Loading...by Patrick J. Buchanan – August 6, 1995
The New Hampshire Presidential Primary Internet Forum
Moderators: Mark Kuhn & Jim Farrell. Text transcribed from tape by Jim Farrell, Dept of Communication, University of New Hampshire
At a picnic at the Moffett Farm in Gonic (part of Rochester), Pat Buchanan spoke to a crowd of about 150 supporters. The following were his remarks to the gathering:
Thank you very much Bob, and I want to thank the Moffetts as well for the use of the family home and the grounds. The food looks terrific, the sons are doing a great job up there cooking away. And I also want to thank um Mike, and Roger, and Peter who did such a phenomenal job yesterday up at the Granite State Taxpayers Association. [applause] We got almost 50% of the vote and ran ahead of our closest rival by almost two to one. It was a great victory for us. [applause]
Let me talk . . . I know many of you have heard me and my message for a long time, and you know, you’ve all met ah “Hillary Rodham” Buchanan over here, [laughter/applause] but ah, and she’s been my faithful companion through 24 years and also campaign of 1991-92, and ah, she’s got more experience in politics than I do. This young lady was working for Richard Nixon in 1960 when he ran against John F. Kennedy, [applause] travelled the whole country with him. [applause]
And I want to talk about the campaign Shelly and I are on, and many of you folks are already signed up on. This campaign, I believe, I believe it’s the hottest campaign in America right now. And I don’t think you will get an argument on that issue from my friends, and some of my critics, who are my colleagues back in the Washington press corps, because we started way way back in the pack, and many friends said well, Pat’s going at it, he just likes campaigning, he enjoys it, and that’s why he’s doing it. But, I think in the last couple of months we have astonished Washington.
I remember when they had the more recent straw poll, I mean the one before we had now, it was in Virginia, and it was the biggest straw poll in America to date, 1200 came out to Northern Virginia, Tyson’s Corner, and when returns came in, it was Dole 7, Gramm 9, and the Buchanan forces 59% of the vote [applause]. When that came in, I remember well, the next morning I was watching David Brinkley, and the eyebrows were going up and down [laughter] and he said “Pat Buchanan got 60% in Virginia, what does this mean, George Will.” And George was trying to explain what it meant. [laughter] But I think we have astonished the folks in Washington, and we’re making . . . we’re gaining ground. We’re not first yet. We are second in New Hampshire. We moved into second position in New York. We won the straw poll yesterday. One national poll, maybe two, has us second nationally. Some of the others have us a little further back. But there’s no doubt we’re gaining ground. And I’ll tell you why I believe we’re gaining ground. One of the reasons is, even my critics will tell you, this is a man who says what he means, and he means what he says. We’re not one [applause] of those folks in Washington who tell you one thing in Rochester, and then go to Washington and do another. In the whole country–liberal, conservative, moderate, Democrat, Republican–is fed up, with people who won’t tell you where they stand, or what they believe. We seem ’em waffling on this issue of life. How can they waffle on an issue like that? [applause] If they’re gonna walk away . . . [applause] Let me tell you. I’ve believed in the right to life my whole life, I’m gonna keep my party pro-life, and I am gonna be the most pro-life president in the history of the United States [applause/cheering]. Before you have any other rights, you’ve gotta have a right to life. Thomas Jefferson’s got that right up in the Declaration of Independence, number one, “inalienable rights, life first.”
But there are other reasons why we’re moving up folks. I know many of you were out here in 1991-92, when we came up here without a lot of support from the Washington establishment, to take on the President of the United States, because we thought he was wrong. He had made a pledge not to raise taxes and he did. He said he would veto a quota bill, and then he went ahead and signed it. So we challenged that President up here in New Hampshire. And he’s a friend of mine, George Bush was. My wife and had been to his house many times. But we challenged him and folks stood with us, because we knew that wasn’t the beliefs of our party. And we didn’t win up here. I got beat. But we shook ’em up up there in Washington, D.C. We shook up the world. Remember back after the day after the New Hampshire primary in 1992? The Prime Minister of Japan came out and had a press conference. He said, “Mr. Bush will do better in the later ones.” [laughter] And that was after my old friend George had thrown up all over him. [laughter]
I really like George. And I don’t want to criticize George, but what I’m saying is, the President did . . . we went down to Georgia and he got up and said “we did make a mistake, we should not have raised those taxes.” So, we won the argument. Look, in 1993, every Republican who had voted for that tax increase, or engineered it like my old friend Phil Gramm, everyone who had supported that tax increase in one way or another got up and voted against the Clinton tax increase. In 1995 they’re all against quotas and affirmative action. As a friend of mine said, “you know, every four years, they all sound like Pat Buchanan. [laughter] But he’s the only one that sounds like Pat Buchanan all the time.” [applause]
So, I think, this is why, this is why, when I say I’m gonna cut the inheritance taxes, on middle class families, and small businesses, and family farms, I think people believe me. And I think you ought to believe that. Because when I disagreed with the President on taxes, I gave up my job and career and came up and challenged him on it. And if I’ll do that, why wouldn’t I just send something to Congress and fight for it. That’s easy to do compared, to taking on the President in the primaries. So folks believe me when I say that. They ought to believe me. And they ought to trust me, because I’m gonna keep my word. I will keep my word to you on every one of these issues. And I will fight as hard as I can.
And there are some other issues, where we haven’t quite persuaded the Republicans to come in my direction. But, they gotta start moving in our direction. That’s my opposition to NAFTA and to GATT, and this World Trade Organization, and this whole New World Order. Now there are many reasons why I opposed NAFTA and GATT. And one of ’em I’d come to see when I was up in the North Country of New Hampshire. I went up to that famous paper mill that I talked about at my convention. And it was Christmas time. These fellas had all lost their jobs. And I was goin’ down this line, and I didn’t know if I wanted to shake hands with ’em because they all looked so angry. And one of ’em, as I was movin’ down the line, they had their head down, one of ’em looked up at me and just said, “save our jobs.” And I thought, what am I gonna do to save this fella’s job. And then I drove down to Manchester, and I picked up the paper, it said the U.S. Export-Import Bank had just guaranteed a brand new loan for some company to build a paper mill in Mexico. They’re shuttin’ down this fella’s paper mill . . .You know they all talk in Washington, some of these high tech types, say “that guy’s gonna get a job building computers.” No he’s not. He’s my age, this fella was. He was my age, and he’s not gonna find another job like that. So these are the best jobs these fellas have, and the guys in Washington say, “they’re dead-end jobs, we’re gonna get rid of them, we wanna all build computers.” That’s nonsense. That’s one reason I opposed NAFTA and GATT. You don’t put Americans in the dog-eat-dog competition with people makin’ a buck and hour, fifty cents an hour. I don’t blame those people overseas. They gotta work for that. But we can’t do that. We can’t drive down the standard of living of the American family.
I was up at Pastor Clark’s today [Pastor Thomas Clark, Tri-City Covenant Church, Somersworth, NH], and he asked me what are the one or two things you could do. And I had to think, because one was Welfare, but the other is we have run our economy in such a way that we are forcing women, who want to stay home with their children, we’re forcing them to go out into the work place, get a job, and keep up the family’s standard of living. And I thought back to when I grew up. When I grew up, my father had nine kids, and he alone worked in an accounting firm, but the real income went up each year, and my mother was home there every day. We got in plenty of trouble as it was. [laughter] Anybody who read my book knows, we got in an awful lot of trouble [laughter]. But, what would it have been like if she hadn’t been there? You know? What would it have been like? So, I think we wanna get back to that, where the standard of living of American families is going up every year. Let the big boys and the multi-national corporations, let ’em take care of themselves. They’re big enough to take care of themselves. We’ve gotta concern ourselves with working people, middle class folks. [applause] This is [inaudible/applause] what we stand for [inaudible/applause].
So, these are some of the ideas, folks. And you know my idea of sovereignty. Right down here, you know we went down, Shelly and I, they had a, ah, we had a conference up in Boston on the roots of the American, ah, Revolution, and on the roots of our economic system and our political system. And we went up to Boston, we had a great conference there, and we had all these academic teachers who were talking about what a great man Washington was. And then we went back and we took a tour in the afternoon out to Lexington, and Concord. And you stand on that green in Lexington. Can you imagine those kids, farm boys, standing up to the British Army. They were standing up because they wanted to defend American sovereignty and independence and liberty. And they wanted to decide here our destiny, what we were gonna do, and what we weren’t gonna do. But, no matter what happened we were gonna decide here. And now you see these guys in Washington, in both parties, surrendering our sovereignty to World, World Trade Organization, giving up the kind of independence of action that the Founding Fathers said should always remain here. Why? For some money? So the multi-national corporations, their stocks can soar. The stocks soar when they take the jobs overseas.
And they’re giving up our sovereignty and freedom of our foreign policy. Look at how far they’ve gone. I mentioned yesterday, they’re making World Bank loans now to North Vietnam. That means everybody out here, we’re guaranteeing loans to the government that killed those 58,000 Americans–a lot our friends over there. Why are we doing this? We ought not to be doing it. But, we’re gonna stop doing it. And as I’ve said, when I take my hand, and take that oath of office, and raise my hand, that New World Order comes crashing down. [applause].
So this is some of the agenda we’ve got here folks. And, I want to appreciate your coming out here. I know some folks here are already strongly for me. Others are saying, they’ll come up to me and say, “well, I’m takin’ a look at another fella.” I told ’em “that fella’s not any good, I’m the guy.” [laughter] No, I’m only kiddin’. You know, I’ve said about every single one of ’em, even old poor Arlen. You know Arlen . . . how do you know I’m the conservative in the race? Who did Arlen Specter challenge to a debate? Said “I want to debate Pat Buchanan, he’s the authentic thing.” You know what I told Arlen? I said “listen Arlen, you’re at 1% in the polls, you gotta move up in the polls a little bit Arlen.” [laughter] “You’re at 1% and that polls got a 3% margin of error.” [laughter] There’s a possibility Arlen Specter doesn’t exist! [laughter/applause]
And I told you . . . We’ve been on this campaign, and I told you how they’ve all been coming around and sounding like Pat Buchanan, you know, even Bill Clinton is there. [laughter] He is, He is. I just told you, I picked up the paper, Bill Clinton “we need a balanced budget, I’ve always believed in balancing the budget.” He started sounding like me in Houston, he said, “Hollywood, doing these terrible things. Look at all this sex and violence in the movies.” This is Bill Clinton. Where do you think Bill gets that money? [laughter] What’s the most recent? He said, “listen, I’ve always been in favor of prayer in the public schools.” [laughter] I told ’em, next week he’s gonna have, gonna have the desert fatigues, up with the gun owners of New Hampshire saying, “you tell ’em don’t try to take away my M-16 rifle from me.” [laughter] They’re all comin’ our way.
Let me say in conclusion, It is really a wonderful gathering out here. We’ve had many wonderful gatherings in New Hampshire and Iowa. We went to 33 towns and cities in just seven days, six days, visiting the good folks out there in Iowa and up here. And I know there’s some folks who are not necessarily, may not be for me yet. And they say, “well,” and one of the questions they ask is, “you know we like Pat, you know he just does a wonderful job on Kinsley on Crossfire, it’s great, but can he win,” they say. “Dole’s up here, and maybe Gramm’s got some money. Phil’s got a lot of money. But we know what the Beatles sang in the sixties, and it’s coming true again, “Money can’t buy you love,” my friend. [laughter]
Well I’ll tell ya, people say, “can you win?” The answer is “ya, I can win, if you’ll come with me. I’ll win if you come with me.” [applause] I will win if you support me and go out there and fight. We will win this thing. We can win it. We can win it. And this is a sign. I mean these are, these are the kinds of crowds I used to get in February, back in 1992. They’re coming out in the Summer already. They’re coming out in the Summer already, although someone told me, in New Hampshire, Summer’s on a Wednesday, Pat. [inaudible/laughter] I’ve been up in that North Country when it is cold, I’ll tell ya.
But listen, thanks you very much for coming out, and sign all these cards, and join up, and we can do it, I promise you. We’re gonna be up here fighting, we’ve got six more months. We can do it, my old friend, old Bob Dole, we’re gonna be chasin’ Bob, and I think we . . . I think we can catch him. Thank you all very very much.