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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPat Buchanan won after all. But now he thinks it might be too late for the nation he was trying...
The Ideas Made It, But I Didnt
Pat Buchanan won after all. But now he thinks it might be too late for the nation he was trying to save.
By TIM ALBERTA May/June 2017
His first date with his future wife was spent in a New Hampshire motel room drinking Wild Turkey into the wee hours with Hunter S. Thompson. He stood several feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. during the I Have a Dream speech. He went to China with Richard M. Nixon and walked away from Watergate unscathed. He survived Iran-Contra, too, and sat alongside Ronald Reagan at the Reykjavík Summit. He invaded Americas living rooms and pioneered the rhetorical combat that would power the cable news age. He defied the establishment by challenging a sitting president of his own party. He captured the fear and frustration of the right by proclaiming a great culture war was at hand. And his third-party candidacy in 2000 almost certainly handed George W. Bush the presidency, thanks to thousands of Palm Beach, Florida, residents mistakenly voting for him on the butterfly ballot when they meant to back Al Gore.
If not for his outsize ambition, Pat Buchanan might be the closest thing the American right has to a real-life Forrest Gump, that patriot from ordinary stock whose life journey positioned him to witness, influence and narrate the pivotal moments that shaped our modern world and changed the course of this countrys history. He has known myriad rolesneighborhood brawler, college expellee, journalist, White House adviser, political commentator, presidential candidate three times over, author, provocateurand his existence traces the arc of what feels to some Americans like a nations ascent and decline. He was 3 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and 6 when Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now 78, with thick, black glasses and a thinning face, Buchanan looks back with nostalgia at a life and career that, for all its significance, was at risk of being forgottenuntil Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.
A quarter-century before Trump descended into the atrium of his Manhattan skyscraper to launch his unlikely bid for the White House, Buchanan, until then a columnist, political operative and TV commentator, stepped onto a stage in Concord, New Hampshire, to declare his own candidacy 10 weeks ahead of the states presidential primary. Associating the globalist President George H. W. Bush with bureaucrats in Brussels pursuing a European superstate that trampled on national identity, Buchanan warned his rowdy audience, We must not trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of anybodys new world order! His radically different prescription, which would underpin three consecutive runs for the presidency: a new nationalism that would focus on forgotten Americans left behind by bad trade deals, open-border immigration policies and foreign adventurism. His voice booming, Buchanan demanded: Should the United States be required to carry indefinitely the full burden of defending rich and prosperous allies who take Americas generosity for granted as they invade our markets?
This rhetoricdeployed again during his losing bid for the 1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000not only provided a template for Trumps campaign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the partys defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original to Trumps campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchananfrom depicting the political class as bumbling stooges to singling out a rising superpower as an economic menace (though back then it was Japan, not China) to rallying the citizenry to take back a country whose destiny they no longer dictated. Pitchfork Pat, as he was nicknamed, even deployed a phrase that combined Trumps two signature slogans: Make America First Again.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/22/pat-buchanan-trump-president-history-profile-215042
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)I guess if you're not on the receiving end, it's hard to fully understand.