Buchanan '08

Matt writes:

Buchanan's 2000 campaign struck me as wildly undermotivated at the time. By today, it looks very well motivated in retrospect -- there seems to be a clear political space for someone who espouses a Buchanan-esque combination of foreign policy restraint, globalization skepticism, nativism, and culture war populism. Crucially, this political space also seemed to be open in 2004. If Buchanan had run then rather than in 2000, it seems to me that he could have easily picked up 3-4 percent and tipped the election to Kerry.

I dunno - I agree that Bush version 2000 (he of the "humble" foreign policy) wasn't the ideal candidate for a Buchananite to run against, but in a certain way '00 was a better year for a third party candidate than '04, because the stakes in the election seemed to be so low, so why not cast a protest vote? In the Bush-Kerry race, by contrast, a lot of the pundits didn't much like either candidate, but everyone seemed to agree that the stakes in the election were extremely high (I'm not sure that view has been borne out by events, but that's an argument for another day), and that nothing less than the security of the United States was at stake. To overgeneralize a bit, it was a "fear" election on both sides - liberals were terrified of what another four years of Bush would mean for the country, conservatives were terrified of what a President Kerry would mean for the War on Terror, and independents broke left or right depending on which fear they gravitated toward. Sure, there were some anti-Iraq War conservatives floating around, but most of them were either hard-line war-on-terror hawks who regarded the Iraq War as a mistake but also a fait accompli and wanted to keep the Republicans in charge to protect the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, and so forth - or else they were Rockefeller Republican types who were socially-liberal enough to feel comfortable pulling the lever for Kerry. Throw in the fact that the Republican base had forged a personal bond with Bush in a way they hadn't yet in 2000, and the absence of immigration as a galvanizer for anti-Administration feeling on the right, and it's hard for me to imagine Buchanan getting any more traction in '04 than he did four years before.

But '08, on the other hand, might be a different story. Not for Buchanan himself, presumably - he's too old and too overexposed at this point - but if Rudy Giuliani (or even John McCain) takes the GOP nomination, there will be a lot of disgruntled cultural conservatives out there, creating an obvious opening for a third-party candidate running to the nominee's right on abortion and immigration while advancing a Jacksonian critique of the Iraq War (if not necessarily a Ron Paulesqe critique of American foreign policy since 1945). The difficulty is that it's hard to think of a national figure who's a natural fit for that role.

Though you know, Dan Quayle is only sixty ...