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Wednesday, March 15, 2000
By James O'Toole, Politics Editor, Post-Gazette
He's at 6 percent in the polls. Ross Perot partisans are making noises about challenging him for his new party's nomination. And the Reform Party itself is riven with dissension.
Pat Buchanan has them just where he wants them.
"We're up and running now that the primaries are over," the former columnist assured one of the scores of supporters who showed up to get his autograph yesterday.
Buchanan was in Pittsburgh to raise money for his presidential campaign and to sell about 100 copies of his book, "A Republic, Not an Empire," during the autograph session at Waldenbooks in South Hills Village.
Buchanan has kept a relatively low profile for the last few months. But with the major party nominations effectively decided, he's back making the rounds of the Sunday talk shows, back, he hopes, as a significant factor in the presidential race.
"We're out there campaigning; if it takes off, there's no way George W. can be president of the United States; it's as simple as that," he said.
Tomorrow, he's making a major speech elaborating on his anti-establishment themes at Harvard University.
Sen. John McCain, the vanquished but not vanished Republican maverick, was sharply critical of the work displayed on the wall behind Buchanan's desk at Waldenbooks -- he denounced Buchanan's assertion that Hitler ceased to represent a threat to the United States after 1940 -- but Buchanan maintains that McCain's supporters will naturally migrate to his banner.
"It's very anti-establishment, very anti- the Republican establishment," Buchanan said of the McCain voting bloc. "They're for radical campaign reform; so am I. . . . [McCain] wants to eliminate soft money; I would go further. I want to eliminate congressional pensions and impose term limits."
Buchanan acknowledges that his candidacy has the potential unintended consequence of driving the presidency into the hands of Vice President Al Gore and away from the party he left last fall.
"Obviously, there's an element of risk, it's undeniable," he said when asked about that possibility. "Obviously, there is the possibility that you could hurt the causes you believe in, but look at Washington -- the Republican Party, the establishment is almost a Xeroxed copy [of the Democrats]."
"You've got two Clintonized parties in Washington, D.C., and one of them calls itself the Republican Party. We need a new party."
A small but steady crowd flowed through the store for about 90 minutes, clutching their books, waiting for his big confident signature.
Many said they would vote for him in the fall, but some were drawn by his celebrity rather than his candidacy. Pam and Jack Spencer said they would be voting for Alan Keyes in the state's GOP primary on April 4, and while they said they liked Buchanan's ideas, said they thought they would vote in the Republican column in November.
But Bob Jones of Swissvale pledges his ballot to Buchanan.
"It's the trade issue mainly," said Jones, a retired steelworker. "Now you go to the Wal-Mart and all you see are these made-in-China things. I don't see why that should be -- he's the only one talking about that."
As the line made its way toward the candidate, workers for the Reform Party circulated collecting some of the nearly 22,000 signatures needed to get the party on the ballot in Pennsylvania's general election.
"His issues are my issues," said LaVerne Sober, of Greensburg. "No one else is talking about China; no one else is talking about Kosovo. The reality is we don't have two parties now; we have one party."
Buchanan said he thought Reform Party founder Ross Perot would be a formidable candidate if he got into the race. But, despite the entreaties of the Perot loyalists, Buchanan said he doubted that would happen. And he noted that the logistical hurdles of ballot access would make it very difficult for any other candidate to realistically compete for the party's nomination at this point.