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They may not feel it in their gut, but they see it in the polls, and Buchanan's rivals have grown increasingly brazen about grabbing his message and making it their own. It was Buchanan, with his infamous declaration of a "cultural war" during the Republican Convention in 1992, who paved the way for Dole's attack on Hollywood this year. Long before Gramm decided that ending affirmative action would be his first presidential act, Buchanan stood virtually alone against what he called "the whole rotten infrastructure of reverse discrimination."
Since Buchanan's campaign began to pick up steam over the summer, the mimicry has become more obvious. On July 11, Buchanan pledged in Des Moines, Iowa, to reduce "the confiscatory inheritance tax now imposed on American family farms"--a populist-sounding gloss on a measure that would benefit those who inherit between $600,000 and $5 million. Four days later, Gramm promised on CNN "to do something about inheritance taxes, which are now confiscatory." In September, Buchanan called for a rollback of congressional pensions in the wake of Senator Bob Packwood's resignation, only to be echoed by Lamar Alexander at the candidates' forum in Manchester a few weeks later. "We got Arlen Specter talking about a flat tax," Buchanan notes with glee. "Did you hear anything about a flat tax from [him] in all his years in the Senate?"
The list of appropriations goes on and on: In his announcement speech, Dole identified no fewer than a dozen Buchananesque villains, ranging from the U.N. to affirmative action--both of which Dole had supported in the past. Gramm took aim at half a dozen, including welfare recipients and prisoners. Before he dropped out of the race, California Governor Pete Wilson bet heavily on this year's trifecta of blame: illegal immigrants, affirmative action and repeat criminals (with a call for "three strikes and you're out" legislation). Buchanan, of course, had already put his money on those horses--and others too.
It is true that Buchanan has always been a flamethrower, but even he was not quite as incendiary in his 1992 debut campaign. That race was not freighted with nearly as much symbolic villainy. For Bill Clinton, it was "change" vs. the "status quo." George Bush bashed liberals but mainly defended his accomplishments, among them steering the cold war to an end. As for Buchanan, a large (and not well remembered) part of his cultural-war diatribe at the convention was a paean to Bush in which he praised the President for his expertise in foreign affairs, something he would never do in a speech today. But in the political atmosphere of 1995, says Murray Edelman, an expert in rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin, "the number of enemies has proliferated. Instead of clear-sighted observation of what problems there are and how they should be dealt with, we become concerned with irrelevancies."