Online NewsHour: Republican No More -- October 25, 1999



	REPUBLICAN NO MORE

October 25, 1999

Amid weeks of speculation, Pat Buchanan announces that he has left the Republican Party to seek the Reform Party's presidential nomination. After this background report, Margaret Warner discusses the Buchanan switch with two Republican strategists.

Special Emphasis:
What are the topics America's leaders need to address?

Online Forum:
What issues do you think should shape election 2000?

Oct. 22, 1999:
One on one with Bill Bradley.

Oct. 5, 1999:
Al Gore's campaign moves to Tennessee.

Sept. 27, 1999:
Dan Quayle drops out of the presidential race.

Sept. 23, 1999:
A Steve Forbes campaign snapshot.

Sept. 22, 1999:
A look at the Patrick Buchanan campaign.

Sept. 16, 1999:
Dan Quayle on the campaign trail.

Sept. 9, 1999:
The Post's Thomas Edsall on the Bradley campaign.

Sept. 1, 1999:
The Post's Dan Balz on the McCain campaign..

Browse the NewsHour's coverage of the White House.

JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has the Buchanan story.

MARGARET WARNER: The announcement had been expected for weeks, and Pat Buchanan wasted little time making it when he appeared before supporters this morning at a Northern Virginia hotel.

PATRICK BUCHANAN: Today I am ending my lifelong membership in the Republican Party and my campaign for its nomination, and I am declaring my intention to seek the nomination of the Reform Party for the Presidency of the United States of America. (Cheers and Applause) (chanting "Go, Pat, Go")

MARGARET WARNER: Buchanan is a lifelong Republican, an activist who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and became best known as a conservative commentator on television. He's run for President twice before as a Republican. In 1992, he made a surprisingly strong showing against incumbent President George Bush in the New Hampshire primary. In 1996, Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary over eventual nominee Bob Dole. This time, though, Buchanan's bid for the Republican nomination has lagged. After finishing a distant fifth in the Iowa Straw Poll in August, he began considering the move that he made today.

Buchanan on the stump

Patrick Buchanan PATRICK BUCHANAN: 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. (Cheers and applause) 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 voted for MFN trade privileges for a communist China that is right now pointing missiles at our own country, the United States of America. (Applause) 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! (Cheers and applause) Neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans whose jobs were sent overseas to finance the boom market of the 1990's that the rest of us enjoy.

Patrick Buchanan Both parties are addicted to soft money; both write laws with corporate lobbyists looking over their shoulders; both embrace the 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. (Cheers and applause) 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. Only the Reform Party offers the hope of a real debate and a real choice of destinies for our country. 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. (Cheers and applause) We have not yet begun to fight!