Sharks on the Right Are Circling Bush : GOP: If Pat Buchanan and friends can weaken the President, they gain more clout.

A year ago, word that conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan was considering taking a shot at President Bush in the GOP primaries would have been dismissed as a hoax. With the President riding high after drawing his line in the sand in front of Saddam Hussein and the country hanging on his every word, George Bush would have been an unlikely target for a right-wing ambush.

The fact that Buchanan even ponders such a step now suggests that Bush may be in even more trouble than we imagine. There is no collection of carnivores, outside of Sea World, more sensitive to the scent of wounded prey than the Republican right. Never lovers of Bush, they sulked in their underwater lairs during his vice presidency and the first three years of his presidential term. Now, just when we all thought it was safe for him to go into the water, the Great White Sharks of the right are circling.

For the right wing in this country, the election of 1988 was the classic good news/bad news joke. The good news was that the country had elected a Republican. The bad news was the Republican was George Bush. For people like Paul Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation, junk-mail mogul Richard Viguerie and Pat Buchanan, George Bush’s conservative credentials have always been suspect. He was seen as an enemy soldier who surrendered to them a little too eagerly. And for all of the loyalty he showed to Ronald Reagan and all of his deference to conservative issues such as abortion limitation, school prayer and flag burning, they were suspicious of him. And even when he filled the U.S. Supreme Court with the most conservative judges confirmable, the right saw him as a galvanized conservative at best.

What has been Bush’s transgression that has caused this sullenness among conservatives? They profess to be concerned about his waffling on taxes and his neglect of domestic problems, but there is more to it than that. These are people whose gastric juices are never turned on solely by economic issues. They want no civil-rights bill at all, and Bush will sign one. They do not like the fact that he made an effort to soften the Administration’s interpretation of the gag rule that forbids abortion referrals in federally funded programs (even though he eventually vetoed a bill to block the ban). They suspect that he would sign some kind of gun-control measure if it were attached to a tough crime bill. And for all of their posturing on the issue, they would have preferred a white conservative to a black one on the Supreme Court.

Can these disaffected right-wing Republicans really hurt a President whose personal popularity remains high? The answer is yes, not because these ultra-conservatives are so numerous--they constitute only about 15% of the electorate--but they supply much of the GOP brainpower. Their intellectual missile batteries in the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the editorial pages of the National Review and the American Spectator can inflict considerable damage on Bush.

If Bush tries to propitiate them, he may decouple himself from the political mainstream and find himself espousing positions too extreme for the electorate. For those who doubt his readiness to appease the right, consider the selection of Dan Quayle as running mate--a decision that is inexplicable except as political tribute to them.

If Bush rejects their nudging, they will attempt to cut him down to size in their columns, newsletters, mass mailings and commentaries. By reducing his stature to the point where he is more nearly the size of a Democratic challenger, they even out the odds somewhat in the election. At that point, their modest strength in the electorate becomes more critical to the outcome.

Whether or not Buchanan or any other conservative (or David Duke) decides to take on the President in a head-to-head contest is less the issue than the fact that the right-wingers are rattling their cages. They are a constituency that George Bush inherited from Ronald Reagan and who contributed to his victory in 1988. Somewhere down the line, however, Bush may wish that Reagan had left him out of the will.