POLITICAL BRIEFING

DILEMMA ON THE RIGHT--For many conservatives, the 1992 Republican presidential race has become a choice between unpleasant alternatives. Increasingly alienated from President Bush over issues ranging from taxes to the civil rights legislation he recently signed, many on the right find themselves unable to embrace commentator Patrick J. Buchanan’s neo-isolationist kamikaze run at the incumbent, much less David Duke’s none-too-subtle attacks on the “rising welfare underclass.”

The ambivalence may be best symbolized by the agonies of National Review, the conservatives’ preeminent journal of opinion. Earlier this month, it broke from Bush, declaring in an editorial that unless the President “makes a major, explicit and convincing turn to the right . . . we can no longer support his Administration.”

But the magazine’s most recent issue contained an extraordinary 43-page article by founder William F. Buckley Jr. accusing Buchanan (among other intellectuals) of anti-Semitism--in Buchanan’s case for repeatedly suggesting that American Jews were orchestrating support for the Persian Gulf War more out of concern for Israeli than American interests. “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period . . . amounted to anti-Semitism,” Buckley concluded.