Candidate Buchanan Running Lonely Race a Few Laps Behind

It’s 5:30 a.m., and Pat Buchanan is blasting past red lights and over sidewalks in back of a black Lincoln Town Car barreling through deserted downtown Little Rock.

After three interviews at three television stations in 30 minutes, he jets off to a cramped studio in Birmingham, Ark., to record his latest radio ad. He turns to a nearby speaker phone and demands the day’s poll results from Bay Buchanan, his sister and confidant.

“You’re holding at one,” she says. “You’re a sleeper, Pat, you’re a sleeper.”

He lets out a laugh, at once both pained and pleased. “We’ll have a whale of a fourth quarter,” he says.

Probably not. As opposed to fellow third-party candidate Ralph Nader, Buchanan has simply vanished as a political force in this year’s presidential election, stuck at 1% in the national polls.

Even a last-minute blitz of television ads and campaign stops this weekend seems unlikely to win the 5% of the popular vote his Reform Party needs to receive federal election money four years from now.

The poor showing has given the Republicans a distinct edge in the closing days of this election, experts said. As Democrats scramble to discourage liberals from supporting Nader, the GOP has locked down precious percentage points among voters on the right wing of their political spectrum.

Buchanan’s conservative appeal simply hasn’t been enough to pry Republicans--hungry to regain the White House--from GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush.

“In politics, it’s easy to coalesce around a common enemy. For conservatives, that enemy is the Democratic Party and the Clinton-Gore administration,” said Bruce Cain, director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies.

Who would have thought that Pat Buchanan--one of the most controversial voices on the American right for more than three decades, a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon--could be so ignored?

Just four years ago, he seriously challenged for the Republican nomination, winning the 1996 New Hampshire primary. Two years ago, he was still on CNN’s popular “Crossfire.”

And now? He’s scrambling for space on local early morning TV news, squeezed between the furniture commercials and live pancake breakfast shots.

“Nobody’s taking him seriously,” Cain said.

Buchanan, among the savviest of political observers, knows he is an asterisk in the polls, with no chance of winning. But he is also certain his time will come, when his issues--stopping illegal immigration, reducing overseas entanglements and ending free trade--will prevail again.

“We just have to go through our own little Gethsemane,” Buchanan said over a quick breakfast Friday in New York City.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The idea a year ago was to eliminate the competition from Reform Party contenders like Donald Trump, take over the party’s $12.6 million in federal election funds and storm to a decent showing in the polls.

Message Is Neither Here Nor There

Buchanan attributes his descent into presidential irrelevancy to a variety of reasons: the long, bruising fight for control of the Reform Party, gall bladder operations earlier this year that shut him down for a month and, most damaging, being barred from the national debates.

But many of the same factors affect Nader, who at least is drawing the magic 5% that may hand the Green Party federal election funds in the next presidential election cycle. Buchanan’s biggest problem may simply be that his time has passed.

His anti-illegal immigrant, anti-free trade rhetoric doesn’t resonate well in a time of economic prosperity, experts say. And his anti-abortion stance, a source of strength in previous elections, failed to convince his supporters to follow him when he left the Republican Party last fall.

“Unless the Republican Party abandons the pro-life agenda, there’s no room for a third party on the right,” said Terry Jeffrey, Buchanan’s campaign manager in 1996 and editor of the conservative Human Events magazine.

Buchanan acknowledges his message is out of step with the times.

“We’re warning about what is coming, and the people are reflecting on what is,” Buchanan said. “The passion in this race is to get rid of Clinton-Gore. That’s what people are more interested in than issues and ideas.”

But with tongue in cheek, Buchanan predicts vindication after the “invasion” of illegal immigrants and growing trade deficits bring down the economy.

“People are going to say, ‘Who was that guy back then who was talking about this?’ And they’ll say, ‘Buchanan’s the guy. Isn’t he dead?’ ”

That sort of fatalism suffuses the campaign, rendering it both comic and desperate. It takes only a few days on the hustings to reveal the incongruity of mixing high name recognition and low poll standing.

At airport after airport, fans flocked to Buchanan, seeking autographs. But nearly as many seemed puzzled by his presence. One woman in Birmingham whispered to a friend: “I think that’s Pat Buchanan, but why would he be here?” A security guard in the lobby of a local newspaper leaned over to ask: “What office is he running for?”

With a shoestring staff, many decisions are made on the fly. A planned trip to North Carolina was canceled when Buchanan and his wife, Shelley, found out they had been put on a standby flight, with the rest of their staff of three to catch up later.

Victories tend to be small. When a CBS poll showed Buchanan’s support rising to 2%, his small band of helpers let out a cheer. “We doubled our support,” said K.B. Forbes, his spokesman.

That’s not to say Buchanan’s not trying. On Friday, he unveiled his fifth and final television ad, spending most of the rest of the Reform Party’s money on a 200-media-market buying spree in more than 25 states.

Like his other ads, the latest one is designed to be provocative, showing images of the recent terrorist attack on the guided-missile destroyer Cole and warning against overseas military commitments. Other ads have showed a man choking on a meatball and dialing 911, only to get a multilingual automated message system. Another featured illegal immigrants, apparently running across the border, much like former California Gov. Pete Wilson’s infamous reelection ad in 1994.

But the ads have generated little of the hoped-for controversy that would guarantee wider distribution through news stories. Case in point: When Buchanan’s spokesman asked if anyone wanted the newest ad played again during a sparsely attended news conference, no one raised a hand.

In addition to advertising, Buchanan is traveling seven days a week, 16 hours a day, doing as many local TV and radio interviews as possible to raise his profile. On Wednesday, for instance, he conducted 23 interviews with local newspapers and television and radio stations. He has already visited 30 states.

But that reduces the campaign to an endless blur of five-minute interviews.

That means 5 1/2 hours of sleep a night. Bad coffee from airport vending machines. Dinner at McDonald’s. And the endless, endless question: Why are you running?

Buchanan does his best to answer every question, whether from a barely awake morning television anchor or the radio talk-show host who asked darkly: “RU-486. Partial-birth abortion. Britney Spears. Are we losing the culture war?”

It’s the only weapon he has, he said.

The major candidates “have got 100 reporters and TV cameras right with them. You say something in the morning and it goes all over America,” Buchanan said. “You’re me, we get everybody in Tallahassee, everybody in Little Rock. You have to go from market to market.”

Buchanan Uncertain of Post-Election Plans

Buchanan turned 62 this week, a passing marked only by a hasty presentation of gifts from his three-man staff in an Atlanta airport and a cake before a speaker’s club in Tallahassee, Fla.

He’s not sure what he’ll do after the race. Write his memoirs. Evaluate whether he can somehow keep the Reform Party going as a new far-right party. Or simply get a job.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, to be honest,” Buchanan said. “I’m the only guy who doesn’t have a job in this economy.”

The pace is grinding, and it shows. Toward the end of one long day earlier this week, Buchanan sought respite on a bench outside the Atlanta airport, exhausted after 16 hours of campaigning.

As he waited for his car to pick him up, he sat alone under the yellowish glare of the overhead lights, reading a new Gore Vidal book.

It was about the years from World War II to the Korean War, when America seemed more grand and life more innocent.