Why Is Pat Still Running? He's Gearing Up for '96.

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

Give Pat Buchanan this much: he has propelled himself out of the Crossfire thunderdome and into the first tier of G.O.P. hopefuls for 1996. He has jerked a nervous President hard to starboard and roused the Bush-Quayle campaign from groggy complacency. And he has singlehandedly destroyed the incipient threat Bush faced from Louisiana's David Duke. Not bad for 13 weeks' work.

Republican Party elders say it is nonetheless time for Buchanan to do the ! right thing. They will bombard the TV commentator with calls to get out of the race this week no matter how he fares in the Michigan primary. But Buchanan is likely to ignore pleas for party loyalty, vowing to stay in until the California primary on June 2. From now on, however, it will be a race with a difference: instead of running against Bush, Buchanan will increasingly oppose rival conservatives who he feels hijacked the movement years ago. "At this point," says Burton Pines of the Heritage Foundation, "the target of Buchanan really stops being Bush and becomes the pretenders for the conservative mantle."

Rifts on the right are nothing new. Before he became a campaign-trail phenomenon, Buchanan was just a standard 1950s-style conservative who believed in isolationism, protectionism and white people. The ideology he was steeped in as a child -- some call it "paleoconservatism" -- was overtaken during the 1960s and '70s by a more interventionist, internationalist group contaminated by heresies like civil rights and support for Israel. These variations annoyed Buchanan, who for months before the race likened neoconservatives to "fleas who conclude they are steering the dog." When Buchanan began his quixotic presidential bid in December, notes Tony Fabrizio, who was briefly the candidate's pollster, "his goal was to cleanse the conservative movement of the people who don't agree with him."

With Buchanan's success at the polls, the paleo-neo fault line widened into a canyon of controversy, as leading conservatives rushed to choose sides. Neoconservatives and many Reaganites lined up against Buchanan, dismissing his message as negative and exclusionary. Bush haters and old-line conservatives, particularly those disaffected by Washington's self-important neo-con luminaries, admired Buchanan's courage and supported him with money. Says Catholic University's Stuart Rothenberg: "Buchanan has been confusing for conservatives. They don't like what he says, but they're so anxious to see George Bush punished that their reaction has been a mix of embarrassment and admiration at the same time."

Buchanan is joining the battle over the meaning of conservatism in the 1990s. Will conservatives have an agenda for minorities or merely the back of their hand? Will they support free trade or protectionism? Will America come first, or not? Said an influential conservative: "It's not that Pat has made a lot of converts among conservative elites. But he has heightened the need to give definition to a conservatism that is neither Bush status-quoism nor the nativist regressive approach of the 1950s." Not everybody wants to have that debate in the middle of a closer than expected Bush re-election campaign. The National Review, which earlier advised its New Hampshire readers to lodge a protest vote on Buchanan's behalf, calls in its current issue for Buchanan to get out after Michigan to preserve his status as "one of several leaders of a united conservative movement."

Buchanan softened his anti-Bush line last week, promising not to "rule or ruin" the party. But Republican National Committee chairman Richard Bond may have unintentionally goaded Buchanan to remain in the race when he likened him to David Duke "in a jacket and tie." Buchanan responded by calling for Bond's dismissal and added, "We've been driving the debate, so why quit when we are winning the argument?"

Buchanan's lingering presence in the race continues to scramble the already complicated picture for 1996, when a battle royal will take place over the Bush succession. Conservatives such as William Bennett, Pete du Pont and Jack Kemp, urged by supporters to run this year as a warm-up for 1996, are surely kicking themselves for leaving the field open to Buchanan. Worse, they must now contend with him as a 1996 front runner. "Every day Buchanan stays in, Bennett, Kemp and Du Pont have to work a little harder," says the Heritage Foundation's Pines.

One unexpected beneficiary of all this may be Dan Quayle. The Vice President has spent more time on the road, in bigger media markets, than he would have if Buchanan had not mounted a challenge. Buchanan's ascendance to the first tier will make Quayle less of a lonely target in the pre-season maneuvering. And by remaining magnanimous in the current debate, Quayle has attempted, said an aide, to "remind the establishment G.O.P. that there is a conservatism they can live with."

Quayle now thinks that Buchanan will stay in the race through the California primary, where a host of local races and widespread dissatisfaction with moderate Governor Pete Wilson promises a large conservative turnout. Buchanan has already compiled what his rival admits is probably the best direct-mail list of the decade; by remaining through California, Buchanan could as much as double his 25,000-name list and create a postconvention PAC capable of raising more than half a million dollars a year -- enough to keep him on the road ) after November, laying the groundwork for a '96 run.

Buchanan is unlikely ever to become sole arbiter of a movement as broad as American conservatism. His campaign increasingly resembles that of Jesse Jackson, who launched his 1988 presidential bid as part of his persistent drive to become the single spokesman for African Americans. That effort caught fire and became a full-fledged campaign for a few months. But after he peaked as a candidate, Jackson resumed his old crusade. In the end, Buchanan's campaign may likewise revert from a run at the presidency to his crusade to become Mr. Conservatism.