"I don't necessarily believe the spin that the media's put on the things he's said," said DiNizio, who says "A Girl Like You" is probably his band's biggest hit. "I'm reserving judgment. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand and see what the truth of the matter is."

DiNizio got his chance when, at approximately 1:20 p.m., Buchanan -- with well-coiffed wife, Shelley, and a few aides in tow -- pulled up to Raritan Community College in a shiny black Mercedes limousine to wax populist.

Buchanan's speech to the roughly 200 New Jerseyans assembled drew cheers, several standing Os and complete success in the state party elections, as every one of the 25 "Buchanan Reform"-endorsed candidates for delegate, national committee and state office won.

DiNizio and the rest of the crowd -- a hodgepodge of earnest reformers, future assassins, XYYs and audio-visual club rejects, as always -- learned the prime lesson about Buchanan: If you're able to scrape away his unsettling lapses into bigotry, he gives a hell of a speech and often even makes sense.

Part of this is clearly because the Republican and Democratic parties seem so poll-driven, focus-group-tested and beholden to the big money doled out by corporate America.

"They're two wings of the same bird of prey," Buchanan said to raucous applause. "All they're looking for is soft money."

That line was one of many in which Buchanan focused on areas where his branch of populist conservatism meshes with the Reform Party's reformist populism. Likewise, he found common cause with all in the audience on the body of his remarks, which were focused on trade policies, immigration reform, his belief that the U.S. is handing over its sovereignty to groups like the World Trade Organization, and the unfairness of the Reform Party being shut out of the presidential debates.

Noting the relatively sizable crowd in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, Buchanan began his remarks by saying "I'm glad to see so many people are unemployed, like me."

Buchanan told the crowd that he first realized that all was not well in the state of the GOP when, during the Iowa straw poll last summer, his speech was resoundingly applauded by the 15,000 cornfed Republican attendees. He was heartened that the audience whooped it up for his speech -- even though he "criticized not only the policies of Clinton and Gore but also the Republican establishment." But he still came in near-last, which he ascribed to the tens of millions of dollars at the disposal of Gov. George W. Bush and then-candidate publisher Steve Forbes.

"This party is a little too rich for our blood," he says he told Shelley, a former receptionist for then-Vice President Richard Nixon. The fact that the GOP cheered on trade agreements like NAFTA made the role of Big Money in his party all the more disappointing, he says.

Before his speech, Buchanan told reporters that nothing much had changed since then, as evidenced by the fact that House Minority Whip "Tom DeLay [R-Texas] was rounding up votes for Bill Clinton" on permanent normal trade relations "with Communist China."

The Republican leadership's "whole war plan is to bash Clinton on scandals ... conservatism is about a lot more than that," he said.

Like a fervent opposition to abortion, for instance -- an issue where he found Bush more than a little wanting. That Bush would consider selecting a pro-choice running mate "shows you where his heart is," Buchanan said. Bush would never, ever pick a veep nominee who wanted to lower the defense budget to $100 billion, or one who opposed the capital gains tax.

But in front of the crowd, Buchanan steered clear of the "social issues" various Reform Party old-guarders have criticized him for addressing while seeking the nomination of their party, which avoids taking a platform position on controversial subjects like abortion and gay rights.

That didn't mean Buchanan would stray away from other issues the all-white crowd was destined to lap up, like immigration -- a subject that Bush and Vice President Al Gore avoid discussing because if they don't, Buchanan said, "the media will call them names."

Three months ago, the Buchanans visited an Arizona border town and met an 82-year-old widow who lives in a self-imposed jail because of our government's failure to protect our southern border, he said. Theresa Murray sleeps with a loaded gun, in a house with bars on all the windows and razor wire along the fence outlining her property. Her guard dogs were poisoned, and her home has been burglarized 30 times.

"Why?" he asked. "Because we have a government too gutless and too cowardly to defend the border of the United States of America!"

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