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Patrick Buchanan

Patrick J. Buchanan is a conservative activist and pundit. He was a candidate for the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Republican presidential nominations and received nearly 450,000 votes as the Reform Party nominee in 2000. Buchanan was an adviser to three presidents and is now the chairman of The American Cause, which describes itself as “educational organization whose mission is to advance and promote traditional American values that are rooted in the conservative principles of national sovereignty, economic patriotism, limited government, and individual freedom.”

Jules Witcover interviewed Buchanan on November 14, 2007.

Why don’t we start by talking about the changes in the public-financing system, whether it’s dead now as a result of all the people opting out, or whether candidates or long-shot candidates have any chance to win the nomination in either party?

I think the chances of a long-shot candidate winning the nomination of the Republican Party have been reduced pretty much to nil by the enormous amounts of money in politics. We did very well in ’92 against the president [George H.W. Bush] of the United States, coming off a talk show and given a 10-week run in New Hampshire. And we got 37 percent to his 51 percent. And we did the same in Georgia.

In ’96, of course, we won Alaska. We won Louisiana. And then we came in a close second in Iowa and won New Hampshire. But in 1999, George [W.] Bush announced, and about the same time, he announced he had $36 million in the bank. And for me, that meant the race was over. You can’t match that kind of money, because what it enables a candidate to do is sleep in his bed in Austin while television is carrying his message into every nook and cranny of Iowa. And you are traveling back and forth across in a van or in an SUV.

Well, what about the Jimmy Carter theory that if you can break out in Iowa or New Hampshire, you’ll get enough momentum and money to possibly position yourself as a serious candidate?

Well, that’s true. And that was our strategy, to do well in the very early primaries. We could have beaten [Bob] Dole, I think. But Dole was not an extremely strong candidate. And he didn’t have inordinate amounts of money. Now take someone like [Mike] Huckabee. If Huckabee does very well in Iowa and well in New Hampshire, I just don’t think he will have the resources. And they will not come in fast enough to enable him to run nationwide by the time the huge primaries come around on the fifth of February.

So I think it’s much, much more difficult. There are too many candidates in the race with too much money. I mean, when we went in, in ’99, you not only had Bush there; we could compete with [John] McCain, but you can’t compete with [Steve] Forbes. As I said, you go to the Iowa straw poll, and he had an air-conditioned tent with French doors on it.

I remember that. So you don’t see any possibility that any of these long shots could catch fire, because there is really not enough time?

Well, the long shots don’t have the establishment with them and the establishment fundraising machines. And they don’t have the resources to build a base in every state and to build a firewall. They have to break through; you have to break through and run through all 11 men, as it were, to score. And it’s become infinitely more difficult now because of the enormous disparities in money. When you have candidates talking about $100 million, there simply is no one who does not have an independent wealth that can do that.

The same was true in our third-party run. We got $12 million from the Federal Election Commission. And it was contested. We didn’t get it for half of the campaign. Then we had to use it fighting lawsuits to throw us off the ballots. So it was just an impossibility. One of the big things that makes it difficult for a third-party candidate in the general is that the two national parties control the presidential debates and who gets in them.

Do you see any possibility of that changing?

No, I don’t. Look, the two parties have a monopoly, or a duopoly, on the most powerful office in the world, an office which can reward or punish whole sectors of the economy and the society given its power and given the power of the Congress. And when you have that kind of power, the money is going to gravitate to those who can wield it.

Looking back now, do you ever regret going the third-party route?

No. I often have many regrets for — one thing was that I didn’t realize that you start off pretty well, but you find out that [Ralph] Nader and I were in the Gator Bowl and the other guys are in the Super Bowl. And the reporters [say], “That’s all very interesting, Pat, but one of these two guys is going to be president.”

My concern about it is not simply the damage it does to you because we did not do well, but the perceived damage it does to your causes like economic patriotism, and border security, and non-interventionism. So you have everybody saying, “Well, that just shows those causes have no support,” which was not true.

What do you think is the impact of the Internet on presidential campaigns?

The Internet’s been beneficial. You see an outsider like Ron Paul doing exceedingly well, because there are a tremendous number of bright, intelligent individuals who admire the guy and his message. So he had raised $6 million in one quarter. And then he raised $4 million on Guy Fawkes Day. That’s enormously beneficial, I think, to a candidate. And it has the same effect, I think, as the early days of direct mail did for conservatives. The grass-roots folks, if they all got together, if you got $100,000, they might be able to match Nelson Rockefeller’s contributions.

Well, do you see other benefits beyond fundraising?

Sure. I think the Internet enables you to get your message out to more people. The democratization of TV, of the media, has been really a great boon. I remember I came back from New Hampshire when I was running in ’92, and these guys were saying, “Hey Pat, that was a great speech you gave up there in what was that, Nashua?” And I said, “Where the hell did you read about that?” C-SPAN was carrying all this live on their “Road to the White House.” They were carrying all of these things. So you had a good audience of maybe 100,000 people following everything we did. That’s good news.

As I said, direct mail, the multiplicity of cable channels, C-SPAN, the Internet, all of these things that multiply the ways you can communicate and people can communicate with your campaign, I think, are beneficial to outsiders. It gives them vehicles to offset to some measure, I mean just the buck-raking that goes on for the front-runners.

As somebody who has been both, and still is, in the news media as well as politics, what’s your feeling about the phenomenon of the blogosphere?

I am not sure I am an expert on the impact of that other than when you mention the Internet, there is no doubt about it — in terms of communications, people have told me, “Get into this race, Pat — we can raise $1 million or $2 million a day on the ’net,” and things like that. I don’t know about everybody blogging out there. I think you are going to get an awful lot of garbage dumped into the stream of politics, far more than even normal. I am not sure if that’s beneficial, all of the stuff that floats around on there.

Do you see any possibility of any kind of monitoring of the blogosphere? When you are dealing with newspapers and network television, even cable television to a degree, you have a monitor. You don’t have any monitor out there for these.

You don’t have any monitors unless we want to hire the Chinese Communists. They know how to handle it. I don’t know how you monitor it, when they have all of that stuff. I mean the biggest seller out there is apparently porn.

What about the independent-expenditure groups and the 527s? Do you see any need or way to put some kind of a cap on them?

I was against a lot of the McCain stuff, because some of these people — I tell you what. The best thing you can get is full disclosure and full exposure of who is spending the money, who is behind the ad, and who is doing this. But when you get into control of content, and you get into knocking, say, the “right to life” people or somebody else off the air for 60 days and they can’t mention candidates and things like that, I have a real problem with that. And I think a lot of conservatives have a problem with McCain-Feingold on that.

The 527s and the independent-expenditure groups, do you think they are on the wane, in any way, in the sense with other ways of reaching the public?

No, I don’t think so. I’ll tell you why. The TV is still the way to reach the masses. And any presidential election, given the fact that the huge Republican margin we had in the [Richard] Nixon-[Ronald] Reagan era is gone, and it’s a 50-50 red-blue country, and 45 percent are probably going to vote Republican almost no matter who is nominated, and the same with the Democrats, you are down to the final 10 percent. And those are sort of voters who aren’t really strongly committed one way or the other. And those folks tend to respond to what they don’t like, rather than what they do like. You get them up there, and you start hitting that negative stuff, and they’ll recoil away from a candidate and go to Brand X.

Do you think more money means more negative campaigning?

It sure does. I think negative campaigning is here to stay.

You mentioned the debates. Do you see any possibility of getting the debates out of the control of the parties?

I don’t think the parties are going to give that up. And I don’t know that the candidates [would, either]. You remember back in [1980], Reagan debated [John] Anderson. Of course, the higher Anderson got, the better Reagan did. So he was happy. And Carter wouldn’t go into it. Carter only debated when it looked like you either debate or die. The parties are not going to give that up. Now why did [Ross] Perot get in there? One reason, of course, is he was big in the polls. But Perot had $3 billion and could spend any amount of money to keep himself up to those levels to compensate for the loss of free media.

But I tell you, you talk about big money, I mean, why do we get these free-trade agreements? Why are you getting them when the country doesn’t want them? Why do these Republicans like [Indiana Representative Mike] Pence and guys like that, good conservatives, go up and walk right into the guns on the issue of illegal immigration? You go take a look at that bill. You know what it’s got in it? It’s got complete amnesty for all civil and criminal liabilities for all the businesses that have hired illegals.

These are the guys who are really pushing a lot of this stuff, some of them, when some conservatives are walking right into the guns. And you don’t understand why. All you have to do is say somebody is pushing this. Who? You know who it is. It’s the corporate guys on K Street who are working for their big bosses up there who want to keep the U.S. market open so they can move their factory to China and dump their goods here. So on all of these things, I’ll tell you this: The corporate power has really knocked the unions almost off the playing field, in terms of real power, in terms of money. It used to be much more competitive. It’s far less so now.

Have you read a new book out called The Shock Doctrine: [The Rise of Disaster Capitalism] by Naomi Klein?

No.

She is a left-wing, anti-corporatist, and she has some interesting theories about how [Milton] Friedman’s theories have worked elsewhere and now are not in the vanguard here but certainly being resurrected here.

Oh, Milton. Listen, I have my new book coming out in a week. And I take on my old friend Milton head-on on free trade. I just ripped him apart. I used to be a Friedmanite. And I went back and re-read all of his arguments on free trade. And they are mush. I just ripped him right to bits. It’s in a chapter called “Colony of the World.”

Getting back to the process, what do you think has been the impact of the front-loading and the proliferation of primaries? What does that do to the opportunity for a candidate who doesn’t have a lot of money to stay in the ballgame?

Well, the worst thing that could happen to an outside candidate — or a candidate who has a message but doesn’t have the big organization and doesn’t have the establishment and doesn’t have the money — is to have regional primaries or start off with huge state primaries, like start off with California. All that regional primaries and big national primaries will do is basically validate the Gallup Poll at that particular point in time.

The reason I like the thing seriatim, where you have Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, is that you can go out there and work a state like Iowa and New Hampshire at the same time for a year. And you have a big field. You can build yourself up to 25 percent, 30 percent. And you can knock off the front-runner. Momentum is an enormous thing. This is a dynamic process. And this is why [Mitt] Romney, frankly, has a shot at this thing. I mean, he has done exactly the right thing.

So you don’t fear that the whole front-loading can automatically knock out a candidate? That there is still a possibility, because of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina?

Once you get the individual state primaries, that is the ideal situation. Look at Huckabee; he wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell if you start off with some big national or some big state. Neither would I. And neither would a lot of people if you do that. All you get then is McCain and Rudy [Giuliani].

Do you think the parties had developed any clout with their efforts to take delegates away from states that jumped outside their process?

I don’t know what the Republicans are doing, but my view is that it’s stupid. I mean, Democrats are going to penalize Michigan and Florida, which may be up for grabs in the general [election]. And that’s one case I believe in amnesty.

Well, why would any state hesitate to go first, because they are losing delegates, when they know by the time that they get to the convention it’s going to be already decided?

What Michigan did is smart as hell. Get somebody to come out there and talk about why the auto companies are going under and the Big Three are selling less than 50 percent of America’s cars when they used to sell 98 percent, and what’s happening to Detroit, what they are going to do about industrial jobs. I commend those folks out there in Michigan [who] try to stick their primary right in there.

You mentioned a few minutes ago that you thought disclosure was really the important thing. But how much do you think people care about the input of money in a campaign? Do you think the actual average voter cares about where the money comes from?

I really don’t. Basically, a lot of these, to most folks, are wonk issues. They are issues, with due respect, it’s like you put out your financial disclosure form. I never had a voter ask me for that in my life. I have 50 reporters asking me when I am going to come out with it. I mean, they don’t care about that stuff. Voters care about gut issues — I mean, things like what [New York Governor Elliot] Spitzer did with the driver’s licenses. Those things really affect people. They are in-tune to them. But you take some of this other stuff that’s more wonkish or “beltway” where it looks like politics as usual and nonsense — they don’t care about it.

What do you think about the role of consultants? Do you think they are overblown?

They are overrated.

Overrated? Overpaid?

Well, look what they did to McCain. I don’t know who ran that campaign. But all of these guys come in there, they looted for advice. Look, there are some guys who are really good, and they are very, very few. The rest of them, I think, you have the glorified hacks, a lot of them. I go on television with all of these Democratic and Republican strategists. Where have they been strategizing and for whom and when? I mean, I have never heard of some of these people. And there are some people who are very good. The consultants, I think they don’t give you anything. They charge enormous amounts.

I know it. Did you ever pay a consultant?

No. I did my own stuff. We used to help Nixon with our strategy. Why the hell did I need somebody to help me? This is what we used to do for a living.

Well, that brings me to another point. There was a time when people who worked for a candidate worked for them because they liked the guy.

They liked him and believed in him.

And it was often a member of his law firm or his brother-in-law, somebody who had a personal connection.

These guys are all hired guns. And some of them are third-rate gunslingers.

What do you think is lost by that development?

Well, one of the things that’s lost is, as you said — whether it’s Nixon, who we liked personally, or whether it’s Reagan, who is a leader of the cause — when you believe in the guy, I think you’re willing to go down to defeat with him. You are willing to work longer hours. And a lot of these guys who are consultants now, I think, are hired guns. They will not go to the wall for somebody, because in the next campaign they might be on the other team. So I think you lose a lot of that stuff.

John Deardorff told me once that some campaigns he worked in, there were maybe 20 different kinds of consultants. About 19 of them didn’t know the candidate and he didn’t know them.

Well, I don’t know whether that’s the candidate’s fault for hiring people like that and letting them take his money.

Do you know any case, as a candidate or as an adviser, where there was a clear quid pro quo for a contribution? Where actually the guy comes in and says, “I’ll give you ‘X’ dollars if you give me this or you introduce this bill.”

No, I don’t. Most of this stuff is done with an understanding: “I really support your position on this. And I really hope you can stick with it. And you’re really out there. Here is a contribution.” When you get right down to it, I am sure it’s done. But I haven’t seen it. I am fortunate, for one reason, I wasn’t in the business of raising money. I wasn’t in the business of collecting money or doing any of those things.

When I was in politics, we were just in the business of advising Nixon on strategy or Reagan on issues and stuff like that. That’s another end of the business. I don’t doubt that it exists. I tell you who to talk to; talk to the guys out there buck-raking. They can tell you a lot more on that, when the guy says, “Is he going to do this or is he going to do that, before I write the check?”

Well, that seems to be the conventional wisdom. But I haven’t encountered anybody where they could come up with a [quid pro quo] — or maybe they are not willing to. They say it’s not that blatant; it’s more subtle. And there’s more finesse involved. If it’s buying anything, it’s buying access.

But I think some of them are doing more than that. When you read in the paper about someone made this contribution, and this guy went to the wall for this particular thing, and you take a look at a lot of these earmarks and stuff like that — that looks pretty damn specific to me. Maybe you can’t prove it. Are you reading all of this stuff out of Alaska? It looks very, very close to bribery to me.