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Sure, he's far out of the mainstream. But assume the U.S. went into a steep recession. Could populist ideas like these suddenly take hold? In an exclusive interview, long-time Washington journalist Robert Novak talks with U.S. presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan.
For the third straight election, Patrick J. Buchanan is seeking the Republican presidential nomination with an under-funded, insufficiently organized campaign and the opposition of his party's establishment. Far from being the charm that succeeds, his third try figures to be less successful than his 1996 effort that came close enough to success that it frightened Republican hierarchs half to death. Buchanan's lieutenants of the last campaign have been hired away by the rival conservative campaign of multi-millionaire magazine publisher Steve Forbes. Buchanan's populist warnings of 1992 and 1996 of impending economic doom seem inappropriate in today's flamboyant economy.
Nevertheless, there is a compelling tone about what Buchanan says is lacking in his rivals from both parties. Even journalists who agree with him about nothing will stipulate that he is the best informed and most cerebral of the aspirants. Alone among the fourteen announced candidates for president, he has a comprehensive world view.
It is the view of a Cassandra. Unlike his opponents, he believes the U.S.-led global economy is built on foundations of sand and will crumble in the foreseeable future with particularly disastrous consequences for Americans. The implicit economic warning of the Buchanan campaign: "Repent, for the end is near!"
Although he has truly spent his entire life immersed in politics, Buchanan's position as an economic nationalist is scarcely a decade old. He was a hard-shell conservative newspaper columnist, television commentator, and aide to two presidents (Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan), but was a vigorous advocate of free-trade. As recently as the 1990 memoir of his youth, Right from the Beginning, published after he left the Reagan White House, Buchanan assailed "the concerted pressures of American corporations and unions" for trade protectionism that would "squander" U.S. leadership in world trade.
By the time he challenged President George Bush for the Republican nomination in 1992, however, he had made a 180-degree swing toward economic nationalism. That campaign dramatically accelerated the transformation. His 1991 Christmas encounter in the north country of New Hampshire with workers...