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| REPUBLICAN NO MORE | |
 October 25, 1999 
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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.
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JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner has the Buchanan story.
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. |
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| Buchanan on the stump | |||||||||||
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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, 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.
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! 
