movement has been growing increasingly exasperated with Bush’s lackluster leadership style, his apparent absence of bedrock conviction and his willingness to seek compromise with a Congress that conservatives consider militantly committed to ideological liberalism.

On this last score, Buchanan is just the man to give voice to the right-wingers’ impatience. For years, the television commentator and former aide to Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan has argued, long and loud, that Republicans should stop trying to work with the Democrats in Congress and instead fight them to the death.

Far from sharing conservatism’s historic distrust of executive power, Buchanan worships it. Contemptuous of traditional conservatives who believe change must be wrought slowly, through established institutions like Congress, Buchanan champions presidential power.

The central goal of conservatives, he proclaimed some years ago, must always be the presidency, from which office they can “conduct siege warfare” against the special interests. Conservatives should rejoice in turning that “mighty instrument of government against the welfare state” and “declare war on the Congress.”

This hotheaded program has become such a dogma among Republicans that--unfortunately for Buchanan--even the President, with his petulant snipes at the “liberal leadership,” pays lip-service to it himself. Even so, it is not difficult to imagine a Buchanan challenge constituting “more than a nuisance factor” for Bush, as Edward Rollins, who managed Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, puts it.

Probably one of the best-known conservative pundits, Buchanan enjoys wide television exposure; he publishes a newsletter with a circulation of 15,000, which provides him a mailing list that should be of value for fund-raising. The Manchester Union-Leader, New Hampshire’s only statewide daily, is almost certain to endorse him, having published in early November a front-page editorial urging Buchanan to run.

What makes Buchanan different from most conservatives and well worth watching is his approach to foreign policy. Earlier this year, when most right-wingers were cheering on the most rapid mobilization of American troops in U.S. history and yelling for the head of Saddam Hussein, Buchanan broke ranks with the White House and managed to take a significant number of erstwhile hawks with him.

Buchanan argued that Bush had grossly exaggerated the threat Hussein posed; that no Americans should die for the Kuwaiti royal family; that the collapse of the Soviet threat meant the time had come to bring troops home, and that the President was required--under the Constitution--to obtain congressional approval before committing troops to any such adventure.

With communism in retreat, he spoke for a growing number of conservatives who had begun to wonder why American taxpayers are still being made to pay for a worldwide military presence and a debilitating arms industry at home. In the process, these neo-isolationists--Buchanan prefers “American Firsters”--began to rediscover the Constitution, which explicitly limits the powers of the federal government to providing for this nation’s defense, not somebody else’s.

With their encouragement, Buchanan ended up questioning the “globalist” foreign policy that both liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans have been rooting for since World War II. In so doing, he has edged close to the non-interventionism that once distinguished American conservatism, as articulated in the 1940s and early ‘50s by Sen. Robert A. Taft and his GOP colleagues in Congress.

Buchanan sees himself in this tradition and--to the extent that he can convince others that he is--his candidacy might prove useful. Bush, after all, has much to answer for, and a principled non-interventionist challenge to this globe-trotting President is long overdue.

If a Buchanan challenge could restore to national prestige the high-minded, civil-libertarian conservatism of Taft & Co., we would all be better off for it. Unfortunately, Buchanan’s own record makes it clear that any such claims to that mantle on his part are spurious and downright insulting.

Having rooted for the invasions of Grenada and Panama like any conventional hawk, he remains, at the very least, an unconvincing constitutionalist. This, after all, is a man who still defends Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who stuck by Nixon until the very end and who thinks Oliver L. North is a great patriot. While true conservatives--unlike neo-populist demagogues--understand the democratic process to be a vital, if sometimes trying, component of representative government, Buchanan openly sneers at it. Some years back, he likened electoral politics in this country to “playing poker for matchsticks--an instructive exercise, perhaps, but one that bores readily, as it is devoid of meaning.”

About that same time, he was praising George C. Wallace as “the authentic voice of the Forgotten Americans, the angry, white working man” who “stirred the embers of patriotism and nationalism in a country whose elite had marched into Vietnam and lacked the capacity to see it through.”

Had Wallace not been shot in that parking lot in Laurel, Md., Buchanan wrote, he “could have been the catalyst for a new alignment in American politics.” Apparently, Buchanan dreams of picking up where the Alabama race-baiter left off. Maybe he will be able to get David Duke to run with him.