COLUMN RIGHT : An Outsider Who Wasted His Key Status : Buchanan could disdain economics as a columnist. But candidates can’t do it and win.

Conservative supporters of Patrick J. Buchanan don’t want to admit it, but a number of them have been quietly disappointed by his showing in the presidential campaign. They hoped that he would make life a little harder for President Bush than he has.

Considering that he is a mere newspaper columnist who never held public office, Buchanan has, from one point of view, done extraordinarily well, getting about a third of the Republican vote against an incumbent and campaigning President. But after New Hampshire, there were quiet hopes among Buchanan supporters that he might go from strength to strength. The results in the South, in Illinois and Michigan, and now Connecticut, suggest that this hope was illusory. Buchanan may be able to soldier on to California, as he has promised, but his crusade is beginning to look a little forlorn.

My suspicion is that in one crucial respect Buchanan may have confused the roles of columnist and candidate. He once said that he didn’t really like to write about economics because the subject didn’t interest him much. Also, he said his readers seemed to share his sentiments because they didn’t react much to his economic columns. In skirting the topic, he no doubt showed shrewd judgment as a columnist. But the economic decisions of government powerfully affect our lives nonetheless, and most voters recognize this and look for redress of economic grievances in the voting booth, if not on the Op-Ed page.

Buchanan seems to have transferred his (good) columnist instincts to the stump, disdaining economics and, the evidence suggests, miscalculating badly (as others have before him) with his appeals to protectionism. “Voodoo economics is redundant,” he has said, rather too dismissively. No, it’s not. There really is a distinction between good and bad economics. Furthermore, the author of the voodoo phrase was George Bush, who applied it in 1980 to one of the more important economic insights of recent decades, subsequently embraced by President Reagan: If the “price” of government gets too high (in the form of rising taxes), people will not “buy” it, and government revenue will fall.

With the state and federal tax increases of the 1990s, taxes are on many voters’ minds, especially at this time of the year, and especially in California. A struggling San Francisco businessman, who is also a strong Buchanan supporter, recently sent the following message to Angela (Bay) Buchanan, the candidate’s sister and campaign manager in Washington:

“The big issues among California Republicans are: Taxes, poor business, taxes, jobs, taxes.” He added: “We are being taxed into business bankruptcies, taxed into losing our homes, taxed into laying off good workers, taxed into losing our jobs, taxed into selling off merchandise at desperation prices. For Pat to say he will veto any new tax increase is insufficient. Roll back old taxes, now, permanently. We are being ‘asphyxiated’ by taxes!”

What has Pat Buchanan been saying on the question of taxes? He has called for tax cuts, but not conspicuously--not in a way that has resonated in the news media. Repeatedly and effectively, however, he has drawn attention to Bush’s famous broken promise: no new taxes. On the stump, he uses the line: “I will keep the promises that George Bush broke.” In short, says Buchanan: “No new taxes and I mean it.”

But he seems not to have noticed that Bush’s promise was itself a feeble compromise with the pro-tax brigades. And it’s not the prospect of new taxes that we are worried about. It’s the certainty of the old ones. Buchanan could easily have run with a dramatic tax promise--calling for a flat tax, for example. How come former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. ended up stealing this issue from the Republicans? Brown seems to have been more attentive to Reagan’s achievement than Buchanan, who worked for Reagan. If Buchanan had called for a 10% rate (topping Brown’s 13%) the media would not have ignored the message, and he might be in a stronger position today.

Buchanan may have worried that running with some such flat-tax proposal would be “irresponsible” at a time of big budget deficits. Indeed, his leading concern when he announced his candidacy was that he would not be taken seriously. A columnist as President? As it turned out, he may have demonstrated an excess of caution. After all, there should be advantages as well as drawbacks for an outsider. A candidate from a novel quarter may be hurt by lack of experience, but he should enjoy far more political freedom and elbow room than your average lifetime pol. It’s odd that Pat Buchanan never really availed himself of this liberty, whereas the lifetime pol, Jerry Brown, did.