A Middle American Revolt

Has Patrick J. Buchanan already shot his wad? It’s a mistake to assume George Bush will retire or lose in November just because that happened to previous postwar Presidents whose New Hampshire primary challengers drew at least 37% of the vote. Buchanan’s stunning showing would leave Bush eminently defeatable, save for two considerable problems: Old precedents are crumbling in America’s age of lowered expectations, which Bush unfortunately epitomizes even as he shrills against doomsayers, and, even more important, none of the Democratic candidates now in the race look like winners.

Bear in mind a second rule of late 20th-Century politics: If either party nominates someone other than their New Hampshire primary winner, that party loses. The Democrats’ New Hampshire victor, Paul E. Tsongas, is a dull, regional favorite son from neighboring Massachusetts. His success came only after the former front-runner, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, sank into the mud of ex-girlfriends and Vietnam draft-board problems--so Democrats are unlikely to nominate him. Clinton’s troubles also look to be a bar, so the assumption is that a messy selection process will yield a handicapped Democratic nominee--who loses to the otherwise beatable Bush. If so, the Democrats will not win the White House until 1996.

But maybe not. Buchanan’s electric showing against Bush is the strongest renomination challenge to an elected Republican President since Theodore Roosevelt roughed up William Howard Taft in 1912, after which the latter lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Gerald R. Ford, an appointive President, had a stiff challenge in 1976, but in the hierarchical GOP, most elected Presidents have had no challengers or just minor opposition. Even Herbert Hoover had no real trouble getting renominated in 1932.

But Buchanan has sounded an intraparty trumpet not heard since TR, the Rough Rider, cut the legs out from under the 300-pound Taft. And, in an eerie similarity, Taft, like Bush, was a Yale-educated pillar of status-quo smugness charged with a negligently handled economic slump. Buchanan’s battle cry is that Bush has betrayed the middle class on taxes, in particular, and public policy, in general. The feisty ex-commentator calls for a “Middle American Revolution” to reclaim the GOP for the middle class and take it away from the “Ivy League globalists,” “vulture capitalists” and well-heeled Washington lobbyists for Japan who have made the onetime party of Peoria and Pasadena into the voice of Park Avenue and Palm Springs.

Another part of Buchanan’s revolutionary rhetoric describes New Hampshire as a second Lexington and Concord, where the Buchanan minutemen sent Bush’s red-coated Tories reeling back to Massachusetts. The battle to get rid of “King George” himself now begins in earnest. His strategy is as fragile as that of the outnumbered patriots of 1775, who had to pick their battlegrounds carefully to survive, bleed the redcoats, wait and hope.

Buchanan must do the same, scrambling to stay alive in the March 3 Georgia primary and the March 10 Texas primary, then heading for Michigan (March 17), and maybe Wisconsin (April 7), Pennsylvania (April 26), North Carolina (May 5) and California (June 2). A more modern analogy would be Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur’s successful strategy of Pacific Island-hopping in World War II. However, if Buchanan declares he will not be beaten in Dixie in March, than the fight against King George will continue--this is the pace and these are the battlefields where the “Middle American Revolution” can survive longest and most deplete the forces of the crown.

This kind of talk sets the Muffies and Chappies in the White House to giggling, but Buchanan is not the first 1992 presidential candidate to liken Bush to King George III of England. Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, another fighting Irishman, started doing it months ago--and back in 1988, even “Burke’s Peerage,” the British genealogy guide, saluted Bush as America’s “most royal” President. “Burke’s Peerage” may not circulate in the United States, but Buchanan’s anti-royal rhetoric--albeit half-Celtic overromanticization--has got GOP veterans of the Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan campaigns figuratively stomping their feet to hear, once more, the populist, anti-Establishment cadences of their political youth.

The perceptive observer will be saying: This is conservatism? The answer is: Not really. It’s anti-Washingtonism, outsider politics, populism, another one of those waves of grass-roots hostility toward privileged New York-Washington elites who abuse the economy, the people or both. The GOP presidential coalition was built on one of these popular waves in 1968-72, then reinforced by another in 1980. Its framework is shaky now--as 20% to 40% of the coalition’s voters conclude that Bush isn’t part of the solution, he’s part of the problem.

Exit polls in New Hampshire showed it was this frustration that Buchanan spoke to. Among Republican and Independent voters, Buchanan scored almost as well with liberals and moderates as with self-identified conservatives because economic anger, cultural animosity and a sense of political betrayal do not fit on neat ideological scales. That is who voted for him--which Bush’s gray-flannel advisers do not really understand--and more than half these Buchanan-backers said they might or would switch to the Democrats in November.

Psychologies like this tend to create and prolong divisive primaries. When Ronald Reagan fought drawn out, bitter GOP primaries against Ford in 1976, it helped defeat Ford in November. Edward M. Kennedy did the same to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic heats. Buchanan could do the same thing to Bush, and not worry about November--especially if the economy is still sour and the Democratic presidential nominee marginally acceptable.

That, however, brings us to another big “if.” The Democratic Party stands on the brink of a historic opportunity--as the economy slumps in the longest downturn since the 1930s, and the Republicans, once again, tear themselves apart over economic royalism and favoritism to elites in financial markets over ordinary folk in supermarkets. But once again, the Democrats are struggling to maintain their unique laurels as the only party to lose two straight presidential elections to George Herbert Walker Bush.

Twice now, Democrats have begun their nomination race by enthusing over a country boy turned Ivy League narcissist who took his moral compass from the Age of Aquarius--Gary Hart in 1988, Clinton today. Each time, after this contender unraveled, the Democrats in the New Hampshire primary chose a Greek, Ivy League technocrat from Massachusetts with negative charisma. Four years ago, Michael S. Dukakis blew a 17-point lead over Bush in a way that made 1948 surprise loser Thomas E. Dewey look like Machiavelli, and Tsongas’ dweeb quotient is even higher. When he gets to Texas for Super Tuesday, the pickup bubbas in Amarillo won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Neither, at this point, do the Democrats in Congress, most of whom would like to wind up selecting House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri or Sen. Lloyd M. Bentsen of Texas as their nominee at a brokered national convention. Whatever the previous nomination potential of an unsullied Clinton, now that he’s been marginalized by the twin scandals of an alleged girlfriend and an outmaneuvered draft board, many professionals see him as dead meat once the GOP attack ads start.

As for Tsongas, nobody paid much attention to his recent employment until the last days of the New Hampshire campaign. But his mid-to-late 1980s record--extraordinary for a would-be Democratic President--of lobbying for Drexel Burnham Lambert, the American Insurance Assn. and the National Venture Capital Assn., while serving as a director of seven major corporations, puts him on the fringe of the recent Reagan-Bush free-for-all era of junk bonds, debt and speculative finance and callous corporate downsizing that any serious 1992 Democratic campaign will have to indict.

It’s still possible that the Clinton-Tsongas mess will evolve into stalemate--with Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. and Harkin also getting nowhere. This could happen if Clinton stays alive, though weakened, through enough March primaries to get enough delegates, substantially Southern, to block any of his current rivals--even if his personal problems prove large enough to block his own nomination.

That would set the scene for a brokered convention that could nominate Gephardt or Bentsen on a centrist platform, able to woo the up-for-grabs GOP Buchanan vote, followed by a campaign imitating the middle-class populism that produced Democrat Harris Wofford’s upset victory in November’s U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania. That is Stage 2 of the Republican nightmare, following Stage 1--where Buchanan flogs Bush’s mismanagement of the economy all the way through a bitter primary in recession-angered and pivotal California. Circumstances like these confront Bush with the menace latent in Tuesday’s New Hampshire embarrassment.

On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid the collateral thought that history has its own unique role for Bush. Even as the New Hampshire returns were coming in, Bush’s chief strategist, Robert M. Teeter, told the press to ignore the precedents suggesting that Buchanan-like protest showings in New Hampshire had forced previous presidents into retirement. Back in 1988, he pointed out, Bush--abetted by Dukakis’ fumbles--had overcome the precedent that no sitting vice president had been elected President since 1836.

That’s true. Precedents are falling. Presidential politics in the United States is increasingly a game of trivial pursuers. As for Bush, it can be suggested that he’s filling a historical destiny, not to preside over a mythical new world order, but to furnish a caricature of second-rate leadership for an America in decline, where yesterday’s yardsticks--for better and (mostly) for worse--are going by the board. This is a United States where government processes are clogged by interest groups, where budget deficits keep soaring, where crumbling, crime-ridden cities are likened to Brazil, where families fear for children’s living standard, where Europe pays less attention to our wishes while Japanese prime ministers scoff and where the President flubs the attack on a Third World nation with a Kentucky-sized gross national product--whose dictator then gets away to thumb his nose at Washington.

If Americans are content with these trends and politicians who sidestep their discussion, then maybe there’s no importance to the truth of what stricken New Hampshire has just told us: Bush doesn’t deserve reelection but the Democrats don’t yet deserve to beat him.