Playing On Emotions Of Frightened People -- Buchanan: Ignorant, Reactionary, Dangerous

IT'S HARD to take Pat Buchanan seriously.

He is such a mindless, reactionary buffoon that ignoring him seems almost like the best reaction to his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. Reasonable people probably assume that no one is buying his thinly veiled message of elitism, racism and isolationism presented as some sort of conservative agenda.

Thinking voters are sure that the gaping holes in his logic and the bitter aftertaste of his rhetoric are universally offensive. Most analysts seem to believe that while his antics as a print and broadcast commentator were titillating grist for political debate, they don't have the substance to support a real-life run for the White House.

Most observers are sure that Buchanan will kill his own candidacy with proposals such as sending homeless panhandlers to jail.

"I don't think we should have them wandering around the streets, frightening women and people," said Buchanan, who seems to put women, people, and the homeless in three separate categories.

"I would put them up for the night, and if they kept doing it, I would pick them up for vagrancy and lock 'em up."

"Keep doing it" probably refers to asking for handouts, but it also could mean if they keep being hungry and without adequate clothing, shelter, or medical attention.

There was such negative national reaction to Buchanan's comments, which were made the day before Christmas Eve, that he tried to soften the sound of his hob-nailed tongue by spending part of Christmas Eve helping to serve dinners in a New Hampshire soup kitchen.

But he is so pitiful. Even his efforts to be nice turn out nasty. He said his national program for jailing people because they have no money, no place to live, and not enough to eat was basically targeted at the large U.S. cities.

So it is in the big cities, where many people of color are homeless, that he wants to institute jail time for felonious possession of an empty stomach.

Buchanan overlooks the fact that many of the homeless are children and families; people with mental and physical differences; people forced on the street by the same federal policies he stridently endorses. Instead, he keeps reciting an incident about "deranged and dangerous" homeless people attacking women who wouldn't give them money.

He doesn't even say how big and little cities now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy are supposed to pay for all this stepped-up infringement on civil liberties and this expensive, tax-paid jail time.

He glibly states that homelessness is "primarily a local problem" and not a presidential responsibility. It doesn't connect with him that all those streets where people are living and dying are U.S. streets, and that this makes homelessness a national problem of the first magnitude.

He would rather expend valuable national resources to dig a trench and build a fence along a 200-mile stretch of the border between the United States and Mexico to stop undocumented immigrants from entering this country.

Buchanan said the fence and trench would cost less than $1 billion and would stop 90 percent of the immigration, because most of it happens in that 200-mile area.

He is such a silly man. There are thousands of miles of southern border, and anyone who wants to cross it badly enough will just avoid Buchanan's great wall of isolationist and racist ignorance.

He didn't mention the northern border with Canada, where undocumented immigration occurs on a daily basis, but gets less attention and restriction because most of the violators don't happen to be brown and speak Spanish.

He also is concerned that multiculturalism is a bad thing that tarnishes the good name of folks such as Christopher Columbus and General Custer, at a time when there is so much immigration into this country.

He seems concerned that people who get a dose of the truth about the way the country was stolen from Native Americans, and developed at the expense of omen and people of color, might change the way future generations view the world.

In a nation that will be one-third people of color by 2010 and already has a population that is more than one-half female, honest, unromanticized, unsanitized portrayals of history are long overdue.

All of Buchanan's gibberish would be laughable except that it is such a waste of public time and energy when we desperately need to be binding wounds, rebuilding the nation, and learning to live and to share with one another.

It is a dangerous brand of politics that plays on the emotions of people who are angry, frustrated, frightened and confused. Half-truths, whole lies, and old prejudices and stereotypes are used to sell a brand of ugliness that can win elections and destroy nations.

It's tempting to dismiss the rantings of a Pat Buchanan and figure he will eventually self-destruct. But that was the same attitude a lot of people had when Ronald Reagan came knocking for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976 and again in 1980.

We'll pay for that miscalculation for a long, long time to come. We should not make the same mistake twice.

We'll talk more later.

Don Williamson's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday on The Times' editorial pages.