OFF TO THE RACES

Pity the poor pundits, with their conventional wisdom, which may indeed be conventional but surely isn't very wise. All last year we were told that at this point in the Republican presidential contest, we would have a two-man race between Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and his well-financed challenger, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. Well, Phil Gramm didn't even make it to the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire. Today, the GOP field is a three-man race featuring the Kansas senator, a former governor of Tennessee and a former presidential speechwriter-turned-TV talk show host and newspaper pundit, plus a wealthy magazine publisher, Steve Forbes, running a self-financed effort.

The first three are alumni of the Richard Nixon school of American politics. Buchanan left a job writing editorials at the old St. Louis Globe-Democrat to join Nixon two years before his 1968 presidential comeback bid and was with him to the bitter end in 1974. Lamar Alexander got his start in Washington as a young aide in the Nixon White House. Sen. Dole was Mr. Nixon's hand-picked GOP national chairman. That old Mr. Nixon looms large in all their careers, rather than a more successful former president named Ronald Reagan, goes a long way toward explaining the malaise currently gripping the GOP. This contest could use a dose of Reaganite optimism.

Voters won't find it from Buchanan. Although he briefly wrote speeches for the Gipper too, Buchanan's vision of America isn't Reagan's "shining city on a hill." Rather, Buchanan, who darkly vows to "take America back" -- from whom? from what? we might ask -- sees an America in decline, describing a country "abused by pipsqueak nations, an economy ravaged by Mexican peasants," as one critic aptly put it.

Although Buchanan's humor and extraordinary phrasemaking gifts are on daily display -- "Welcome to 'Crossfire'," he quipped to Lamar Alexander at Thursday night's debate -- his anger, his exclusionary attitudes and his dark pessimism disqualify him from the office he seeks. A president must radiate a sense of inclusiveness and a largeness of spirit that Buchanan, while an amiable fellow, plainly lacks. Besides, the presidency isn't an entry-level position. Buchanan hasn't ever been elected dog catcher.

Buchanan has succeeded to the extent he has largely because he is the only candidate currently offering a coherent vision as he speaks to economic fears that gnaw at many Americans. Buchanan's is a deeply flawed vision, but it is nonetheless real. America can't prosper in a global economy by erecting tariff walls of the kind Buchanan would build. Besides, such tariffs are massive tax increases that the middle class would pay most dearly.

Like Sen. Dole's, Lamar Alexander's candidacy is more process-oriented than issue- or substance-based. He now appears to be trying to take Buchanan on, but the air is full of charges of "extremism" from Sen. Dole and others in the GOP establishment. This is dangerous stuff. Any Republican nominee will need the Buchanan voters in November. Dole, Alexander and Forbes should take Buchanan on forthrightly on the issues and leave the namecalling out of it. Meanwhile, whoever is writing Mr. Dole's speeches should get out a book of the Gipper's Golden Oldies.

Whoever recovers the sense of Reaganite vision will be nominated and will deserve it. Despite what the temporary polls of the moment may say, that nomination is very much worth having. For the presidential election this fall must offer a clear choice between a confident Republican Party bidding to broaden and solidify its majority status, and a current president bent, mostly, on preserving his party's patchwork of special interests.