Word: buchananism
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...took aim at half a dozen, including welfare recipients and prisoners. Before he dropped out of the race, California Governor Pete Wilson bet heavily on this year's trifecta of blame: illegal immigrants, affirmative action and repeat criminals (with a call for "three strikes and you're out" legislation). Buchanan, of course, had already put his money on those horses--and others...
...true that Buchanan has always been a flamethrower, but even he was not quite as incendiary in his 1992 debut campaign. That race was not freighted with nearly as much symbolic villainy. For Bill Clinton, it was "change" vs. the "status quo." George Bush bashed liberals but mainly defended his accomplishments, among them steering the cold war to an end. As for Buchanan, a large (and not well remembered) part of his cultural-war diatribe at the convention was a paean to Bush in which he praised the President for his expertise in foreign affairs, something he would never...
Like any other seasoned writer, Buchanan spends time not only on what he says but also on how he says it; he searches for the tangy phrase, the sticky epithet, the cartoonish image that will lodge in voters' minds and either inspire or terrify them: When he attacked the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as Surgeon General, it was because "you can't have an abortionist as America's family doctor." On the stump, Department of Education employees become "some guy in sandals and beads...telling us how to teach American history," and the Democrats are "the party of national...
...heart of his message comes down to this: you have lost control over your lives, your money, your choices, your government. Who has power instead? Your enemies. Some of the enemies Buchanan serves up seem a bit farfetched. The fact that the National Endowment for the Arts has little to do with the collapse of the American family, for instance, does not prevent Buchanan from announcing that if he is elected, "the first week I'm going to walk out of that White House down to the NEA. I'm going to padlock the place and fumigate...
Next in his hierarchy of demons are corporations, the "transnational institutions that show no loyalty to a country now at all. They are concerned about the corporate economy. I'm concerned about the national economy. They are no longer one and the same." These are the moments when Buchanan sounds like an unreconstructed liberal Democrat, defending labor unions and denouncing rapacious Big Business. But he does not extend his aim to the rich, perhaps because he understands what many have missed: most Americans do not want to hate rich people--they want to be them. "I really have no problem...