Previous Buchanan Diaries and VDARE Invitation to Other Campaigns

UPDATE: September 14 - Pat campaigning again - great two days media - victory in FEC and California hearings  - things change fast in this business!

Scott McConnell's September 10, 2000 Buchanan Diary

Campaign's fraught present - America's fraught future

On Friday, Pat came out for the first time since the three hospitalizations. A trip down the road to his headquarters in Tyson’s Corners, and two or three sets of meetings. After some three hours huddling with various staff members, he said he was "tiring" a bit. But it was a great boost for everyone to see him, sharp and funny and (finally) ready again to campaign.

Not campaigning the past four weeks has been terrible, of course. We immediately lost what bounce we had gained from the convention - a bounce shortened, in any event, by the wrecking crew's activities.

But we'll see soon enough, when the ads go up, what kind of constituencies are out there - how many people care about immigration, or that American policies are killing innocent Iraqi children by the hundreds of thousands, or that we are quietly signing away our sovereignty to various UN bodies.

With a few exceptions, the US press is wedded to the high-immigration, globalization process. Some of the foreign analysis is better - witness the recent London Financial Times story about "fraught" future of California, "once golden, now merely gilded." http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=
Article&cid=FT3JJHUITCC&live=true&useoverridetemplate=IXLZHNNP94C

An American paper would do the same story without mentioning the obvious fact that a massive influx of low-wage immigrants is the principle reason for the working class depression. An editor who insisted on stressing the truth ... well, you know what would happen. http://www.vdare.com/firing.htm

Maybe we should instead be talking about a "prescription drug plan" - an idea whose morality was, in my view, succinctly summed up by the September 6 Paul Craig Roberts column http://www.townhall.com/columnists/paulcraigroberts/pcr200096.shtml noting that the elderly are the wealthiest group of people in American society, and there is no great moral reason why young families should be taxed in order to transfer even more resources to them.

I know I don't have a prescription drug plan. (I mean for the country - I do manage to purchase one for myself and family). When I try to think of one, what comes to mind is an Irving Kristol comment years ago to the effect that "a nation whose politics turn on the cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics are squalid." Can anyone imagine his infinitely more influential son Bill saying something that fearless and on point?

During one of our meetings with Pat, we heard that the Michigan Republican Secretary of State had succeeded in her effort to knock the Reform Party off the ballot - Michigan was Pat's best state in raw percentage terms in '96, and the troubled Bush campaign is pulling out all the stops. The Secretary of State in question, Candice Miller was - someone with a long memory of Buchanan campaigns reminded us - one of Engler's choices for a delegate at large slot in the 1996 GOP convention. Problem was, the Buchanan forces won the at large slots, and she was bumped for one of ours. So there is some personal vindictiveness at work as well.