Last Mad Dash for Patrick J. Buchanan’s Crusade

It was the last mad dash, an appropriately frenetic coda to Patrick J. Buchanan’s weeklong trek across California and his entire guerrilla primary crusade--a wearying day capped by a tour of the San Diego convention hall where the conservative commentator vowed Monday that he would mount a bruising “battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”

Leapfrogging the state by chartered jet on a final full day of campaigning before today’s primary, Buchanan’s 14-hour airborne blitzkrieg proceeded without any hope of victory, a whirl of motion that passed for momentum, a succession of news conferences and rallies pervaded with the dawning sense that his self-proclaimed “Buchananist” movement would have to find new ways of keeping its populist fire lit.

Even as he toured the cavernous San Diego Convention Center hall where he expects to mount his platform fight, Buchanan talked of a post-primary meeting with aides and conservative leaders planned later this week at his campaign headquarters in McLean, Va. A group of some two dozen Buchanan intimates will work on a “McLean Manifesto”--a document that Buchanan expects to chart the future of his movement and ultimately, he hopes, the GOP as well.

“The objective,” he said, “is to bring the Republican Party and its future our way.”

Swooping down from the air for appearances in San Diego, Sacramento and Spokane, Wash., Buchanan tried to be everywhere at once, at least over the state’s free airwaves. He started his campaigning long before dawn, waking up before 4 a.m. in his hotel room in Glendale to telephone radio talk show hosts in the Los Angeles area.

More than 14 hours later, he had not visibly slowed, appearing for a rally in Spokane, where he hoped to persuade disaffected Democrats and independents to cross party lines and vote for him in Washington’s open primary.

“The stronger Pat Buchanan’s vote is,” he told a small crowd of loyalists who crowded onto a Sacramento airport tarmac, “the better the chance we have that the Republican Party will reach out to our voters, the voters it needs to win the election” in November.

Buchanan acknowledged that his repeated threats of a third-party bid and his refusal to endorse Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were part of an ongoing effort to gain “leverage” over the party’s platform.

“We would surrender all the leverage we have if we stepped down now,” he said. And he added that he expects tough negotiations over the party’s ideals because the “Republican establishment responds only to strength.”

“If we walk in there with 3 or 4 million votes,” he said, “my voice will be louder and clearer than if we walked in with 2 million votes,” a figure he passed last week. As he walked into the concrete-walled hall in San Diego, Buchanan talked of another prime-time speech--like his controversial 1992 “cultural war” jeremiad--as if the fight for it was already won.

“Are you going to show me where I’m going to be speaking?” he whispered to center manager Carol Wallace as she ushered him into the hall, a gaping room where the view is broken by massive concrete pillars.

“We have a spot for you right here,” she told him.

Buchanan still plans to campaign in primaries later this spring, but by Monday, his traveling roadshow was ready for packing up, displaying visible signs of wear accumulated from the punishing pace of the telescoped three-month primary campaign.

The vinyl “Buchanan for President” sign that campaign aides have unfurled at every rally and press conference since January is ready for mothballs, a map of wrinkles and dogears. The campaign’s “Go Pat Go” theme song has been played so often at rallies that even some Buchanan aides have winced lately when its cheery tune cranked up.

Even Shelly Buchanan, the candidate’s trouper of a wife, sighed happily at the start of Monday’s aerial tour as she realized she was about to go home to suburban Virginia, then recoiled slightly when she realized a year’s worth of unopened mail awaited in tiny mountains in their dining room. “I can’t wait to get home,” she said.