Buchanan fodder.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan - Cover Story

Dan Welsh's collar really is blue. A shipping dispatcher at an aging furniture factory in a decaying industrial town, Welsh still wears an old-fashioned blue work shirt. At night, he worries whether he'll wake up and have a job in the morning. He's seen too many fellow members of his United Steelworkers union local "downsized" and "outplaced" from the middle class into a grim existence on the margins of American society.

Tonight Welsh is fighting back. He's standing in a classroom at a Dubuque, Iowa, high school, preparing to participate for the first time in a Republican Presidential caucus. A man who was excited by Jesse Jackson's talk of economic democracy in 1988, and by Tom Harkin's promise to fight for full employment in 1992, Welsh is about to cast a ballot for Pat Buchanan.

So, for that matter, are thousands of other blue-collar workers in Iowa on this night when Buchanan will nearly upset GOP frontrunner Bob Dole. It's people like Welsh who will go on to supply Buchanan with the margin of victory in New Hampshire and strong showings further down the primary road.

Pat Buchanan's base still lies in the shadowy realm of the religious right and the militia fringe. But with the votes of anti-abortion fanatics, gun-toting social renegades, and anti-United Nations ranters alone, Buchanan would have gotten no further than did the lame 1988 candidacy of fundamentalist broadcaster Pat Robertson.

What propels Buchanan forward is an unexpectedly strong level of support from white workers--many of them union members--who have simply given up on waiting for redemption in the form of a Democratic President.

"On his central rhetorical message about NAFTA, GATT, and protecting jobs, Buchanan is sounding the clarion call of economic populism," says Ronnie Dugger, the founder of the Texas Observer who now heads The Alliance, a national group seeking to forge a progressive populist movement in America. "That's why Buchanan's rising. I don't think it's anything else. He's showing just how much rage there is at the corporate oligarchy."

But how can solid union people--even Jesse Jackson backers--vote for Pat Buchanan, the man who defended Franco's fascism, the man whose entire career has been characterized by charges of racism and anti-Semitism, the man who plotted dirty tricks with Richard Nixon, the man who held Ronald Reagan's hand at Bitburg, the man who proclaimed Ollie North a hero?

"We're in a fight for our lives out here," says Welsh. "We just had a toy factory west of town announce that they were shutting down and moving 300 jobs to Mexico. The tractor factory is laying people off. The meatpacking plant is cutting back. The Fortune 500 companies are trashing us. And right now there's only one candidate for President who says we've got to put American workers first. His name is Pat Buchanan and, I don't care what they say about him, at least he understands that people are hurting."

That sentiment is widespread. You can hear it expressed by men and women wearing PAT IN '96 stickers on their union jackets, by long-haul drivers displaying TRUCKERS FOR BUCHANAN stickers, and by farmers hammering red-white-and-blue BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT signs to their fence posts. It's a sentiment that runs far deeper than Washington pundits and political analysts care to...