Pat Buchanan’s Exit Strategy Could Backfire

Go, Pat, Go? It looks like he’s going, going--all but gone. And while Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson will try to convince Pat Buchanan not to bolt the GOP, the folks who really should be saying Stay, Pat, Stay are his fellow right-to-lifers. Because if Buchanan jumps parties, the cause he has held dearest--”innocent human life is sacred and cannot be taken,” as he said on Sunday’s “Meet the Press”--likely will be badly damaged.

Asked on the talk show if he would commit to endorsing the Republican nominee next year, Buchanan, who finished a distant fifth in last month’s Iowa straw poll, didn’t bother with the familiarly dodgy I’m-sure-the-nominee-will-be-me response. Rather, he denounced the GOP as “a Xerox copy” of the Democrats and said he was “strongly” leaning toward seeking the Reform Party nomination.

While Buchanan has expanded his message to include Ross Perot-like “economic nationalism,” his base constituency is and always will be Catholic pro-lifers. No doubt some of them are angry enough to secede, but their real gripe, a quarter-century after Roe vs. Wade, should be with the country, which is effectively pro-choice. The GOP, meanwhile, has kept the faith on clutch concerns as partial-birth abortion. But pro-life clout could be kiboshed if Buchanan exits and thereby exposes the numerical weakness of the anti-abortion movement.

Narrow-ideology groups flourish only when they are part of a broad coalition. If they try and go it alone, they are left isolated and marginalized. This basic political science lesson has been relearned this decade in Pennsylvania.

Peg Luksik, a self-proclaimed “housewife from Johnstown,” is a longtime activist in the Keystone State; her multiple candidacies measure just how many votes the right-to-lifers can pull in a socially conservative, Catholic-rich state. Short answer: not enough. In 1990, she ran in the Republican gubernatorial primary against the state’s incumbent auditor; she lost but scored an impressive 45.5% of the vote. Numbers such as that could have made her a player in Republican politics, but she went a different route, one that made her a pariah instead. In 1994, she ran as the “Constitutional” candidate for governor, focusing her fire on the pro-choice Republican nominee, Tom Ridge. She earned 13% of the statewide general election vote, not enough to keep Ridge from winning.

Luksik ran third-party again in 1998; while her platform had many planks, in the words of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette political editor James O’Toole, “Opposition to abortion has been at the core of Luksik’s appeal in all her races.” Revealingly, the total number of votes she won varied little in her three races; the difference was that her base of 350,000 or so loyal voters bulks much larger inside a Republican primary than it does in a general election. Meanwhile, Ridge won big; he buried his Democrat challenger in one of the biggest landslides in state history, 57% to 31%. Indeed, having demonstrated his vote-harvesting skills in a traditionally Democratic state, Ridge is now said to be on George W. Bush’s vice presidential short list.

Pro-life Republicans, who count Bush among their number, will no doubt seek to block a pro-choicer on the ’00 ticket. But if Buchanan launches a Luksikian fringe fling and draws away the fervent faithful, then pro-lifers will have that much less leverage inside the GOP.

Of course, Buchanan’s goal is to make the GOP lose in 2000 and thereby teach the party a lesson about deviating, even in the slightest, from pro-life orthodoxy. But the Pennsylvania experience suggests that it won’t work out that way; indeed, the two most recent nonpartisan presidential polls show Buchanan with a Luksik-like ceiling: 9% and 10%, respectively. More to the point, Bush still beats Al Gore handily.

Which suggests a terrible possibility for right-to-lifers: Maybe the Republicans would do better without them. That was the case in Pennsylvania, where Ridge, framed by Luksik into the center, twice carried the same moderate Philadelphia suburbs that pro-lifers George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole lost in ’92 and ’96.

So right-to-lifers have a problem: Their hearts may be telling them to go with Pat, but their heads should tell them to stand pat. Meanwhile, regular Republicans have no reason to dissuade Buchanan from going--the sooner the better.