Bush's `Chain-Saw' Nightmare
Maybe some good will come out of Patrick Buchanan's candidacy. Maybe it will scare George Bush straight.</br></br>The president has been pretty badly rattled by Buchanan's guerrilla tactics. He is no match for them. Nor can he compete in right-ness. Bush, plainly panicked, threw a human sacrifice from the speeding sled, in a vain attempt to slow down the wolves. The sacking of John E. Frohnmayer, the National Endowment for the Arts chairman, was seen as appeasement of the most cowardly sort.</br></br>Bush is caught in a nightmare that has haunted him since 1980, when Ronald Reagan put him on the ticket with the understanding he remake himself in the conservative mode. Buchanan, on the other hand, is living a fantasy. He is getting large crowds and hoarse cheers in Georgia. He does provocative, wounding events, like a visit to a Confederate cemetery, and his followers cackle. He pointedly did not stop at the black cemetery across the street.</br></br>Bush cannot prevail in a contest in what Playboy magazine once referred to as Buchanan's "chain-saw politics." In his misery, he says less and less about more and more. On the day that General Motors named 12 of the 21 plants it will close, with a loss of 16,000 jobs, Bush did not mention it in his speeches. He put out a statement of regret through his press secretary. When he talks about economic recovery, he's all booster and bluster. "We are the United States of America," he says, grinning past the ghosts of decline and second-rateness.</br></br>He should draw inspiration from the Democrats, who are squabbling among themselves and tearing each other up in a way that could leave them scarred in November. But he does not think November. He is acting as if the entire electorate were composed of yahoos who want to savage gays and end welfare.