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Even more important than dollars or polls is the emerging sense that Buchanan is setting the pace in this race. He's the one with the resonant message; he's the one with the most passionate following, the true believers, who won't drift off to support Lamar Alexander or Arlen Specter if the weather changes in New Hampshire. And most telling of all, he's the one the other candidates have started to copy. Pat Buchanan is fast becoming the Perot of 1996, the maverick with a message who probably can't win but certainly won't go away.
Listen closely to the other candidates, and it is easy to conclude that Buchanan has, in one sense, already won. When Bob Dole denounces Hollywood sleazemongers, when Phil Gramm's pollster tells him to talk more about "fair trade, not free trade," when Arlen Specter starts to peddle a flat tax and Lamar Alexander blasts congressional pensions, Buchanan gets to lean back in the rented van that drives through the north country of New Hampshire and revel in remaking the Republican Party in his own image. This has become the Buchanan Effect. "All the candidates are responding to it," he notes with satisfaction. "These moderate Republicans can't go in the direction they want to go because of our campaign. We are setting the agenda for the party and, I think, to a degree, for the country. Right from this van." And he laughs happily at the thought.
Last week he went further, drawing a line in the sand with himself, the "authentic conservative" in the race, on one side and the moderates on the other. "I say to Colin Powell, 'Come into this race if you want, but you are not going to take this party back to the days of Rockefeller Republicanism, because we aren't going to let you.'" He calls Dole and Gramm "leap-year conservatives" who shuttle to the right every four years but are squeamish moderates at heart. So this is the Buchanan Dilemma: Will red-meat conservatives who love Pat continue to support him right through the convention, even at the risk of helping re-elect a President they revile; or will they make a pragmatic decision to fall back and support the candidate with the best chance of winning the war?
Whatever role he finally plays--spoiler or kingmaker or king--Buchanan has already remodeled the tone and the substance of the G.O.P. race. Despite Census Bureau figures and polls that show flat wages are a central concern of most Americans, Buchanan is the only G.O.P. candidate to address the issue directly and with gusto. The left-wing Nation magazine calls Buchanan "the closest thing to a genuine populist in the 1996 race." The others seem to have found no way to talk about income inequality without offending their affluent base of supporters and campaign contributors. While Buchanan strikes a populist note on the gap between wage earners and Wall Street, much more of his stump speech is devoted to redirecting blame at less powerful targets: immigrants, welfare recipients, homosexuals, beneficiaries of affirmative action, government bureaucrats. And it is in that mode--not his bashing of greedy bosses--that he is truly a leader in the Republican field. He has perfected a cathartic language that taps voters' economic frustrations but deflects their attention away from painful solutions. His campaign and the others that ape it are dominated by the misleading--yet so far effective--politics of blame.