This is an historic day I have looked forward to, and it is only fitting that I do my part to help send out this speech far into cyberspace.
Text of Pat Buchanan 's speech announcing plans to seek the Reform Party presidential nomination:
Good morning again, and happy St. Crispin's Day and let's make a little history. Today I am ending my lifelong membership in the Republican Party and my campaign for its nomination, and I'm declaring my intention to see(k) the nomination of the Reform Party for the presidency of the United States of America.
This decision was not made without anguish and regret. I will forever cherish the memory of having been perhaps the only Goldwater right in the graduating class of the graduate school of journalism in Columbia in New York in 1961.
Nor will I ever regret my nine years of service to Richard Nixon, from his comeback campaigns of 1966 and '68 to the great triumph, 49 states in 1972, to the tragic final days of Watergate. I was with Nixon in China, and I had the high honor of being Ronald Reagan's second in the great Panama Canal debates, and of being at his side when that great president refused to give up a missile defense for his country and walked out of the summit at Reykjavik in Ronald Reagan's finest hour of the Cold War.
>From the thunderous reception we got at Houston in 1992, when I told the
Buchanan Brigades we had to come home and stand beside George Bush, to the ovations at Ames this summer last when I faced off with his son, the governor, the Republican Party has been good to me, and I have tried to be loyal to it. But as John F. Kennedy said, sometimes party loyalty asks too much, and today it asks too much of us.
Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings on the same bird of prey.
On foreign and trade policy, open borders and centralized power, our Beltway parties have become identical twins. Both supported NAFTA and GATT and the surrender of American sovereignty to the World Trade Organization. Both supported the extension of nuclear war guarantees right up to the borders of Russia.
Both supported the illegal war on Serbia.
Both support IMF bailouts of corrupt and even criminal regimes. Both voted for MFN trade privileges for a communist China that is right now pointing missiles at our country, the United States of America.
So let me say to the leaders of those two parties in Washington, D.C.: The appeasement of Beijing is a bipartisan disgrace, and we will not be a party to it.
And neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were sent overseas to finance the boom market of the 1990s that the rest of us enjoy.
Both parties are addicted to soft money; both write laws with corporate lobbyists looking over their shoulder.
Both embrace the amoral and unprincipled politics of triangulation, and neither fights with conviction and courage to rescue God's country from the cultural and moral pit into which she has fallen.
The day of the outsider is over. And the Beltway parties, the money men, have seen to that. Never again will our political establishment permit a dissident to come as close to capturing a nomination as we did in 1996. They have rearranged the primary schedules and rigged the game to protect the party favorites.
Candidates of ideas need not apply. As both parties--both parties--seek out the hollow men, the malleable men, willing to read from teleprompters speeches scripted by consultants and pollsters to whom the latest readout from the focus group is sacred text. So...
And we choose not to play our assigned walk-on role in their sham election.
We've just started going here, friends.
We've just started.
My friends, this year I believe is our last chance to save our Republic before she disappears into a Godless new world order that our elites are constructing in betrayal of everything for which the founding fathers fought and lived and died.
Only the Reform Party offers a hope of a real debate and a real choice of destinies for our country.
"If we don't go now, Pat," I've been told by loyalists all across America, "every cause for which we have fought for seven years will die." But we can't let those causes die, because they are America's cause.
So let me say to the money boys and the Beltway elites who think that at long last they have pulled up the drawbridge and locked us out forever, you don't know this peasant army. We have not yet begun to fight.
So let me--let me lay out our patriot's road for America.
With the Cold War over, we shall craft a foreign policy for a new century rooted in the great tradition of Washington, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams who wrote: Wherever the standard of freedom and independence shall be imperiled, unfurled there will America's heart, her benedictions and her prayers be, but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
I pledge to you I will never send an American army to fight in a foreign war unless our country is attacked or our vital interests are imperiled.
They call us isolationists. And that's one of the nicest things they call us.
They call us isolationists. Well, if they mean I intend to isolate America from all the bloody territorial, tribal and ethnic wars of the 21st century, I plead guilty.
Mr. Bush down there in Texas says his Department of Education will write tests for fourth-grade children in Idaho. But if I am elected president, the bureaucrats at the Department of Education are not going to be testing kids, they're going to be testing the magic of the marketplace.
And all federal money for the schoolchildren of America will be sent back to the school districts of America where accountability begins and authority belongs.
We need a new Supreme Court where only constitutionalists need apply, a court that will respect both state's rights and human rights, that will begin to undo the damage done this nation by judicial aggressions, beginning with that abomination they call Roe v. Wade.
We need a president and a Congress that will pick up the whip the Founding Fathers left in Article 3 of the Constitution, to heard the justices back into the narrow stalls to which they were first consigned by Hamilton and Madison.
What is a self-governing people doing meekly waiting each week for nine jurists to tell us how we may live and how we should governor ourselves?
As our fathers threw off a tyranny of kings, let us throw off this tyranny of judges and let America be America again.
As for our IRS tax code, it is an insult to a free people, the product--the product of an endless series of corrupt bargains between legislators and lobbyists. Let us tear this weed out by its roots, cut taxes to the lowest levels in history, eliminate taxes on savers and small business and shift the burden where it belongs: on the backs of a global transnational elite that has no loyalty to any country.
For every tax on manufactured goods made in the U.S.A., let us put an equal tax on foreign goods dumped in the U.S.A.
For every--for every tariff that China puts on us, let's put an equal tariff on them. That way--that way, Mr. Clinton's principal campaign contributors down at the Chinese embassy can start help paying for the 7th Fleet.
Friends, ours is truly the best of times and the worst of times. With our miraculous advances in medicine, science and technology, none of us would want to go back to yesterday.
But something good has been lost in those years as well: the old patriotism, a popular culture that undergirded the values of faith (inaudible) country; the idea that we Americans are one people who sacrifice and suffer together and go forward and progress together. The mutual respect, the sense of limits, the good manners--all are gone.
My life has been spent in the great and good vocations of politics and journalism and government. None commands the respect it once did. All are today in disrepute.
I cannot think of a time since Watergate so poisoned with rancor and hostility. And I don't know if any president can change that the way Ronald Reagan infused his times with that spirit of confidence and unabashed love of country for which he became so famous. But I do know this: I will try.
America needs a government of national unity and reconciliation that draws from the best of all parties. And I promise you, I will create that kind of government. And if we lead, they will follow; and if we build it, they will come.
My friends, all the great empires of Europe that began our century so full of swagger and bombast all came crashing down in ruins. All are now surrendering their independence and their identities to a superstate in Europe that pays homage to the great god, mammon.
America, alone, yet endures, independent and free.
The great questions before us are these: Shall we, too, yield to their temptation, follow their path and suffer their fate? Forbid it, Almighty God. Is the call to empire irresistible? Is world government inevitable? Or can American remain forever a light unto the nations, an example to mankind of how a free people should govern themselves, a republic above whose sovereignty stands the sovereignty of God alone?
This is our cause. And so it is, that in the name of the Founding Fathers we go forward to rescue our Lady America, and will not quit this fight as long as there is breath within us.
God bless this republic and God bless America.
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"In the next century, nations as we know them will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
(- Strobe Talbot, Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.)
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