BIG PAT'S ABOUT TO TAKE ON THE PRESIDENT; HOLD YOUR HAT!

President George Bush will almost certainly have a conservative opponent in his race for renomination. That likely challenger is Patrick J. Buchanan, the columnist and TV commentator whom George Will once dubbed "the pit bull of the American Right."

Buchanan is of course well-known to readers of this editorial page and to nationwide viewing audiences of the three weekly TV programs on which he regularly appears. Buchanan appears five nights weekly on CNN's spirited "Crossfire" program; he also hosts a newer weekly program seen each Saturday night on CNN, called "Capital Gang"; and for ten years he has occupied a regular chair on "The McLaughlin Group" (Sundays at noon on Channel 8), the highly entertaining and stimulating PBS program. From these posts, he has made himself, on a regular daily basis, into the most visible conservative spokesman in America.

It was on the Capital Gang Saturday evening that Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal said Buchanan had taken a two-week leave of absence from CNN to study whether he should enter the GOP primary contest against President Bush.

With a column published in something like 180 newspapers, Buchanan is a devout Catholic, possessed of a keen sense of humor, who grew up in a middle class family of ten children. Interestingly, his first job out of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was in 1962 at the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat, of Ever Honored Memory. From that post, and, beginning in 1975 from his newspaper column, he exerted more influence on this writer in my formative years than any author, with the single exception of another devout Catholic, William F. Buckley Jr., the patron saint of the conservatives. (Which is not to say I agree with Buchanan on everything, or even with the thrust of his prospective campaign, about which more in a minute.)

Did I say humor? Buchanan once mocked a caricature of his own image as an ogre lusting for combat. Mulling over a presidential candidacy in late 1987 (he declined to enter the race), Buchanan recalled the 1976 slogan ("Why not the best?") of a Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter. Buchanan cracked to his friend, White House speech writer Peggy Noonan, that his own campaign slogan could be "Why not the beast?" Buchanan's 1987 memoir of his Catholic upbringing in a loving, brawling family of ten children (entitled "Right From the Beginning") is riotously funny at many points.

True to his Jesuit education, Pat Buchanan is a bare-knuckled street brawler who loves indeed, can't resist the sort of vivid metaphors that crackle off the page, either delighting or outraging readers. He offered McLaughlin Group viewers a vivid example about this time last year during the runup to the Persian Gulf War. Commenting on public reluctance in advance of the outbreak of hostilities, Buchanan a pre-war dove and critic of President Bush's troop deployment observed that, "Nobody wants this war except the Israeli foreign ministry and their `Amen corner' in the United States."

That zinger got him into one of his most serious scraps in a career packed with them. It got him charged with anti-Semitism by heavyweight columnist Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times, and it offended other neo-conservative allies who have neither forgotten, nor forgiven its source. These folks will have the long knives out when the Buchanan campaign bus crosses into the snows of New Hampshire (site of the first primary early next year).

Buchanan is a fierce traditionalist, a gifted and disciplined writer with an ear for the cadence, rhythm and poetry of the English language. He is also a far better than average political strategist, with nationwide GOP contacts both broad and deep, built up since he entered the national scene as a Richard Nixon aide in the mid-'60s. His ideological commitment is such that in 1985, he left columnwriting and TV commentating positions that were earning him $400,000 annually to serve Ronald Reagan as White House Director of Communications. His government salary in that post: approximately $80,000.

I do not believe that Pat Buchanan believes he can deny renomination to the incumbent Republican residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But this does not mean his candidacy is a meanlingless exercise in futility; far, far from it.

A Buchanan candidacy means that the sober, street-wise and politically savvy conservative veterans who are responsible for the last three national Republican landslides have concluded that President Bush's betrayal of Reaganism has gone on long enough and that above all, the case has to be made. The Buchanan candidacy boldly challenges the men and women in the White House to return to the low-tax, supply-side, growth economics that produced the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history the very policies that 1988 candidate Vice President George Bush said he'd fight to continue.

Where these policies are articulated with passion and principle, they are as potent today as they were in 1980, '84 and '88. Ask Ray Mabus, the defeated governor of Mississippi, who raised taxes and added state employees and paid with his job twelve days ago. Ask New Jersey Governor Jim Florio. He raised $2.8 billion in new taxes and got himself a recall movement and stunning, veto-proof majorities of anti-tax Republicans in both houses, majorities determined to roll back those taxes and put state government on a diet.

Buchanan would do the same to the bloated federal establishment with which George Bush seems all too comfortable. Which is why he means trouble with a capital "T" to the tin-eared, establishment, status-quo Republicans who staff the Bush administration.

Columnist Robert Novak, a savvy veteran political observer, says that New Hampshire is in sufficient economic distress that Buchanan could get 35-40 percent of the Republican primary vote early next year, and Novak doesn't rule out an insurgent Buchanan's knocking off the president in that first round.

In the opinion of this columnist, the combative Buchanan is not the person best suited for making the conservative case; those laurels go to former Congressman, now Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack F. Kemp.

But that's the stuff of another column, another day. Meanwhile, with David Duke apparently obliterated in Saturday night's Louisiana voting, Buchanan has a clear field, and this one's about to get interesting. Real interesting.