Bush Assailed by Buchanan Over Quotas : Campaign: The GOP contender decries reverse bias and President’s tax stand in bid to find voter discontent in stops in South Carolina, Georgia.

Decrying hiring quotas and reverse discrimination, Patrick J. Buchanan took his Republican presidential campaign to the South on Friday, hoping to find the same voter resentment toward President Bush that he tapped so successfully in New Hampshire.

“We’ve had enough of a President who caves in on taxes and then caves in on quotas,” Buchanan said as he broadened his attacks to issues he believes will play well with conservative white voters in the South.

“Quotas of any kind are wrong. You don’t change the invidious nature of quotas simply by reversing the color of the skin of the beneficiaries and if I am elected all forms of reverse discrimination in the federal government will be eliminated,” Buchanan told several hundred supporters in Augusta, Ga., before flying on to South Carolina for the day.

The “Buchanan Brigades,” as the candidate calls his supporters to emphasize the militant patriotism with which his campaign is laced, staged their first hit-and-run attacks in Georgia and South Carolina, where primaries will be held on March 3 and 7, respectively.

He will make forays into at least six Southern states before the big Super Tuesday round of primaries March 10. But, unable to finance a major campaign in all of them, he plans to focus most of his efforts on Georgia, which Buchanan said represents “the best chance we’ve got” of inflicting a humiliating Republican primary defeat on the President.

Campaign aides said Buchanan plans to spend $250,000 in Georgia, a state to which he will return several times over the coming week. Two new television ads have also been targeted at the state--one that emphasizes Buchanan’s “America first” campaign theme and another “more negative” ad that attacks Bush for “flip-flopping” on the issues of taxes and hiring quotas, one aide said.

While most Republican analysts doubt that Buchanan can win the Georgia primary, a percentage of the votes exceeding or even approaching the 37% he won in New Hampshire would be evidence that his appeal extends beyond economically depressed New England.

In New Hampshire, exit polls following last Tuesday’s primaries showed that half of those Republicans who voted for Buchanan did so as a protest vote to show their unhappiness with the way Bush is handing the economy.

In the South, where the regional unemployment rate is about 4%--well below the national average of 7.1%--the economy is not the burning issue it is in New Hampshire, where unemployment is running slightly above the national average.

Thus Buchanan went South with a different mix of messages for conservative voters. In Augusta and later Charleston, he continued his attacks on Bush for breaking his no new taxes pledge. But he also wove in new attacks on social issues and on civil rights, criticizing the President for signing the 1991 Civil Rights Act. Conservatives maintain the law will force businessmen to adopt de facto quotas in hiring to avoid lawsuits, while supporters of the bill say it reaffirms the concept of affirmative action without requiring quotas.

“We are going to expose the fact that, in George Bush, we thought we had a continuation of Ronald Reagan’s policies in Washington when what we got was really warmed-over Jimmy Carter,” Buchanan told supporters in Georgia.

Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the conservative House minority whip, has estimated that Buchanan could capture between 25% and 35% of the Republican vote in Georgia, where he has an additional advantage in the fact that former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, who is also a presidential candidate, is not on the ballot.

In South Carolina, however, Duke is on the ballot and can be expected to siphon off at least some of the support from low- to moderate-income whites that Buchanan is hoping to draw away from Bush. And the Republican Party Establishment in South Carolina is solidly behind Bush. In Georgia, it is somewhat divided.