KINDER'S COMMENTARY: BUCHANAN STYLE ISN'T ATTRACTIVE

My last column described more than 20 years' identification with and admiration for Patrick Buchanan. That Pat is a fierce, loyal and effective fighter for causes he believes in is beyond contest. The question becomes: For what principles or causes, these days, does he fight?

There's the right to life of the unborn, in the service of whom Pat has never wavered. The pro-life cause is one I am proud to share with Pat, although I would hasten to add that I differ with him primarily on certain stylistic aspects having to do with how this or that message is communicated. More about this shortly.

There's the whole panoply of conservative economic issues on which every Republican presidential candidate is agreed: A balanced budget, tax cuts for families, deep cuts in the capital gains tax and shrinking government at all levels. As for shrinking government, first on the chopping block is the federal Department of Education, created by Jimmy Carter as a payoff to the National Education Association for their first-ever endorsement of the Georgia governor back in 1976. As with this writer, in this poker game Pat would see the abolition of education and raise other budget cutters by eliminating the departments of Commerce, Energy and Housing and Urban Development.

Next in the Buchanan pantheon come the troublesome, high-octane issues of trade and immigration. He is wrong on both, and more's the pity. My last column referenced "Right From the Beginning," Buchanan's 1988 autobiography. In it he includes a chapter singing, with lyrics and tunes straight out of a traditional GOP hymn book, the virtues of free trade. That Patrick Buchanan is gone with the winds of presidential campaigning, replaced by an aggressive "economic nationalist" pledging tariffs of 40 percent on the Chinese, and at least 10 percent on the Japanese goods American consumers so plainly want. Other nations would also confront Buchanan's aggressive face on trade.

This, unmistakably, is a formula for trade war. It is neither conservative nor worthy of a leader bidding to become the chief executive of the most powerful nation on earth. In Buchanan's trade conflict, every consumer would lose, and all of us would pay his 40 percent tax increases. Bad as this would be, there's worse.

Buchanan, who should know better, willfully ignores history. The stock market crashed in October 1929, but it wasn't until the following year that President Herbert Hoover signed the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff. Instantly, our trading partners retaliated with high tariffs of their own. Result: Trade collapsed, as the temporary downturn signalled by the crash of '29 deepened into the decade-long catastrophe of the Great Depression. The economy contracted by a devastating 30 percent, and Hoover economics were discredited for two generations as the GOP was consigned to seemingly permanent minority status. As America retreated from world leadership into Buchanan-style isolationism, the seeds were sown for the rise of European dictators and World War II. Any Republicans want an encore?

Then there's immigration, and it is here that Buchanan's darkly pessimistic view of America is most starkly revealed. Ronald Reagan is the most important Republican and the most transforming national GOP leader since Teddy Roosevelt. This was true of the Gipper in no small part because he championed America as a "shining city on a hill," an America whose best days are still ahead of us, an America that views international competition not as something to be feared, but rather as the strong and well-conditioned runner views the race.

Buchanan's 1996 view is starkly opposed to that of the Great Communicator for whom he once worked. He would actually halt for a period -- not just illegal -- but legal immigration. This is unworthy of our Nation of Immigrants. As Bill Bennett phrased it, noting Buchanan's Irish heritage, "If he had had his way on immigration earlier, Pat and I would today be having a fist fight on the streets of Belfast." Legal immigration is a strength for America, especially in emerging growth industries such as computers, software and electronics.

Then there's the Buchanan style -- the very pungent style that served him so well as a newspaper pundit and brawling TV polemicist. A wise man once observed, "Dynamism begets polarity." That is, the Buchananite dynamism and vividness of personal expression repels at least as many (and probably more) than it attracts. Politics, though -- especially presidential politics -- is a process of addition, not subtraction. Americans want to like their president and to see in that leader a largeness of spirit and a sense of inclusiveness that Buchanan simply lacks. There is, after all, no evidence that Buchanan's support tops 30-32 percent, even in Republican primaries. God love him, and I do, he is a minoritarian wholly incapable of winning a general election.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.