After flirting with Ross Perot for his blessing and the Reform party nomination, will Pat Buchanan actually turn tail and run away from the race for the Reform party nomination before it even starts?
Listen to what he told Diane Rehm on her radio show Sept. 24. Buchanan had just complained about George W. Bush's fund-raising prowess, and Rehm asked him why he was thinking of leaving the GOP: "I believe the Republican nomination is virtually rigged now; it's what you might call a stacked deck," Pat complained. "But then you hear that the Republican hierarchy down there in Austin -- Mr. Bush's folks -- have been in touch with Governor Ventura in the Reform party, and [Ventura's] in touch with Donald Trump, who has more money than Mr. Bush. So if I'm running into another stacked deck, if our democracy has become a plutocracy, I can't play. So I've gotta look and see if I can win this."
Doesn't this sound as if Buchanan has already crafted his talking points for not going ahead and competing for the Reform party nomination? Buchanan may now be realizing that he has driven himself into a culde-sac. Pat-the-politician started to flirt with the Reform party -- not necessarily a foolish idea for a presidential campaign that was going nowhere in the GOP. But at the same time, Pat-the-author was hitting the road to promote his much-labored-over revisionist history of World War II. His psychic investment in the latter enterprise seems to have taken precedence. That investment has manifested itself in the ever deeper hole he has been digging by resolutely defending his labor of love.
What Buchanan seems not to have anticipated is that the defense of his book might endanger his chances of getting the Reform party nomination, both because Ventura may decide he has to block Buchanan to save his party, and because Perot, eccentric though he may be, is not on record as being a World War II revisionist. Fearing failure in the Reform party, Buchanan seems to be thinking of reasons not to go through with his presidential run.
In the interests of full disclosure, THE SCRAPBOOK should note that Buchanan complimented this magazine to the Today show's Katie Couric last week, calling us "that little dinky magazine that pretends to be conservative. And these little boys have been on Pat Buchanan's case for a long time. The reason they're outraged, I'll tell you, is because they fear that Pat Buchanan may move to the Reform party and take the conservative movement with him." THE SCRAPBOOK, for its part, isn't outraged -- particularly since this magazine urged Buchanan to move to the Reform party, confident he would be unable to take the conservative movement with him. Plus THE SCRAPBOOK has a certain fondness for others who refer to themselves in the third person.