Give Pat Buchanan this much: he has propelled himself out of the Crossfire thunderdome and into the first tier of G.O.P. hopefuls for 1996. He has jerked a nervous President hard to starboard and roused the Bush-Quayle campaign from groggy complacency. And he has singlehandedly destroyed the incipient threat Bush faced from Louisiana's David Duke. Not bad for 13 weeks' work.
Republican Party elders say it is nonetheless time for Buchanan to do the ! right thing. They will bombard the TV commentator with calls to get out of the race this week no matter how he fares in the Michigan primary. But Buchanan is likely to ignore pleas for party loyalty, vowing to stay in until the California primary on June 2. From now on, however, it will be a race with a difference: instead of running against Bush, Buchanan will increasingly oppose rival conservatives who he feels hijacked the movement years ago. "At this point," says Burton Pines of the Heritage Foundation, "the target of Buchanan really stops being Bush and becomes the pretenders for the conservative mantle."
Rifts on the right are nothing new. Before he became a campaign-trail phenomenon, Buchanan was just a standard 1950s-style conservative who believed in isolationism, protectionism and white people. The ideology he was steeped in as a child -- some call it "paleoconservatism" -- was overtaken during the 1960s and '70s by a more interventionist, internationalist group contaminated by heresies like civil rights and support for Israel. These variations annoyed Buchanan, who for months before the race likened neoconservatives to "fleas who conclude they are steering the dog." When Buchanan began his quixotic presidential bid in December, notes Tony Fabrizio, who was briefly the candidate's pollster, "his goal was to cleanse the conservative movement of the people who don't agree with him."
With Buchanan's success at the polls, the paleo-neo fault line widened into a canyon of controversy, as leading conservatives rushed to choose sides. Neoconservatives and many Reaganites lined up against Buchanan, dismissing his message as negative and exclusionary. Bush haters and old-line conservatives, particularly those disaffected by Washington's self-important neo-con luminaries, admired Buchanan's courage and supported him with money. Says Catholic University's Stuart Rothenberg: "Buchanan has been confusing for conservatives. They don't like what he says, but they're so anxious to see George Bush punished that their reaction has been a mix of embarrassment and admiration at the same time."