A Nasty Campaign of ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ : Buchanan’s appeal to voters’ fears

In eight short months, either the United States will have a new President, or its old President will be back for a new term in office. The lead time seems breathtakingly short by comparison with the immense distance in mood that separates the present confusion from the clarity and unity that the nation still yearns for when it thinks of its chief executive. Will we get there by the time we get there?

A part of the public impatience with our presidential candidates is, of course, simple unhappiness that things are as damned complicated as they are. No institution comes closer than our national political system to being coextensive with the national situation itself. Were we a bit happier about the latter, we might be able to see the candidates as honorable men in distinguished careers offering us their thinking and themselves as best they can. Insiders all, to be sure, but in a happier mood we might just call that experience.

Only one of the current crop of insiders has put himself not just outside the political system but outside a key national consensus, one that must be maintained if we are to survive at all as a nation. Pat Buchanan, former Nixon aide, former Reagan aide, is as much a Beltway baby as any of them. (He was, in fact, born and bred in Washington.) His platform, moreover, is slapped together from denunciatory themes that have worked time and again for his old bosses: against abortion rights, against pornography, against foreign aid, against affirmative action, against welfare, against feminism and, above all, against taxation and big government. Against “them.”

It is because this is indeed so familiar a litany that President Bush and his supporters have had so difficult a time throwing back the Buchanan challenge. They have denounced Buchanan for disloyalty and divisiveness. They have not denounced the substance of his views.

But President Bush, despite the race-baiting Willie Horton ad and his long holding action against the Civil Rights Act, can find plenty of daylight between himself and a man who speaks as follows:

Adolf Hitler was “an individual of great courage . . . extraordinary gifts.” Women are “less equipped psychologically . . . in the brawling arenas of business, commerce, industry and the professions.”

Or: “Why are we more shocked when a dozen people are killed in Vilnius than (by) a massacre in Burundi? Because they are white people. That’s who we are. That’s where America comes from.”

In point of simplest fact, that’s not who we all are or where we all come from. For too long, we sold ourselves that lie. We shall die as a nation if we buy it again.

Here, at least, President Bush can campaign against Pat Buchanan on substance. And he must do so now, or we may all have to do so in 1996.