Buchanan Rides a Wave of Rebellion in Arizona

The raw recruits of Pat’s Peasant Army sidle up to Patrick J. Buchanan each day like rebels emerging from a forest lair, some bold, others hesitant, each stirring with long-nursed resentments, all joined in a crusade of the disaffected.

Their emergence in the early presidential primaries and caucuses has sent a shudder through the Republican Party, a jolt that the Buchanan Brigaders hope to magnify into a political earthquake in today’s Arizona vote.

They have turned out by the thousands as Buchanan rambled through the Grand Canyon State the past six days, his bus caravan snaking at a grueling pace from the Mexican border into the high desert. At each stop, in sweaty high school gymnasiums, in dust-choked strip malls, in courthouse squares packed with the committed and the curious, Buchanan has fused a movement that defies the tidy demographics of modern American politics.

There are trailer park matrons who grow giddy in Buchanan’s presence as if he were Elvis returned. There are the bitter patriots who listen to radio talk shows long into the night, gasping on cue when Buchanan denounces American fealty to United Nations military commanders and international trade groups. There are layoff victims who nod quietly at Buchanan’s tirade against corporate greed and devil’s-bargain trade deals, muttering, “You tell ‘em, Pat,” during the candidate’s rare lapses into silence.

There are his own twentysomething operatives and volunteers--fresh-scrubbed, earnest young Republicans who deify Buchanan as he once did Barry Goldwater--whose right-wing passion pulses through this year’s primary campaign just as the anti-Vietnam War fervor of Eugene J. McCarthy’s children’s crusaders transformed the 1968 Democratic primaries.

They have all joined in the groundswell the candidate has brashly named after himself. “Buchananism” is what the acerbic commentator and former Nixon and Reagan aide calls his strain of 1990s populism, a roughly crocheted blend of right-wing, nationalistic and anticorporate fervor that has unhinged his presidential rivals and horrified party regulars.

Inside the eye of the storm, not even Buchanan can tell the true depth and dimensions of the insurrection roiling around him. Its endurance may depend more on unseen tides coursing through the electorate than on Buchanan’s own ability to exploit them. For the moment, he is a surf rider astride a monster wave.

Link With Crowds

The link between the man and his crowds is almost umbilical. Buchanan is their surrogate, their mouthpiece, injecting into public discourse resentments that few politicians utter and none wield with his surgical vitriol. On the campaign trail, the familiar Washington talk show figure disappears, replaced by a tough-talking gunslinger in black hat. His Chesapeake drawl metamorphoses into a Western twang; his speeches grow thick with “y’alls.”

He is aware of the extremists, the “lost souls” on the margin of his movement, the sour men who laugh contemptuously when he vilifies the Wall Street investment firm of Goldman, Sachs. It is a risk that populists from William Jennings Bryan to George Wallace took as they built their followings out of Americans’ private disappointments and need to find public scapegoats. Buchanan insists he will not abide racist supporters--but says he has no control over the fringe figures hidden among his crowds.

“I can’t be responsible for everyone who shows up at the rallies,” he says, adding: “They’re supporting my views; I’m not supporting theirs.”

Buchanan’s speeches, “a little poetry, a little history, a little romance,” tumble out “free-form, off the top of my head,” he says. He draws on years as a bulldog debater, on his photographic, conservative-filtered recall of American history, on his intuitive feel for his audience’s mood.

Buchanan’s audience almost anticipates his attack lines.

“He’s not a politician, doesn’t talk weasel words,” said Byron Nabbe, 55, a soybean farmer who fell in with the Buchanan Brigaders in Iowa last year and followed it to Scottsdale, Ariz., where he spends his winters. “It’s people’s talk, plain and simple. You know where Pat stands.”

Tapping Discontent

Stealing a private moment from the campaign’s chaos, sprawled out on a couch in his Patriot Winnebago, Buchanan says that what he and his people share is the belief that they are strangers in their own land, the “sense that they’re losing their own country, that the culture has become alien to them.”

As he has turned to each new state, Buchanan has played and abandoned issues like a reckless poker player going hell-bent through a deck of cards.

“It’s not a unified movement,” said political writer Kevin Phillips. “He’s found a different base of frustrated people in every state he’s gone into. That’s what has made his campaign so effective--but it’s also what makes it so hard to tell if it’s going to last.”

In Alaska, Buchanan railed against the intrusion of government wildlife agencies. In Iowa, he tilted against giant hog lots, then pushed hard against abortion after his right-to-life stance won big in the Louisiana caucuses. He stormed through the mill towns of New Hampshire, decrying corporate disloyalty to workers--an attack that helped him win the state’s influential primary last week.

Trolling for support among the flinty Arizona conservatives who launched Goldwater and later powered the brief reign of archconservative Gov. Evan Mecham, Buchanan has played on simmering border-town resentment of illegal immigrants and championed the property rights protests of ranchers and miners in a state where 70% of the land is federally owned.

In Gila Bend last week, Buchanan hoarsely shouted down a young Mexican American offended by his tirades against immigrants. Mexico’s refugees “have no right to come in here and break our laws and commit crime,” he hollered over the protests of 18-year-old student Marciano Murillo Jr. And at a gathering of property rights activists in Tempe, Buchanan mocked “bureaucrats in sandals and beads” who bar oil drilling on public lands.

Even as Buchanan’s Go-Pat-Go Express rolled past cactus-strewn ridgelines deep in Arizona’s high Rim Country, he was pondering another pinball carom onto a new set of issues designed for Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

“Let’s see,” he mused inside his RV, “in South Carolina, you’ve got the Citadel issue, federal courts going in there . . . the judge who’s hammering the Citadel [forcing the admission of female students], the idea of these federal judges dictating to these small institutions. Maybe even it’s the old [Confederate] battle flag. And its [massive layoffs in] the textile mills.”

Energized Supporters

There are always new veins of resentment to tap. Gun fanciers in camouflage caps, abortion foes with their toddlers, Latino couples disgusted with illegal immigration and Sunbelt businessmen craving justice for “us angry white males”--they turn out by the thousands now, streaming so quickly into a high school gym in Yuma last week that the local fire marshal had to bar the doors.

After the speeches, Buchanan audiences talk back, surging forward as he double pumps his handshakes, Lyndon B. Johnson-style. “Put America first,” yelled a woman aiming a disposable camera after a rally in the mountaintop town of Payson. “Hey, Pat,” yelled Lincoln Forte, a conspiracy theorist in a buckskin fringe jacket, “who are the majority stockholders in the Federal Reserve bank?”

Conversions come in the course of a single talk. At a meeting of an Arizona Right to Life chapter in Tempe, Julie Pierce went in a supporter of publishing heir Steve Forbes and left a Buchananista.

“He was last on my list,” marveled Pierce, 36, a paralegal with three children. “I figured he was just another politician. But those words! Did you hear him? It was almost like poetry. It goes straight to your heart.”

At a candidates’ debate at Arizona State University, the auditorium throbbed with the cheers, hoots and catcalls of GOP students who roared for Buchanan just as an earlier generation of campus idealists lionized anti-war Sens. McCarthy and George S. McGovern.

“Man, I wish I could be as blunt in my dorm room and my classrooms as he is on stage,” said James Barrett, 21, who is studying for a doctorate in elementary education. “He says what we all would like to say, but we can’t because of all this political correctness.”

Compared to the road-hardened political professionals who staff rival campaigns, Buchanan’s operation is a nursery, staffed by well-groomed young Republicans who see themselves as the guerrillas of a political revolution.

Curtis Gans, who was staff director for McCarthy’s 1968 presidential run and now directs the nonpartisan Center for the American Electorate in Washington, detects a parallel between the leftist children’s crusaders and Buchanan’s right-wing young Turks.

“There’s a level of energy that only the young can provide,” Gans said. “It appears that Buchanan’s kids may have the same kind of drive.” The difference, Gans said, is that McCarthy’s idealists “represented the majority opinion among American youth at the time. I don’t see these young Republicans as a majority base among the larger group of young voters.”

Even if his campaign sputters out, Buchanan says he will still go out a winner if he can inspire a new generation of young conservatives--just as Goldwater became his model after the devastating Johnson landslide of 1964.

“Maybe 30 years from now,” Buchanan said, “some guy’s going to be a United States senator, maybe a governor, maybe running for president, and he’ll look over and say, ‘You know where I got my start? In the Buchanan campaign.’ ”