Organization: Penn State University
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 21:53:39 EDT
From: Tom Benson <T3B@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.clinton
Subject: PAT BUCHANAN SPEECH IN HOUSTON
Distribution: alt

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|                               CRTNET                               |
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|                          August 27, 1992                           |
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|                            Number   621                            |
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|             COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND THEORY NETWORK              |
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|            Edited by Tom Benson, Penn State University             |
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CONTENTS --

    --  Patrick J. Buchanan: Speech at the Republican National
         Convention, Houston, Texas, August 17, 1992


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Date:         Thu, 27 Aug 1992 13:35:03 CDT
[sender]      "Discussion of campaigning for
              President by George H. W. Bush"
              <BUSH@MARIST.BITNET>
[from]        THE GAR <GLWARNER@SAMFORD.BITNET>  (Gary Warner)
Subject:      BUCHANAN Speech

The following is the text of the speech given by Patrick J.
Buchanan at the Republican National Convention in Houston,
Texas on August 17, 1992.

                     ------------------

My friends, we may have taken the long way home, but we
finally got here in Houston.  The first thing I want to do
is to congratulate President Bush, and remove any doubt
about where we stand:  The primaries are over, the heart is
strong again, and the Buchanan Brigades are enlisted -- all
the way to a great Republican comeback victory in November.

Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade
ball up at Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 radicals and
liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the
greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American
political history.

One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium.
The Reagan Decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in
America; and they said the only way to prevent even worse
times is to entrust our nation's fate and future to the
party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter and Dukakis.

Where do they find these leaders?  No way, my friends.  The
American people are not going to buy back into the
discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed
liberalism of the '70s -- no matter how slick the package in
1992.

The malcontents of Madison Square Garden notwithstanding,
the 1980s were not terrible years in America.  They were
great years.  You know it and I know it.  And everyone knows
it except for the carping critics who sat on the sidelines
of history, jeering at one of the greatest statesmen of
modern time, Ronald Reagan.

Remember the time of Jimmy Carter's days of malaise?  Ronald
Reagan crafted the greatest peacetime recovery in U.S.
history -- three million new businesses created, and 20
million new jobs.

Under the Reagan Doctrine, one by one, it was the Communist
dominoes that began to fall.  First, Grenada was liberated
by U.S. airborne troops and the U.S. Marine Corps.  Then,
the mighty Red Army was run out of Afghanistan with American
weapons.  In Nicaragua, that squalid Marxist regime was
forced to hold free elections -- by Ronald Reagan's Contra
army -- and the Communists were thrown out of power.

Fellow Americans, we ought to remember, it was under our
party that the Berlin Wall came down, and Europe was
reunited.  It was under our party that the Soviet empire
collapsed, and the captive nations broke free.

You know, it is said that each President will be remembered
in history by but a single sentence.  George Washington was
the father of our country.  Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves
and saved the Union.  And it is just about time that my old
colleagues -- the columnists and commentators, looking down
on us tonight from their anchor booths and sky boxes -- gave
Ronald Reagan the full credit he deserves for leading
America to victory in the Cold War.

Most of all, Ronald Reagan made us proud to be Americans
again.  We never felt better about our country; and we never
stood taller in the eyes of the world than when the Gipper
was at the helm.

But we are here tonight, my friends, not only celebrate, but
to nominate.  And an American President has many, many
roles.

He is our First Diplomat, the architect of American foreign
policy.  And which of these two men is more qualified for
that great role?  George Bush has been U.N. ambassador,
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, envoy to China.
As Vice-President, George Bush co-authored and co-signed the
policies that won the Cold War.  As President, George Bush
presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the
termination of the Warsaw Pact.

And what about Mr. Clinton?  Well, Bill Clinton couldn't
find 150 words to discuss foreign policy in an acceptance
speech that lasted almost an hour.  As was said of another
Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton's foreign policy is
pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the
International House of Pancakes.

Let us look at the record and recall what happened.  Under
George Bush, more human beings escaped from the prison house
of tyranny to freedom than in any other four-year period in
history.

And for any man, let me tell you, for any man to call this a
record of failure is the cheap political rhetoric of
politicians who only know how to build themselves up by
tearing America down, and we don't want that kind of
leadership in the United States.

The presidency, my friends, is also an office that Teddy
Roosevelt called America's Bully Pulpit.  Mr. Truman said it
was "preeminently a place of moral leadership."  George Bush
is a defender of right-to-life, and a champion of the Judeo-
Christian values and beliefs upon which this America was
founded.

Clinton, however, has a different agenda.

At its top is unrestricted abortion-on-demand.  When the
Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked
to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn
children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told
there was no place for him at the podium of Bill Clinton's
convention -- no room at the inn.

Yet, the militant leader of the homosexual rights movement
could rise at that same convention and say: "Bill Clinton
and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay
ticket in history."  And so they do.

Bill Clinton says he supports school choice, but only for
state-run schools.  Parents who send their children to
Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or
Catholic schools, need not apply.

Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Clinton says
of his lawyer-spouse.

And what does Hillary believe?  Well, Hillary believes that
12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents.
And Hillary has compared marriage and the family as
institutions to slavery -- and life on an Indian
reservation.

Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends, this is radical feminism.  The agenda that Clinton
& Clinton would impose on America -- abortion-on-demand, a
litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights,
discrimination against religious schools, women in combat
units -- that's change, all right.  That's not the kind of
change America needs.  It's not the kind of change America
wants.  And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a
nation that we still call God's country.

A President of the United States is also America's
commander-in-chief.  He's the man we authorize to send sons
and brothers, fathers and friends, into battle.

George Bush was 17 years old when they bombed Pearl Harbor.
He left his high school graduation.  He walked down to the
recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest
fighter pilot in the Pacific War.  And Bill Clinton?  I'll
tell you where he was.  When Bill Clinton's time came in
Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England
and figured out how to dodge the draft.

Let me ask the question:  Which of these two men has won the
moral authority to send young Americans into battle?  I
suggest, respectfully, it is the patriot and war hero, Navy
Lieutenant (j.g.) George Herbert Walker Bush.

My fellow Americans, this campaign is about philosophy, and
it is about character; and George Bush wins hands down on
both counts.  It is time all of us came home and stood
beside him.

As his running mate, Gov. Clinton chose Albert Gore.  But
just how moderate is Prince Albert?  Well, according to the
National Taxpayers Union, Al Gore beat out Ted Kennedy, two
straight years, for the title of the biggest spender in the
U.S. Senate -- and Teddy Kennedy isn't moderate about
anything.  I'm not kidding about Teddy.  How many other
60-year-olds do you know who still go to Florida for spring
break?

Up at that great big costume party they held up in New York,
Mr. Gore made a startling declaration.  Henceforth, Albert
Gore said, the "central organizing principal" of governments
everywhere must be the environment.

Wrong, Albert!

The central organizing principle of this republic is
freedom.

And from the ancient forests of Oregon and Washington to the
inland empire of California, America's great middle class
has got to start standing up to these environmental
extremists who put rats and birds and insects ahead of
families, workers and jobs.

One year ago, my friends, I could not dream I would be here
tonight.  I was just one of many panelists on what George
Bush calls "those crazy Sunday talk shows."

But I disagreed with the President; and so we challenged the
President in the Republican primaries, and we fought as best
we could.  From February to June, President Bush won 33 of
those primaries.  I can't recall exactly how many we won.
I'll get that figure tomorrow.

But tonight I want to speak from the heart, to the three
million Americans who voted for Pat Buchanan for President.
I will never forget you, nor the great honor you have done
me.  But I do believe, deep in my heart, that the right
place for us to be now -- in this presidential campaign --
is right beside George Bush.  This party is my home.  This
party is our home, and we've got to come home to it.  And
don't let anyone tell you any different.

Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him
for freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with
him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples
should have the same standing in law as married men and
women.

We stand with President Bush for right-to-life and for
voluntary prayer in the public schools.  And we stand
against putting our wives and daughters and sisters into
combat units of the United States Army.  And we also stand
with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and
communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so
terribly pollutes our popular culture.

We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who
interpret the law as written, and against would-be Supreme
Court justices like Mario Cuomo who think they have a
mandate to re-write our Constitution.

My friends, this election is about more than who gets what.
It is about who we are.  It is about what we believe and
what we stand for as Americans.  There is a religious war
going on in this country for the soul of America.  It is a
cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be
as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of
America.

And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton &
Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our
side.  And so, to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have
to come home, and stand beside George Bush.

In those six months campaigning from Concord, New Hampshire,
to California, I came to know our country better than I had
known it ever before in my life, and I gathered up memories
that are going to be with me the rest of my days.

There was that day-long ride through the great state of
Georgia in a bus Vice President Bush himself had used in
1988 - a bus they called Asphalt One.  The ride ended with a
9:00 pm speech in a tiny town in southern Georgia called
Fitzgerald.

There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill, in
the frozen North Country of New Hampshire, in a town called
Groveton -- tough, hardy men.  None of them would say a word
to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by
one.  They were under threat of losing their jobs at
Christmas.  As I moved down the line, one tough fellow about
my age looked up and said to me "Save our jobs!"

Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the
Manchester airport on Christmas Day, who came running up to
me and said "Mr. Buchanan, I'm going to vote for you."  And
then she broke down weeping and she said, "I've lost my job,
I don't have any money, and they're going to take away my
little girl.  What am I going to do?"

My friends, these people are our people.  They don't read
Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they came from the same
school yards and the same playgrounds and towns as we came
from.  They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and
our dreams.  These are the conservatives of the heart.  They
are our people and we need to reconnect with them.  We need
to let them know we know how bad they're hurting.  They
don't expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.

There were the people of Hayfork, a tiny town up in
California's Trinity Alps, a town that is now under a
sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside nine
million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl --
forgetting the habitat of the men and women who live and
work in Hayfork.

And there were the brave people of Koreatown who took the
worst of those L.A. riots, but still live the family values
we treasure, and who still deeply believe in the American
Dream.

Friends, in those wonderful 25 weeks of our campaign, the
saddest days were the days of that riot in L.A., the worst
riot in American history.  But out of that awful tragedy can
come a message of hope.

Hours after the violence ended I went down to the Army
compound in south Los Angeles where I met the troopers of
the 18th Cavalry who had come to save the city of Los
Angeles.  An officer of the 18th Cav said "Mr.  Buchanan, I
want you to talk to a couple of our troopers."  I went over
and I met these young fellows.  They couldn't have been 20
years old and they recounted their story.

They had come into Los Angeles late in the evening of the
second day, when the rioting was still going on, and two of
them walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and
burned every building on the block but one, a convalescent
home for the aged.

And the mob was headed in to ransack and loot the apartments
of the terrified old men and women inside.  The troopers
came up the street, M-16s at the ready, and the mob
threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated because it had
met the one thing that could stop it:  Force, rooted in
justice, backed by moral courage.

Greater love hath no man that he lay down his life for his
friend.  Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their
lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they didn't
even know.  And, as those boys took back the streets of Los
Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our
cities, and take back our culture, and take back our
country.

God bless you, and God bless America.

=====================================================

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