ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 5, 1996 TAG: 9603050066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 NATL/INTL EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SERIES: Election '96
SOURCE: JODI ENDA KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
VOTERS ARE CARRYING Pat Buchanan's message of shrinking government, protecting jobs and living morally to the ballot boxes.
His words landed like punches - short jabs, stinging uppercuts and powerful right hooks. He delivered a rapid combination of blows to the nation's head and to its heart.
He mocked the Democratic National Convention as ``the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.'' He derided ``Prince Albert'' Gore as an environmental extremist and disparaged Hillary Rodham Clinton as a radical feminist. Then he summoned Americans to ``take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.''
But, from whom?
``There is a religious war going on in this country for the soul of America,'' he bellowed from the stage at the Republican National Convention. ``It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.''
He called on Republicans and the nation to unite behind George Bush, but filled his speech with words that divide.
And, oh, were people angry. Many reviled Pat Buchanan back in 1992.
Then ... they followed him.
Perhaps without realizing it, people have touted his ideas - ideas about fostering family values, prayer in school and the right to own guns. Ideas about ending affirmative action and shrinking government, welfare and taxes.
They carried those ideas to the ballot box, voting new people into Congress - Republican people, conservative people, people who extolled a Buchananesque philosophy with such thunder that Buchanan himself no longer seemed shrill.
The country not only has Buchanan on the ballot again, but also has a phalanx of candidates who seem to be trying to prove they are like Buchanan in spirit and true to the conservative cause.
Nearly four years after Buchanan delivered a speech derided as a body blow to the Republican Party and the country, both have re-emerged in his image.
Making Buchanan, who lost every primary he entered in 1992, a winner after all.
Buchanan started off as ``Paddy Joe'' Buchanan, who had an ideal life.
At its core was family, church, and an unwavering belief that from those two institutions ``Truth'' is bestowed.
His childhood was one filled with kinship and prayer, a respect for learning and a conviction that anything worth doing - studying, working, playing, fighting - was worth doing well. Born on All Souls Day, 1938, the third of nine children in a very close, Roman Catholic family in Washington, D.C., Buchanan excelled in school and sports, engaged in sophomoric shenanigans, and practiced an Old World chivalry impressed on him by his father. He could recite the ``Hail Mary'' before he could walk.
His ``Pop,'' William Baldwin Buchanan, an up-by-his-bootstraps accountant given to harsh punishment and moral rectitude, led the family in dinnertime debates about politics and spoke reverently of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and the Confederacy. The church was not open to question. Sex was not discussed. Communism was loathed. Loyalty, ingrained. Emotion, unmanly.
It was, Pat Buchanan wrote in ``Right From the Beginning,'' his 1988 autobiography, ``another time in America, in many ways a better time.''
A time that lives with him still, in his heart, in his campaign.
When Buchanan rails against abortion, or condoms in school, when he preaches personal responsibility and the need to teach morality, when he defends Richard Nixon, and most certainly when he invokes the pre-World War II isolationist slogan ``America First,'' he is speaking as much as Paddy Joe as he is as Patrick J.
``A lot of people say we're living in the past,'' said Charles Leasure, who has known Buchanan since third grade. ``I don't think so. You like to retain what worked before.''
At a time when other candidates base platforms on polls, Buchanan has remained immobile on many fronts. He emotes the sense of conviction acquired from the nuns and Jesuits who taught him from grade school through college. He speaks with the confidence of a child told that he possessed the Truth. It is his upbringing, said his brother James, that spurred Buchanan to set aside the career as a columnist and commentator that made him a millionaire to seek an office few think he can obtain.
The two-fingered whistles and chants of ``Go, Pat, Go!'' are deafening as hundreds of bodies press together, packing the Washington Hilton's lower lobby. Finally, he arrives.
At the Christian Coalition's national convention, Buchanan is very big. Almost all the Republican candidates have come to speak, but Buchanan has nabbed the keynote slot. Right next to Oliver North. Here, you don't get much bigger than that.
Buchanan carries the audience with him as he paints his vision of an America many of them long to see. It is his usual stump speech, which he begins by introducing his ``nominee to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton,'' Shelley Buchanan. But banter quickly gives way to Buchanan's trademark rhetoric.
``I will keep this party pro-life. I will choose a pro-life vice president. I will appoint pro-life justices who will overturn Roe vs. Wade. I will make my presidency a bully pulpit for the right to life,'' Buchanan asserts. The audience roars.
``But that isn't enough.'' His voice grows sober. ``We need to make this beloved country of ours God's country once again.''
Buchanan is still fighting for America's soul. Next he takes on the Education Department's voluntary National History Standards for schools:
``There's no mention of Paul Revere's ride, no mention of Robert E. Lee, one mention of U.S. Grant, no mention of Thomas Edison, no mention of the Wright brothers. But there are 17 mentions of the Ku Klux Klan,'' Buchanan says. Coalition members gasp.
``The people that write these histories despise America's history, and they've got an agenda that is to inculcate and indoctrinate America's children in their contempt for America's past,'' he contends. ``I'll tell you, we don't need some miserable secular humanist in sandals and beads at the Department of Education telling us how to educate America's children.''
(Offstage, Buchanan concedes that he knows of no such sandaled-and-beaded bureaucrat. But that doesn't stop him from using the image to depict the Education Department as a bogeyman out to destroy the "true history" of this country.)
The problem with the schools, he continues in his stump speech, is that they have lost sight of their primary goal - the ``inculcation of values.''
``Listen, when we see God and the Bible, sources of morality, expelled from the public schools, and Playboy magazine and condoms brought in, that's part of this cultural war. When we see Easter give way to Earth Day, that's part of this cultural war.''
The crowd is his. These are Buchanan folk, true believers who think the way he does. They share his disdain for promiscuity and godlessness, his longing for a simpler, more righteous nation.
For the nation they think they once had.
This is the second in a series of profiles on the leading Republican presidential candidates.
LENGTH: Long : 131 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Pat Buchanan shakes hands with Harold and Elizabethby CNBEarls in Roswell, Ga., Monday. color. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT PROFILE