Message and Style Stirred Supporters

His speeches were the most pugnacious, his voters the most committed, his victory party by far the most festive of the 1996 New Hampshire primary.

As Patrick J. Buchanan rode a wave of economic and social resentment to victory on Tuesday, it was his brigade of energetic supporters who held the key to his success. And they basked in his win like true believers.

They labeled themselves “patriots of the new conservativism.” They brushed off reports linking Buchanan activists to white supremacists as “typical smears by the media and elitists.” They held out Buchanan as the champion of powerless victims of corporate greed.

Listen to Georgia Gilbert, 48, a housewife from seaside Portsmouth who came to the victory party Tuesday night:

“As the dream of upward mobility for the middle class disappears, you can point your finger a lot of places. Concern for jobs going overseas is great here. Pat nailed that one before the ink was dry on NAFTA,” she said, referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement--one of Buchanan’s principal targets.

Buchanan managed to tap the economic and social strains afflicting the Republican electorate here with a uniquely blunt and colorful rhetorical style.

He proclaimed that his candidacy had Washington quailing at “the sound of hoofbeats” and warned, “They hear the shouts of the peasants from over the hill.” While it may have given the Republican establishment the jitters, it gave his followers a sense of shared purpose. It was a message, they said, that overwhelmed the bureaucratese of Bob Dole, the wooly vagueness of Lamar Alexander, or the professorial bleat of publisher Steve Forbes.

Tuesday’s vote had politicians, historians and voters all struggling to pinpoint Buchanan’s place in the American parade.

“He’s addressing a common strain that affects the 65% of the population whose incomes have declined in real terms over the last 20 years,” said Duke University historian Lawrence Goodwyn, an expert in populist movements.

Goodwyn also noted that Buchanan’s success came on largely unplowed ground. “He’s filling a vacuum that exists in both parties. There wouldn’t be room for Pat Buchanan to make this kind of hay in the FDR era because those people were being addressed by FDR.”

Alan Brinkley, professor of history at Columbia University and the author of the book “Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression,” located the political forebears of part of Buchanan’s message within the tradition of Catholic social thought.

That tradition, he said, is one “not of hostility to capitalism, but muted criticisms of large corporations [that says] they cannot behave entirely as they wish . . . that there are limits to property rights.”

Upon that, Buchanan layered a protest against intellectual elitism that struck a chord within many supporters upset at what they see as the encroachment of moral decay on their lives.

“I was graced with a childhood of innocence,” said Tim Chicester, 53, an Ousterlitz, N.Y., resident, working a telephone bank for Buchanan on Tuesday. “These children are literally raped in the classroom by educators. These things all boil together.”

For all that, Buchanan’s surging fortunes sometimes seemed incredible, even to himself. Encountered by a reporter Tuesday afternoon on the almost deserted indoor track of a Manchester health club, he was asked to call the race. “I think it’s tight as a tick,” he replied.

Buchanan’s startling success did have his leading rivals flailing to find the silver lining in their own showing. Alexander spoke as though third place was better than second--or even first. “I’d rather be in my position than Bob Dole’s, and mine than Pat Buchanan’s,” he said. “This is good news for us tonight.”

Forbes contented himself with declaring that he had “set the agenda” for the race, although talk of his flat-tax proposal had ebbed with his own fortunes. “It’s on to Delaware, on to Arizona,” he declared.

The Buchanan victory party in a sense began days ago. As the mean-spirited GOP contest drew to a close, Buchanan supporters bedecked in red, white and blue livery could often be spotted in New Hampshire’s major cities traveling in enthusiastic bands. Other candidates could barely summon large crowds, even for well-publicized events; when Alexander finished his signature 100-mile walk across the state with a ceremony at a seafront park in Portsmouth, many of the 250 supporters dutifully waving signs drifted off before the bluegrass music ended.

A further contrast was afforded on election night. At Buchanan headquarters at the Courtyard banquet hall in Manchester, 700 people made it inside and another 100 were turned away. When the candidate and his family arrived on stage at 9:20 p.m., the crowd broke into a spontaneous rendering of “God Bless America.”

Meanwhile Dole--still the best-organized and best-financed candidate--was hosting a somewhat lugubrious session across town at the Center of New Hampshire Holiday Inn. As a campaign official tried to interest the crowd in a victory chant (“Give me a ‘D’! Give me an ‘O’!), he drew fewer cheers than curious stares from the floor.

Dole’s campaign officials themselves projected the air of those who have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

“Had we won this election, Bob Dole would have been judged the Republican nominee tonight,” said William Lacy, a top campaign aide. “It’ll take us a few more wins now to make that claim.”

When Dole finally appeared on stage, his speech seemed curiously conditional, as it might for a one-time front-runner trailing an insurgent challenger by a single percentage point.

“We know we’re now engaged in a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican Party,” he said.

“We have conducted a three-week political campaign that will go down in legend,” he shouted. “They’re going to come after us with everything they’ve got. Do not wait for orders from headquarters. Mount up, everybody.”