The Man Behind Buchanan's Daring Anti-Bush Ad

WASHINGTON - Late last year, Ian Weinschel, an obscure Republican political consultant with pugnacious self-confidence, asked President Bush's top campaign aides if he could join the president's media team.

"Let's make it real clear - I begged," said Weinschel, who worked for Bush in 1980 and for the Reagan-Bush ticket in 1984. "I had four kids to feed. They basically told us to go fly a kite. So we went and flew a kite up in New Hampshire, and lightning came down and hit George Bush real good."

That lightning has now taken the form of the most daringly negative commercial of the 1992 campaign, an ad that has provided the latest spark for the insurgent campaign of the candidate who did hire Weinschel - Pat Buchanan.

In a single 30-second spot, Weinschel skillfully exploits the hot-button issues of pornography, homosexuality and race.

With its arresting, slow-motion images of gay black men in chains and leather harnesses, drawn from a film made in part with federal money, the ad is nothing less than an attempt to do to Bush what Bush did to Michael Dukakis in 1988.

The irony is inescapable: A president, who won election by turning Willie Horton and Boston Harbor into emotionally charged symbols of his opponent's weaknesses, finds himself denouncing negative advertising when its power is turned against him.

And a bearded 42-year-old ad man working out of his home on a Maryland cattle farm finds himself dictating the pace of the Republican presidential campaign.

"It's sweet revenge. . . . The president has been playing on my tennis court," Weinschel said recently.

As attack ads have become part of the political landscape, Republican consultants have frequently pilloried Democrats over such "moral" issues as racial quotas, gay rights and pornography. Now the same ammunition is being used in a fratricidal battle in the Republican Party.

Some Republicans say Buchanan could pay a stiff price for trying to link Bush to what the new ad calls "pornographic and blasphemous art."

The commercial, which began airing in Georgia Wednesday, uses scenes from "Tongues Untied," a PBS documentary about gay black men that received a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

"It's tasteless, and it's going to hurt Pat Buchanan," said Mike Murphy, one of Bush's three media consultants. "Pat's got to decide if he wants to be the sideshow of 1992 or a significant candidate in '96."

"If Pat wants to be the leader of the conservative movement, this is suicidal," a Bush campaign official said.

"It's like throwing acid around - you're going to have an effect on the target, but you get some of it on yourself, too."

Buchanan, campaigning Thursday in Georgia, defended the ad as "symbolic," saying Bush is "a conscientious objector" in "a great cultural war" over American values.

"The president has spoken about obscene and blasphemous art, but he hasn't done anything about it," Buchanan said.

"It's a pattern. He says one thing and does another."

Buchanan told a crowd of supporters at a mall in Rome, Ga., that if he were president, "I'd clean house at the NEA. . . . If I am elected, the place would be shut down, padlocked and fumigated." The crowd whooped and hollered its support.

While it may be unfair for Buchanan to hold Bush personally responsible for funding a sexually explicit film, critics said Bush took a similar tack in blaming former Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis for Horton's rape of a woman while on furlough from prison.

Arthur Kropp, president of People for the American Way, said both commercials vilify "the most unpopular segments of society - in the Horton ad it was black criminals, in the Buchanan ad it's black homosexuals.

"They take a complex issue and distort it to score some cheap points."

Democratic consultant Robert Squier said: "Bush is arguably the most vulnerable politician in America to this kind of strike. He can't throw up his hands and say how terrible this is because his advertising in the last campaign defined the bottom of the pit."

Weinschel dismissed criticism of the ad, saying, "It has nothing to do with homosexuality. The NEA is taking your money and my money and shouldn't be giving it to people to put together pornography. . . . I don't call it negative advertising. I call it documentary advertising."

Weinschel said he and his wife and partner, Betsy, "weren't raised inside the Beltway. We don't know how to use the rule book because we never had a copy of it."

Weinschel, who grows corn and alfalfa on his 150-acre farm in Mount Airy, Md., has handled 80 campaigns. Past clients include Sen. William Roth, R-Del., former Sen. Paul Trible, R-Va., and former Rhode Island Gov. Edward DiPrete.

Weinschel's ads for Buchanan have been effective. During the New Hampshire primary, he saturated the airwaves with footage of Bush shouting his "read my lips" tax pledge, with the tag line: "Can we afford four more years of broken promises?"

Weinschel said the ad was justified because "the president has lied to the American people."

In the primary's final days, Weinschel unveiled several "positive" ads in which Buchanan spoke about the pain of the recession. Then Weinschel quickly switched to a spot accusing Bush of pulling back a promised tax credit for families with children, a charge picked up from a Washington Post article.