Copyright 2000 The Baltimore Sun Company
THE
BALTIMORE SUN
April 14, 2000, Friday ,FINAL
SECTION: EDITORIAL ,17A
LENGTH: 738 words
HEADLINE:
Tales from the war zone
BYLINE: Jack W. Germond and
Jules Witcover
BODY:
WHEN SEVERAL thousand
Teamsters rallied at the foot of the Capitol this week against permanent
normal trade relations (NTR) status for China, among those awaiting his
turn to speak was Pat Buchanan, the Republican- turned-Reform Party presidential
candidate.
A local union member came up and offered him his shiny blue
Teamsters jacket. Mr. Buchanan slipped off his own gray suit coat, handed it to
an aide and slipped on the union garb. Then he proceeded to piggy back on the
labor rally to make what started out as a tirade against free trade with China
and ended up a pitch of sorts for his White House bid.
"Right now," he
said, "the Chinese Communists sell us 40 percent of their exports and they take
1 percent of ours -- the same percentage they took in 1900, a hundred years ago.
Who's negotiating these deals? And what are they using that money for? They're
persecuting Christians, they're persecuting folks like Chinese dissident Harry
Wu, they're using that money to buy weapons to threaten our friends in Taiwan"
as well as the United States itself.
"You know something," he went on,
"if I were there in the White House, and they came into my office and said, 'We
want permanent NTR,' I'd tell them: 'You stop persecuting Christians and you
stop threatening our country, or you guys have sold your last pair of chopsticks
anywhere in the United States of America!' "
The Teamster crowd loved
it. Warming to its cheers, Mr. Buchanan promised that rather than have U.S.
Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky negotiating trade deals with China, "if
I get there the Oval Office it won't be Charlene Barshefsky sitting down in
Beijing, it'll be Jim Hoffa!"
Mr. Buchanan's political battlefield
promotion of the Teamsters president, standing on the speaker's platform behind
him, really ignited the crowd. "Hoffa! Hoffa!" The shouts came up to greet the
Reform Party candidate.
Mr. Buchanan decided to quit while he was ahead,
and after a few more rousing words, left to thunderous applause. He doffed the
Teamsters jacket, returned it to its owner, slipped on his suit jacket and waded
through a throng of glad-handers.
Thus is the presidential campaign of
the man who elected to leave his lifelong home in the Republican Party for this
free-lance bid. He is a guerrilla political warrior living off the land, seizing
whatever opportunities offer themselves to get his message out among like-minded
Americans. This was not a Buchanan rally nor was there any way of knowing how
many of those cheering Teamsters might vote for him in November, but he turned
it into one for a few minutes.
While he continues to take forums where
he can find them, Mr. Buchanan is working hard to get the Reform Party on the
ballot in all 50 states -- the task set for anyone who wants to be considered
the party's nominee. With Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and multimillionaire
playboy Donald Trump having taken themselves out of contention, and party
founder Ross Perot expected to do the same, Mr. Buchanan appears to have the
inside track by default. With the nomination comes $12.6
million in federal funds, which isn't close to the $65.5
million Al Gore and George W. Bush will get, but it's not bad for an experienced
guerrilla warrior like Mr. Buchanan.
His prime objective once he has the
nomination, to be decided at the party convention in Long Beach in August, will
be to get into the debates with Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush in the fall. He says he
thinks he can have 15 percent support in the major polls by then, one yardstick
for admission set by the Commission on Presidential Debates. But the commission
will decide whether he has "a realistic chance of winning" (another of its
yardsticks), and that will be tough.
In that regard, Mr. Buchanan says,
he hopes the pressure of public and news media attention will get the Federal
Election Commission to intercede on his behalf, just as such attention generated
by John McCain in the New York primary earlier this year finally got Gov. George
Pataki to open ballot access to him.
Meanwhile, he keeps living off the
land -- and keeping his powder dry.
Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover
write from The Sun's Washington Bureau. Mr. Germond's latest book is "Fat Man in
a Middle Seat -- 40 Years of Covering Politics" (Random House, 1999). Mr.
Witcover's latest book is "No Way to Pick a President" (Farrar Straus &
Giroux, 1999).
LOAD-DATE: April 19, 2000
