Who's afraid of Pat Buchanan?

His spineless Republican rivals and the political punditocracy, that's who.

By Jake Tapper

Sep 4, 1999 | Pat Buchanan is back in the presidential campaign saddle again, leaving a trail of racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetorical dung behind him wherever he goes.

But unlike in his two previous runs, this time around virtually no one seems willing to call him on it. Not the press, not the commentators and, most significantly, not his fellow Republicans. This week, as rumors intensify that Buchanan may bolt for the Reform Party, thereby becoming a significant factor in the presidential race, the silence has become deafening.

"There's no doubt he makes subliminal appeals to prejudice," says conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, one of the few members of the news media willing to speak out about Buchanan's bigotry. "He tries to be subtle, the comments are not direct appeals to prejudice, which is one of the reasons he gets away with it." But the subtle appeal, Krauthammer argues, "is very much heard by his audience."

Subtle, but not too subtle.

You knew who Buchanan was talking about, for example, during the week of the Iowa straw poll when he blamed the farm crisis on "New York bankers" and "the money boys up in New York."

He didn't say "money-grubbing kikes," but it was there, lurking in the subtext.

Or, in a radio interview, when Buchanan justified his anti-immigration policies by insinuating that the character of Mexicans was generally criminal -- "60,000 of them are in our prisons." The "railroad killer" is the kind of person we're going to have more of unless we build up the border patrol, he said.

He didn't say "dangerous wetback drifters." He didn't have to.

And again, during his speech at the straw poll, he promised that, if he were elected, he'd open up China for U.S. trade -- or else China will have sold its "last pair of chopsticks in any mall in the United States of America."

He didn't say "yellow menace" or "Chinks" or "they're not like us" -- not in so many words, anyway -- but he seemed dangerously close to the precipice of actually uttering such words.

Buchanan has a documented history of making these kinds of incendiary comments. In 1992, the Anti-Defamation League charged that Buchanan had shown "a disregard or hostility toward those not like him and a consequent displeasure with the exercise of freedom by these others ... [a] displeasure ... expressed in a 30-year record of intolerance unmatched by any other mainstream political figure."

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