Buchanan to the Left of Them.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan

Which 2000 Presidential candidate launched his campaign by declaring: "Heartland industries are being sacrificed to enrich a global elite that looks on workers not as fellow human beings but as pawns in a global game of chess"?

Which candidate calls for denying Most Favored Nation trading status to China, saying: "We've got a $60 billion trade deficit with Chinese Communists who persecute Tibetans, persecute Christians, persecute political dissidents ... paid for by surpluses they get from trading with the United States"?

Which candidate tells Iowa farmers: "The corporate establishment, the Republican establishment, and the neoconservative elites are against you"?

Which candidate tells laid-off West Virginia steelworkers: "One day, American workers will wake up and realize that their jobs [and] factory towns have been sacrificed--to save the bacon of the `investment community.' When they do, the day of reckoning will be at hand"?

Who is this modern-day William Jennings Bryan whose economic stances The Wall Street Journal editorial page condemns as "leftist"?

The candidate is Patrick Buchanan.

In his third consecutive bid for the Republican Presidential nomination, Buchanan, who toyed with populist themes in his 1992 challenge to then-President George Bush, and who spun them into a second-place finish in the battle for the 1996 GOP nomination, is back with his most radical message ever. Buchanan still calls himself a conservative--and his "conservatism of the heart" shows little compassion for racial minorities, gays and lesbians, Jews, women, and other constituencies that have been the targets of his wrath over the years.

But on the economic issues that form the centerpiece of his uphill campaign for the GOP nomination, Buchanan is sounding a lot less like his former bosses, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and a lot more like Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, and Jim Hightower.

Buchanan has sampled so many elements of the populist economic rap that Hightower quips, "I'm going to have to sue him for plagiarism."

The joke is really on the Democrats, however, says the former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and host of the nationally syndicated Hightower Radio program. "Instead of going after Buchanan for plagiarism, I should probably sue our Democratic Party candidates for nonsupport," he says.

On the day before their candidate announced his Presidential run in March, the Buchanan Brigades roared into Weirton, West Virginia. Home to the sprawling...