Pat Buchanan - 6 March 1992

You may have noticed, some listeners I hope have noticed, that I have not so far talked about any of the presidential primary elections. This is not an oversight and I can hear rejoicing in some quarters at the thought that I might not talk about the presidential campaign at all until the last of the primaries, California, in June. But before we move on to the general topic that I think interests most people, I'd like to say as simply as possible what a primary election is and is not, apart from mentioning that like most America political and legal institutions, it is extremely, lovingly complicated.

Roughly it's a way of taking the control of political parties away from the bosses and the local party machines and giving the choice of candidates for a dog-catcher for president to the ordinary party member, the voter. What people vote for in these state primaries is not George Bush or Bill Clinton or Jerry Brown or Paul Tsongas directly but for men and women on the ballot form who will go to the party's national convention in the summer, pledged for a certain candidate. So in voting Mr Elmer Schmidt, you know that you're showing your preference for say, President Bush when the Republican convention meets.

Well that's enough of the system. Looking over the general picture, as Mayor Koch used to say every time he saw a voter on the street, how am I doing? After every primary election so far, the president has been asked that very question and he regularly replies, fine, we're doing just fine, which being translated means he's doing remarkably badly and is nervous and every day his campaign advisers and his White House cronies met and try to devise some new technique.

They've just sent out an emergency call for Peggy Noonan, the speech writer who coined "gentler, kinder nation", the phrase that is, not the fact, whatever it may mean. In trying to deal with it, I should say that it is the president's main Republican opponent, Mr Pat Buchanan and it's time to talk about this remarkable character who has never run for elective office in his life, who when he first mentioned some months ago that he was thinking of running for president was mercilessly kidded by his friends and ridiculed by the late-night stand-up television comics. An Irish American, black Irish as we used to say. Goodness no, not black – a dark-eyed, black-haired, twinkling, pugnacious 53-year-old and known around the country as a panellist, sometimes chairman on a television talk – more often shout – show, which pits downright liberals against downright conservatives, the farther apart on the political spectrum the better. The purpose of this articulate, often preposterous show, Crossfire, is to have spokesmen for the left and right wing of any issue, quarrel together as entertainingly as possible.

First about the life and career of Mr Buchanan. He was born in Washington DC, middle class Catholic family, third of nine children, idolised his father whom to this day he calls the "finest man I ever knew". Father Buchanan, who is long gone, had three heroes in his lifetime: Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, Generalissimo Douglas MacArthur, the Commander in Chief of all the United Nations forces in Korea until briskly dismissed by President Truman for wanting to take the war to China, and the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, the notorious hunter of Communists and liberals who might be Communists in the infamous witch hunt of the early 1950s. Pat Buchanan's adoration of his father is such that he picked up with apparently no reservations or misgiving, his father's admiration of this heroic trio.

Young Pat evidently made both parents proud of him by executing his father's advice to punch the nose of any boy whose ideas he found obnoxious and fulfilling his mother's fondest hopes of him as a scholar and a devotee of the church in all its preferences, from the King James version of the Bible, the Latin Mass and its detestation of Communism, abortion and pornography. He must have been plainly a spunky, wide-awake, mischievous little boy and this I think is important in assessing his appeal – he's endowed with a generous dollop of off-hand Irish charm.

The education of young Pat Buchanan was absolutely in line with the tradition of middle and working class Irish-Americans throughout most of our time, The tradition demonstrated or maybe idealised in the movies, by the old 1930s Warner Brothers team, I should say Catholic team of Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Pat O'Brien, namely beat up the neighbourhood gang, go hangdog to the local priest, Spencer Tracy, be scolded with a wink, traipse to confession, back to the happy, rowdy school and the baseball team and if you're Spencer Tracy or Pat Buchanan, you can be forgiven for being something of a scholar. Maybe you'll become a seminarian.

Pat Buchanan then went, of course, to public school in the American sense, lord knows, and did not, like other humble Irish boys whose parents had gone up in the world, go off to a private school, like say the Kennedy sons, whose father was the son of a saloon keeper. Pat went off to a school run by Jesuits, then on to the local university, where his regulation stay was interrupted by a year's suspension for fighting it out with two cops, who'd arrested him for speeding. He went on to a school of journalism, a regular feature of many American universities, and finally got his first job on a Missouri City newspaper and at once hit his stride, which was to cook into salty prose, his father's peppery convictions and prejudices, namely to skin and fry what another old Irish-American journalist called bleeding heart liberals.

So from the start of his career there was never any question or wobble in the political stance of Pat Buchanan, he was a conservative Republican and if it came to a semantic choice, he was a conservative first and a Republican Party member second. One day, way back in 1965, he was then all of 26, he happened to be one of hundreds of guests at a reception for none other than Richard M Nixon who was, at that point, out of office and as far as most political experts were concerned, at the end of his career. Buchanan had the gall to say: remember me, as a boy I caddied for you in Washington. Why don't you run for president, I'll be right there. Awful, outrageous, it worked. Four years later Pat Buchanan was settled down in the White House and was a speech writer and yes, adviser to Nixon and after that, to Reagan. He was in his element with both of them. Watergate? Nonsense, he says, nothing but a bunch of Mickey Mouse misdemeanours. The farther he gets away from the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the more he idolises him and his era as one in which, and perhaps he's right in this, for the last time the white Christian macho male was king in America.

During the four or five years he's been seen jousting and quipping on his television show, he has without shame expressed many views that, in most American public debate, have dared not speak their name. They are the views of people in, pure, or should I say unhesitating reaction against the whole liberal litany. Against multi-culturalism, special help for the poor and the blacks, sympathetic concern for the immigrant Hispanics and Asians, a willingness to accept homosexuals into society and into full legal equality. We come here on a strength, as a campaigner, as a rising politician, that lies not in the view themselves but in the pungency, the sharpness of their expression. That's to say, Pat Buchanan has one thing that none of the other candidates has, he's a wit.

Now that has never been a notable advantage in American politics. Dry humour, yes, but on the contrary, wit tends to make large congregations of ordinary people uncomfortable. President Eisenhower privately called Adlai Stevenson a smart aleck. However, Buchanan's wit does not set him above the crowd, it's not Noël Coward mocking the plebs. It's used to confirm their liveliest prejudices. When I say their prejudices, I mean the actual freely stated prejudices of many straightforward bigots, but also the secret prejudices of many respectable people, who are ashamed to proclaim their feelings about gays, blacks, free trade, the abuse of welfare, American policy towards Israel.

Mind you, Buchanan has spent most of his campaigning tour playing down these views. But few papers and television shows can resist quoting and re-quoting the phrases he used down the years on his television show. So while most people would have a hard time telling you precisely how Governor Clinton and Mr Tsongas, and come to that, Mr Bush feel about policy or about these deep grievances, it's not difficult to recall that to Pat Buchanan, the Congress of the United States is Israeli occupied territory, that the late 1980s in America displayed vulture capitalism, that American policy towards China consists in baling out an 85-year-old chain-smoking Communist dwarf. In fewer words, what sets Pat Buchanan off from all his opponents and many of his supporters, is that his wit and his temperament make him a sharp, memorable character. If we left it there you might well get a wholly false notion of his influence and likely future.

To me, the most significant statistic to come out of all the primaries so far is an exit poll, taken among people who'd voted for Buchanan in New Hampshire. Now these, remember, were registered Republicans but only 20% said they'd voted for Buchanan – either for the new political campaigner or the old blatant curmudgeon; 80% say they would most likely vote for a Democrat in November and this has been true almost everywhere where Buchanan has had between 35 and 40% of the vote. It's been a vote against George Bush. In a state where Bush was unopposed, 30% refused to commit their votes to him. The only consolation for Mr Bush in all this is the equally surprising fact that just over half of all Democratic voters wish somebody else was in their race for the presidency.

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