RON MITCHELL MAKES PRETTY GOOD MONey for a guy who never went to college: $14.50 an hour as an electrician at a computer firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Trouble is, it's the same pay he was earning 13 years ago. Over those years, Mitchell, 49, and his wife and three children had to make adjustments: sending her to work at an oatmeal factory, eating "a little lower on the food chain," turning the thermostat down to 55 degrees and "walking around the house like Indians in blankets." That might have been acceptable, the Mitchells say, if everyone were in the same boat. Instead--like three-fourths of Americans--their hourly pay has remained frozen even as executive salaries, corporate profits and the stock market have boomed. To borrow a phrase from the 1992 presidential campaign, the Mitchells have worked hard and played by the rules. But somehow the game got rigged. And they're looking for someone to bring the old rules back.
Although Mitchell was once active in his county Democratic Party and supported Dick Gephardt for President in 1988 he can't stomach Bill Clinton and hasn't seen him tackle the wage problem in an effective way. Nor is Mitchell hearing answers from most of the Republicans running for President. But there's one exception, and that's why, on a crisp October evening, Mitchell drives to a hotel ballroom on the outskirts of town and listens to a former Nixon speechwriter named Pat Buchanan.
When Buchanan barks that it isn't fair for "corporate chieftains" to get rich even as the wages of their workers stagnate, he seems to know what Mitchell and the 80 others in the audience are going through. They nod in approval when Buchanan slams President Clinton for lending billions of dollars to Mexico. "Why did we send them $50 billion?" the maverick Republican asks. "Because bonds were coming due, my friends!" And he cuts the air with a karate chop. "So we got the New York bankers--Citibank, Chase Manhattan and Goldman Sachs--off the hook. But guess who's on the hook? You and your children and grandchildren!" The crowd applauds enthusiastically--as it does each time Buchanan sets up and knocks down another alleged enemy of the American worker, from trade agreements to the United Nations. Afterward, Mitchell concedes that he isn't clear exactly how Buchanan would restore the old social compact and boost his pay. But at least Buchanan understands his problem and has given him someone to blame.
In the absence of anything better from any other candidate, that is comfort enough for Mitchell and, it seems, for millions of other voters. It has been enough to propel the bellicose Buchanan--infamous for a 1992 G.O.P. convention speech that sent a chill down the spine of anyone less inclined to see America in terms of us vs. them--into second place in the polls, just behind Senate majority leader Bob Dole. After a long time of hand-to-mouth electioneering, Buchanan earlier this month also claimed second place in the money race, surpassing the third-quarter fund raising of formidable fund raiser Phil Gramm.