PAT BUCHANAN told supporters in New Hampshire, where he stunned Americans by winning the Republican primary on Tuesday, that he is trying to lead an army of peasants to capture the White House.
But this scourge of Washington, who campaigns as an outsider and wants to throw out the establishment, comes from Washington itself.
If elected, this sharp-tongued, brawling, American patriot will become the only president born in the nation's capital city.
He is in fact the ultimate insider, born inside the beltway, before the construction of the ring-road around Washington defined the borders of an establishment Pale. He would be a fish out of water anywhere else.
Fifty years ago Washington was a segregated, sleepy southern town. In the white, Catholic parish of Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase, Paddy Joe Buchanan, as he was first known, was born in November 1938, to a strongly Catholic family he learned the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be before he could walk.
His pugilistic conservatism resulted from being raised alongside eight brothers by a German-Catholic mother and a Scotch Irish and Irish father who admired General Douglas McArthur, General Franco of Spain and Senator Joe McCarthy.
On his father's side, Pat Buchanan's ancestors came out of the Ulster plantation. From Northern Ireland "our branch of the family migrated to North Carolina in the late 700s, and from there moved on to the hill country of north Mississippi," he writes in his autobiography Right from the Beginning.
Two great-great grandfathers were "rabid secessionists" who left their mark on the slave plantations. Once, Pat Buchanan went looking for lost cousins in Mississippi but was told by an old lady, as he set out to visit half-a-dozen Buchanans in the telephone book, "They're all negroes - but they're very nice people."
His Protestant grandfather, Henry Martin Buchanan, had the native southern hatred of the Yankees, and a distrust of Catholics - at least until he was nursed out of a fever in an army camp by Sisters of Charity.
Softened up by the nuns, he married a Catholic, Mary Agnes Smith, one of 17 children of Irish immigrant parents who fled Cork during the Famine.
Their son, Bill Buchanan, prospered as an accountant, and the family settled down in the middle-class suburb of Chevy Chase, on the city side, where the big Catholic families tended to stay as they were not welcome in the Maryland country clubs. Catholics 50 years ago faced barriers in society, something which made Pat Buchanan identify with the underdog and tough Irish Catholic seekers-after-justice, like James Cagney.
Pat was a wall-eyed kid whose eyes stared outward to opposite walls of the room and were only corrected after a series of eye operations. So he had to look after himself in the Chevy Chase avenues where school bullies and fistfights were daily hazards. There was some gang warfare too; the Catholics were the "RCs" and the Protestants the "Publics".
Bill Buchanan was a firm believer in the theory that differences should be settled with boxing gloves. He hung a punching bag in the basement and three times a week made the boys hit it 100 times with the right, 100 times with the left and 200 times with the one-two.
The young Buchanan was a bit of a troublemaker. In his youth, the candidate who is now regarded as the authentic voice of angry, white, Christian, American nationalism, was indeed angry, and apparently all the time.
A Jesuit teacher, Father Stephen McNamee, said to him once: "Every time I look over in your direction, you look as though you are going to explode. What is the matter with you? Why are you so angry?"
Sometimes it got out of control. Just before his 21st birthday, when cruising with a date, Pat Buchanan honked his horn at a slow police patrol car on O Street, then passed it. The cop pulled him over and issued a ticket. Buchanan swore at him "in X-rated language", the police officer ordered him out, and a brawl ensued.
Buchanan ended up with a broken hand. Two policemen ended up in hospital.
Buchanan was relieved of $25 by a local magistrate and suspended for a year from Georgetown University. As a day-boy with a reputation for hell-raising, he never fitted in at Georgetown, where boarders were favoured by the management. When he campaigned for student president against a boarder, a priest raged at him through a car window "Don't you understand? We don't want your kind here."
In those halcyon days of confident American Catholicism, young Catholics identified where they lived by their parish. Pat Buchanan was from Blessed Sacrament.
These parishes, with their willow oaks and churches and schools and houses with deep porches and neo-colonial columns, were enclaves of Americanism where patriotism was unquestioned.
In such places was Senator Joe McCarthy hailed as a patriot for his witch hunt against suspected communists, which wrecked many careers. "McCarthy," Buchanan explained years later, "was cheered because for four years he was kicking the living hell out of people most Americans concluded ought to have the living hell kicked out of them."
The Buchanans had a strong, religious, country-first, code. They had a different sense of what was morally evil than the liberal left. Behind the controversy over McCarthyism, he wrote in his biography - in which he vigorously defended "Tail-gunner Joe" - were warring concepts of morality, legitimacy and patriotism. "What after all is McCarthy's bullying of witnesses compared with Harry Truman's coercive `repatriation' of two million Russian POWs to the tender mercy of Joseph Stalin?"
There are remarkable similarities between the two men. Joe McCarthy was a true populist, as is Buchanan today. Many of the reporters who disagreed with McCarthy profoundly, liked him personally, just as Buchanan is a favourite of the media elite of the 1990s.
General Franco was naturally a hero in the Buchanan household too. While the American left had Guernica, the Buchanans had Alcazar, where Franco's troops died heroically rather than surrender.
BUCHANAN embarked on a career as a sharp-witted polemicist of the right, first writing editorials and then working for Richard Nixon as a speech-writer and for Ronald Reagan as communications director from 1985 to 1987.
He has said many controversial things in his career. He has defended accused Nazi refugees, accused the Jewish lobby of having an "Amen Corner" in Congress, attracted supremacists to his campaign.
But with his razor-sharp intellect, puckish sense of humour and a delight in being politically incorrect, Buchanan is feted in circles which would not normally entertain his anti-immigrant, protectionist, racism-tinged radicalism.
Part of this is because of his insider status. He has played the game. This "outsider" spent eight years in the White House as an assistant to three presidents. He attended three US-Soviet summits. He accompanied Nixon to China. He has made a lucrative career after the White House as a master of radio, television and the written word, as an operator of the op-ed pages, as a verbal pugilist on CNN's Crossfire, where political opponents debate at a high pitch.
He earned enough to buy a nice Mercedes some years ago, which embarrassed him with the American car workers on whom he was pushing protectionism during the 1992 4 campaign.
He carried his America-first populism and his Catholic code into his political career and defined it in typical bellicose terms, "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America," he told the Republican Party convention in Houston, Texas in 1992. "It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will be one day as was the cold war itself." In this war they must "block by block take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country."
The values and attitudes of the old Washington are not so evident in Blessed Sacrament parish today, where the population is less than one quarter Catholic and the suburb has been colonised by the establishment and their families.
The city too has passed from (white) Congressional tutelage to (black) mayoral control. "Looking at what Washington is," said Pat Buchanan, writing in 1988, "and remembering what Washington was in 1958, I am reminded about the Africans' jibe about the European colonisers: "When the missionaries came to us from Europe, they had the Bible and we had the land; and now we have the Bible and they have the land."
But it is on the establishment, corporate and political, Democrat and Republican, on whom Buchanan is planning to unleash his peasants. As he put it this week: "In Washington all the knights and barons will be riding back into the castle, pulling up the drawbridge."
But his chances of laying siege to the capital by winning the Republican nomination are in fact pretty remote, despite the successful skirmish in New Hampshire.
Never mind, Pat, there's always CNN and Crossfire, or another job as an insider, writing speeches or directing communications for a future Republican president.