Will Sun Belt Warm Up to Buchanan Bid?

I found the Los Angeles County outpost of the Buchanan Revolution just where you’d expect to meet a Republican revolutionary, in a very nice suburban office building.

Bob Kerns, a Ph.D. mathematician turned oil field developer and part-time politician, greeted me at the door of Whitworth Energy Resources Ltd. It is located on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, next to a Charley Brown’s restaurant.

Kerns, 36, the company’s vice president for finance, runs the Los Angeles County campaign for Pat Buchanan, the conservative insurgent trying to overthrow President Bush.

Kerns welcomed me into the office. He is a friendly, talkative, bulky man whose manner and appearance gave an initial impression of softness. But as the interview went on, I saw a certain high-risk, roll-the-dice quality about him that is as helpful in politics as it is in the oil business.

He once worked for hyper-charged, nonstop-talking Republican Rep. Robert K. Dornan. Then in 1986, Kerns rolled the dice for himself, running on the Republican ticket against Rep. Howard L. Berman, (D-Panorama City). It was an impossible task since Berman is a name partner in the famous Berman-Waxman political machine.

“I got 36% of the vote,” Kerns remembered. Apparently impressed with the man’s ability to absorb defeat, Buchanan’s campaign manager and sister, Bay, asked him to help out with the Buchanan Revolution.

A Valley office. A little-known Republican ideologue. What an inauspicious way for a revolution to begin.

But Bob Kerns may be in the right spot for such an endeavor. Los Angeles County suburbs have been breeding grounds for conservative Republican insurgency.

In the early 1960s, restless young Republican conservatives began meeting in homes in Reseda, Woodland Hills, West Covina, Burbank, Pasadena and other communities in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys.

One of their groups was the United Republicans of California, which held annual conventions I used to cover. We reporters thought UROC members were nutty ideologues. They were sure we were Communists. Some of them would come into the pressroom, trying to sneak a look at our stories or listen to our phone conversations. We laughed at their resolutions condemning sex education in high schools.

The press misjudged them. Convinced that the Republican Party was in the hands of weak-blooded sellouts without the guts to fight the Democrats, the conservatives took over the state GOP.

In a historic 1964 presidential primary, the Republican right delivered the state to their hero, Barry Goldwater. Two years later, the Goldwater troops provided the energy for Ronald Reagan’s win of the GOP nomination for governor.

Bob Kerns wasn’t even an adolescent when this occurred. And now he wants to make it happen again with Pat Buchanan as Goldwater reborn. Not this year maybe, but in 1996.

On the surface, there’s a resemblance between the Goldwater days and Buchanan’s insurgency, especially here in California where the Buchananites plan a major effort in the June 2 primary.

Polls show the GOP grass roots is unhappy with Bush and Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, just as the ‘60s suburbanites were mad at the party chieftains of their day. And Republican strength is growing in L.A. and the Ventura County suburbs.

But there’s a difference. Buchanan, unlike Goldwater, is not yet the idol of the California GOP right. Republican pollster Arnie Steinberg, who advises many conservative GOP campaigns from his Valley office, said his surveys show the anti-Bush feeling here has little to do with ideology. “I have a lot of conservative candidates,” he said, “and they are not for Buchanan.”

Buchanan will have to struggle to fill the Goldwater shoes. Goldwater epitomized the Sun Belt conservatism that swept through the L.A. suburbs in the ‘60s. He was a perfect Sun Belt figure, tanned, straight from the Western desert, tough but not too mean. Goldwater was a gentleman.

Buchanan, on the other hand, is from a cramped world, the Eastern neighborhoods where Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish kids grew up with unrestrained ethnic ill feelings. It was a world run by schoolyard bullies.

The Southland is still the Sun Belt. The question that Bob Kerns will have to answer, as he goes over the political statistics in his Woodland Hills office, is whether the Republican Sun Belters of the ‘90s will join this pugnacious Easterner’s revolution.