Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 20, 1992 TAG: 9203200443
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One can argue that Pat Buchanan made his ownership of a Mercedes-Benz a legitimate "issue" by his loony stress on putting "America first" as a way of attacking President Bush for letting the nation's domestic problems go out of control.
One can also understand that to an unemployed auto worker in Michigan foreign cars, whatever a "foreign" car is, mean fewer sales of American cars, whatever these days an "American" car is, and that falling sales of "American" cars spell fewer jobs building them.
But the reduction of the nation's industrial, trade and employment problems to an attack on Buchanan's ownership of a Mercedes not only reveals, once again, how petty Bush and his campaign advisers really are but demonstrates, were any demonstration needed, that his preoccupation with trivia is complete.
Still, that is Bush's style, and no one who paid attention to his imbecilic and insulting campaign four years ago should be surprised. The Willie Horton, flag-factory and Boston-harbor commercials proved nothing, either about Michael Dukakis or the problems the United States faced. But Bush had no qualms about using them or about distracting voters from the fundamental question of what sort of "vision" he would bring to the White House were he to get there.
He got there, of course, and eventually voters discovered that apart from bombing Iraq into toothpicks he had no more vision than a snail, was indeed incapable of developing one. One could at least hope that in 1992 voters will remember his trivia and demand something more substantial of him.
Leopards do not change their spots, however, and asking George Bush to rise above puerility and hysteria is asking more of him than he can give. The large majorities he has amassed in the primaries completed thus far suggest that he is still Republican Numero Uno.
Yet there is a doubt, a small one, true, and statistically a doubt of no consequence. It's like the doubt one feels when the tongue first discovers a lost filling. It nags and will not go away.
The occasion is, now to the surprise of no one, the stubborn vote going again and again to Buchanan, whose insurgent campaign from the right wing of the Republican Party continues to draw something a bit below or a bit above, but never far from, a quarter of the GOP votes cast.
Buchanan cannot win the Republican nomination and surely no longer deceives himself that he can, if he ever did. But the persistence of his campaign, and the consistency of the votes it attracts, indicates that all is not for the best, for Bush, in this best of all Republican worlds.
Buchanan is winning the votes of alienated Republicans, not all of them the "conservatives" for whom he claims to speak. He is winning the votes, if exit polls mean anything, of Republicans who cannot be considered a part of the GOP right, but who are merely angry at Bush for his dithering, laxity and blindness. And - perhaps worst of all for Bush come fall - Buchanan is winning the "swing" votes of self-styled "independents," occasional Republicans as well as erstwhile Democrats, who threaten in no case to support Bush in November. The "swing vote" is generally thought to be what keeps Republicans in the White House.
None of this may matter as the year unrolls, to be sure. Bush's preoccupation with trivia and his inability to rise above it may be surpassed, as so often happens, by Democratic bumbling. Nor is there any reason to think American voters yet see through the reductionist dirty tricks characteristic of Bush campaigns. His success in Michigan underscores that.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB