A Public Address by Pat Buchanan

[Applause] well good afternoon i'm al simpson the direct tool of the institute of politics and i have been co-opted by russell look at this tie hanging around with mark russell for two days will lead you to different haberdash and here i am looking sartorially splendid in this bowtie isn't that a dazzler path has it says russell got it on me over there playing the piano at lowell house raising hell was terrible i was glad to get out well so today i remind you that the iop was founded by the kennedy family to be the living memorial to president kennedy our mission is to inspire young people to enter careers in government and public service and one of the principal ways we do that is to bring political leaders to speak to you students here at the forum and the students bring the speakers this is a student influenced and run ideally run operation and we we we hear them we listen to them and we bring political leaders and people involved in public life from all walks of life and from every viewpoint as long as they are people who are actually in the arena as teddy roosevelt said paraphrasing those marred by the dust and sweat and blood of the arena the instead of the timid souls who sit on the fence and never enter the fray and if you ever enter the fray of duty my friends you will have made foes and if one has none as small as the work that they have done they have never cast a cuff and perjured lip never struck a traitor on the hip never turned to wrong to right been a coward in the fight that's the way it works so speakers in the forum included such remarkable people as senator john mccain jesse ventura tommy thompson reverend billy graham marion wright edelman gloria steinem jim carville dan lundgren joe lockhart and recently ariana huffington to name but a few now let me note we have sent invitations to vice president gore and governor bush should have not heard from either one of them yet and we're still waiting but i know it won't be long and today's today's speaker has a long history of being in the arena he has been the white house speechwriter and senior advisor to president richard nixon served as white house director of communication for president ronald reagan twice been a candidate for the republican nomination for president in 1992 and 96 been a co-host of cnn's crossfire the quiet and sort of mundane political talk show and last fall he decided to step away from the grand old party and join the reform party and anna and i have come to know pat and shelly during our years in washington she is here we greet you and to end this little introduction i was going to use a favorite phrase of pat's my friends that's one of his favorite lines and let me tell you can say all you want or see all you want hear all you want but remember this man knows what he believes believes what he says and says it without fear or equivocation he knows controversy there will be controversial questions you'll find and ladies and gentlemen i i present to you members of the harvard community uh patrick j buchanan a reform party candidate for president of the united states of america thank you very much appreciate it i thought what i would do is talk about my basic remarks for about 15 or 20 minutes move through them as quickly as i can and then we'll go to questions for the next 40 minutes and the subject i want to talk about today has been the subject of the entire campaign pretty much the only real issue and that's the issue of campaign finance reform just before super tuesday a mysterious ad began running in the three critical states that would decide the republican nominee the ad was described by the new york times as flawed in every claim and it savaged the environmental record of senator john mccain a committee that called itself republicans for clean air which someone said was an oxymoron now had paid 2.5 million dollars for the ad two days later we learned the committee was a front for the wily boys a pair of billionaire brothers from texas who were bushbackers and who were using a virginia post office box now the democrats came out no cleaner in this campaign as al gore was preaching campaign finance reform his friend maria shaw was convicted of channeling 109 000 in illegal contributions to democrats including 65 000 from al's community outreach visit to that buddhist temple nor are the other champions of reform untainted the wall street journal found john mccain's campaign was quote crawling with lobbyists according to the new york times bill bradley was a top recipient of corporate contributions in the 1980s and in 1996 took more all expenses paid junkets than any other senator al you were a poor second [Laughter] [Applause] now seriously friends neither beltway party is going to drain this swamp because to them it isn't a swamp it's a protected wetland and their natural habitat they swim in it they feed in it they spawn in it washington is a city where corporate pacs bid against union packs to contribute more to congressional pacs each month washington lobbyists spend 100 million dollars to influence congress in 1996 the two beltway parties raked in a record 262 million dollars in soft money this year the two beltway parties the republicans and democrats anticipate raking in 500 million dollars half a billion dollars what does that cash buy carl lindner knows in 1995 the first case the united states took to the world trade organization was not about steel dumping or the piracy of our computer software it was about getting bananas into the european union why when the us doesn't grow bananas or export bananas perhaps because carl lindner the ceo of chiquita wrote a 500 000 check to the republican party and another check for the same amount to bill clinton's party and got an overnight stay in the lincoln bedroom as a bonus thus in grateful tribute to carl lindner the united states has been waging a five-year trade war with europe over bananas grown in honduras scan the contributions of major american corporations friends and you'll see a pattern last year a t and t gave 555 000 to democrats 760 000 republicans microsoft gave 351 000 to democrats 446 000 to republicans you get a little more if you control the congress according to the wall street journal more than three dozen major corporations in 1999 however hedged their bets by cutting checks of roughly equal size to house democrats and house republicans and because the same fortune 500 companies subsidize and sustain both beltway parties more and more both beltway parties sing from the same corporate song sheet what is this money buying it's buying your laws and it's buying your government in the great debate over nafta in which i was a losing side you heard all the arguments about mitt milton friedman and the classical liberals cobden and bright about free trade going arm-in-arm with social progress what you may not have heard is that nafta would enable the collective members of the national association of manufacturers to shut down plants in the united states and open them up in mexico where there's no osha no p op epa no social security tax and you can hire good workers for two dollars an hour instead of twenty dollars an hour in the states so seven years after nafta there are four thousand fresh factories in northern mexico most of them us owned mexico exports now ten times as many automobiles to the united states as the united states exports to mexico what nafta was really all about was letting gm and ford say adios to the usa and the stock prices of auto companies and the stock options of auto executives prove it was an excellent investment but asked the auto workers of michigan now tending bar in flint how nafta worked for their families how is it that u.s missile technology is transferred to beijing to improve its long-range or long-march rockets one way is bernard schwartz's way over six years this ceo of loral space gave 1.3 million dollars to the democratic national committee and became its number one contributor in 1997. in return bill clinton gave loral a waiver to let china launch its satellites even though the fbi was even then investigating whether loral had already provided criminal assistance to beijing's ballistic missile program the missiles incidentally that are now targeting your country now the gop heroically denounced this as tantamount to treason but today the republican party right now is trolling silicon valley for cash by promising an even more pro-china trade policy as china threatens taiwan with attack even this morning and threatens us with a missile response if we interfere the party of ronald reagan that i loved and served honorably in the white house is in my judgment dead and its successor on capitol hill has become little more than the bellhop stand of the business roundtable mark hannah william mckinley's campaign manager once said there are two important things in politics the first is money and i can't remember the second al gore is proof of hannah's law caught in a white house shakedown of corporate executives al's defense was quote no controlling legal authority said i couldn't do it perhaps not but where was his conscience where was his respect for the white house and awe for that temple of our republic when he and mr clinton turned it into a boiler room for the democratic national committee but again al gore is not alone at fault did you hear george bush in those debates say he could not support senator mccain's campaign finance reform because quote it would hurt the republican party phil graham says mccain's quote views on campaign finance reform would make the republican party the minority party for 25 years another good argument for reform a few weeks ago mr bush told tim russert i am for banning soft money since then he volunteered his pioneers to help raise 175 million dollars for the rnc al gore is no different the day after calling for a soft money ceasefire he launched a program to enable the democrats to match the gop dollar per dollar but there is hope because the iron is hot and both parties know it both are aware that there is an independent movement in middle america to clean up or clean out washington the 19 million who voted for ross perot in 1992 the economic patriots union members and environmentalists who rallied at seattle the millions who rattled the republican establishment this year were not going away because the beltway parties are chemically dependent on soft money they can't change the system but we can we are free because we are outside the system we get no soft money and we take no pack money let me repeat that we get no soft money and we take no pac money so let me propose today a broad plan to reform our politics and to return power to the people first i believe we need three principles to guide any political reform or campaign finance reform they're quite simple all contributions to campaign shall be voluntary all contributions shall come from citizens and voters none from corporations or unions and all contributions must be disclosed within 48 hours of their receipt second all members of the house and senate should have to raise 50 percent one-half of all their contributions in their home state or home district that would put an end to the buying of senate and house seats by hollywood silicon valley k street or wall street third however the first amendment right of advocacy must not be abridged any group that's willing to disclose its affiliation be it the sierra club or national right to life must remain free to argue its case at the bar of public opinion fourth to enable little-known and third-party candidates to make their case we should increase the individual contribution limit of 1 000 set in 1974 to 3 000 and then index it for inflation but we're not going to break the stranglehold of the beltway parties until we break up the incumbent protection racket republicans swept congress in 1994 on a pledge to pass term limits after their victory house majority leader dick armey was quoted he now denies a quote but he was quoted as saying now that we have elected a republican house maybe there is no more need for term limits well now that we have watched congress in action we need term limits now more than ever seventy percent of the american people support term limits and it's time congress passed a law to give the states the power to impose them and wrote into that law a restriction on the supreme court's right of review so that we don't again have justices serving for life coming to the rescue of congresspersons who want to serve for life lifetime tenure is for harvard professors not members of congress but even before but even before term limits are imposed let us remove one of the great incentives to stay forever on capitol hill by terminating congressional pensions and letting members set up their own 401ks when newt gingrich left congress he walked away with a vested pension worth 4 million dollars anyone here think that is proper compensation for newt's work when i was considering leaving to join the reform party i also began to study ballot requirements i learned that a democrat or republican running for president needs 50 to 60 000 signatures nationwide to secure full ballot access an independent like me a reform party needs over a million signatures it is extraordinarily complex and difficult in georgia the hurdles are so high not one independent congressional candidate has qualified since the ballot access law went into effect in new york the pataki damato machine nearly succeeded in keeping john mccain off the new york ballot now they can do that to mccain imagine the odds against a candidate running without a media spotlight without a big bankroll or without establishment support the democrats and republicans have put the fix in for permanent control of the white house and congress what exactly is microsoft's monopoly compared to this political duopoly's control of the presidency and the congress of the greatest nation on earth the laws governing ballot access are set by state legislatures controlled by democrats and republicans neither has any interest in opening up this process to competition and both have a vested interest in a political lockout now a bill to correct these anti-democratic laws was introduced in congress in nineteen eighty five twice it's been rejected now representative ron paul has reintroduced it for all federal elections it would set uniform federal standards for obtaining and qualifying signatures to make you eligible to run for president it deserves swift passage friends take a look at what this bipartisan collusion is doing to engender a crisis of faith in our republic in december harvard's vanishing voter project found that only 23 percent of americans agree that our two-party system really works half the country wants the option of a third party candidate a recent study by the fec ranked the united states 52nd out of 58 countries in voter turnout however in 1968 when our national participation fell to 36 percent there was a 60 percent turnout in the state of minnesota what made the difference third party candidate jesse ventura was included in televised debates in a state that had same day voter registration both establishment parties oppose same-day voter registration because they can't pre-select prime voters to hit with their phone calls and their scripted mail and they are terrified of third-party candidates in presidential debates because they know what happened in 1992 when ross perot got an audience of 70 million americans and went from 7 percent to 19 overnight so we're going to do battle in a court of law and we're going to do it in the court of public opinion to be included in those bush gore debates because the american people have a right to hear a reform party candidate whose campaign they are paying for with their own tax dollars our presence in those debates will unclot a system in which the elites of both parties have conspired to place the most critical issues war or peace patriotism versus globalism beyond the reach of the electorate my friends we need a realignment of american par american politics let one party support globalism free trade and a new world order where nations are no longer sovereign but let the other party be a populist and traditionalist party dedicated to an economic patriotism that puts american workers and american farmers ahead of any global economy an america first foreign policy that keeps our soldiers sailors airmen and marines out of wars and crusades that are not the business of the united states of america it is our purpose to become that party finally the capstone of a comprehensive plan for political reform is a national initiative and referenda 1604 the british parliament declared to james the first the voice of the people in the things of their knowledge is as the voice of god 24 states give voters the right of initiative and referendum and we've seen it exercised successfully where the popular will was blocked by legislative gridlock or judicial activism in california voters have overruled legislatures to cut property taxes abolish quotas and ensure that all school children learn the english language elitists argue that popular initiative and referenda violate the principles of republicanism but as madison wrote as the people are the only legitimate fountain of power it seems strictly consonant to the republican theory to recur to that same original authority the people whenever it may be necessary to enlarge to diminish or to new model the power of government the day to new model that power of government has come in america well public cynicism runs high so too does the will to reform citizens held hostage by the two parties an unholy matrimony with a special interest want more than just campaign finance reform they want more than two establishment parties offering reform rhetoric at the instigation of focus groups they want authentic reform put another way they want their country back and we're going to give it to them join us and we can make it happen thank you very much all right sure and you go back back and forth yes i'll call out ask a question ask a question josh not you not you josh but you do very well thank you i was jesting about al taking all those junkets why use so i learned and grew all right go ahead sir and um thank you mr buchanan for coming um i'm going to be pretty blunt about this i don't like a lot of your views and in fact most of them scare me a lot but hold on hold on hold on and until recently though i agreed with al that you had this great redeeming feature of consistency you clearly believed in your views and you were firm about them now though you've gone and joined the reform party which really is a party that really doesn't have much to do with your hardline right views except that they're willing to give you a nomination where the republican party never was in that way you've sold yourself out to this party how do you justify that now that you've lost your redeeming feature of consistency is this the indictment or the verdict well first you don't look like a fella that frightens very easily so you need not be afraid of me but let me say when i did join the reform party i have not altered a single view that i can think of uh any of the fundamental views i have the reform party i guess you might be talking about its social agenda and its position on life actually it does not take a stand on social or cultural or moral issues but it has always been economic patriotic uh been for balancing the budget it's been for it's basically a a a populist conservative party in a lot of ways and in all those ways i fundamentally agree with it but i have not changed a single view that i've that i've espoused i've taken those views with me into the reform party and people ask me how i'm going to reconcile that with the reform party platform which is i say is agnostic or does not take a stand on social issues and my answer to that is what i'm going to do is we're going to embrace the political and economic reforms of the reform party 100 and then i will append to that platform a personal statement of my views with regard to human life and the culture of death in america and i will make that statement of my own personal views and i will append that to the platform but you know why i'm doing that is in 1996 i went to the republican party convention with three million votes here's one of the reasons why i'm in the reform party 200 delegates and 3 million votes and i was not allowed to speak from the platform of my own party so then i went and we wrote the platform as i said i would kept the reagan plank in it and then the candidate i endorsed turned around and said we didn't read the platform and we're not bound by it so i said to myself what is the sense of fighting for the platform of a party if they don't care about that platform so i will commit myself to the reform party platform and what it obtains and where it does not i will put out a separate statement of my views thank you um mr buchanan you have said that adolf hitler was an individual of great courage you've questioned whether 800 000 jews died at treblinka because you say diesel engines didn't emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone you've said that holocaust survivors suffered from group fantasies of survival and heroics do you regret saying any of these things and if not why not oh because no i do not no i do not because they've been taken remarkably out of context what i said was in that column in 1977 which was utterly non-controversial at the time that indeed in world war one hitler who had won the iron cross twice was a brave soldier in that war the gearing quite frankly shot down as many planes almost as the red baron the very fact that these two individuals had war records and ludendorff had a war record was it enabled them to build their party up the the vomit of that column was this that you must understand that hitler was not charlie chaplin he wasn't a laughable figure and he was not some rug chewing maniac the way that they grabbed the german people by the throat was to use arguments of patriotism and what that column is about is saying listen when he had arguments for the return of the sudetenland that mild cetong is using right now for the return of taiwan and you better understand that this was not some simple decision when these european statesmen gave in to him it was far more complex and it was based on a review of john tollens it was frankly a review of john tolen's brilliant biography now on the treblinka issue those were made in the context of a 10-year defense of a man named john dimianok who was charged with being ivan the terrible of treblinka i came to his defense in 1982 and for 10 years i said it was a case of mistaken identity and he was deported by this country put on trial in jerusalem sentenced to be hanged and was within weeks of gone to the scaffold when the israeli supreme court said it was a case of mistaken identity i do not apologize that is the best journalism i ever did questions yes sir hi my name is aaron ashwell i'm a sophomore here at the college i'm interested to know how will you reach out to the voters who supported mccain and bradley who are interested in reform but are much more liberal than you are well if they're if they're very if they're liberal on um more liberal than i am on a lot of issues they might be difficult to reach but i found discovered that mccain got 40 percent of the buchanan vote in new hampshire as you recall i won new hampshire in 1996 not by as big a margin as mccain but 40 percent of our people went with john mccain based on the fact that he was standing up and defying the washington establishment and partly of course he got it on his heroic war story so in a lot of ways you might not be able to win all the mccain voters but i think a lot of americans supported mccain and looked to him because he represented a challenge to this two-party system in washington he was something different for example in 92 when i did very well against president bush in new hampshire i think a lot of our people went right over to ross perot so you don't have an exact identity abuse between buchanan and mccain at all you got some disagreements but i think i can get votes for example i don't think the christian conservatives were very enthusiastic about mccain at the end and i think i can get a lot of those votes as well so it's going to be a different coalition we will get some of his votes probably very few of bill bradley's votes thank you yes sir um i'd like to ask for your response to three one sentence items first of all do you still believe as you wrote last year that harvard has too many non-whites and non-christians second of all do you still believe as you wrote in 1990 that the holocaust survivors of treblinka suffered from group fantasies of martyrdom and third do you still believe as you wrote in 1983 that women are not endowed by nature with the will and ambition to succeed in the modern world [Applause] well everybody's reading from the same song sheet here uh let's go back to uh let's see the first what was the first one again whether you said harvard my article on harvard i stand by a hundred percent it was based on an article by ron uns in the wall street journal when he said there are various groups that benefit at harvard from set-asides and de facto quotas and there are other groups that don't and as a result at the student body at harvard the most underrepresented groups are ethnic catholics and fundamentalist christians and that christians and catholics this group who broadly represent 75 percent of the country are down to 25 percent at harvard college and i looked at that and i said why is harvard college which is basically gives you a first class ticket really to america's elites why are the people like me so underrepresented or the least represented according to mr ants now is it because we don't do well in that test i don't know but i think if there is discrimination of that kind at harvard it deserves to be looked at equally as much as discrimination in a union at philadelphia or a police force in alabama in my view many of those who rail most against bias very often do not even look at the bias in their own hearts and so i would say this if there is no discrimination harvard or no anyone else should have no problem but certainly if folks who happen to be ethnic catholics are most underrepresented i understand that italian americans who are eight percent of the population with three percent of the harvard student body and one percent of the faculty why is that is that worth looking at or should harvard be exempt from the things that harvard demands for other organizations that's what that column was about yes right here pardon me well wait a minute all right excuse me all right let's take the issue if you would ask one yeah yeah there's a lot of people that want to ask why don't you take one of the other two give me one of the other two women [Laughter] [Applause] i was hoping for the other one look when i wrote that even my sister called me on the phone and said are you out of your mind that's bae general macarthur as we call her uh but look what i what i meant in there and that clearly could have been better stated what i meant is [Laughter] what it is is is in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism what i meant is if you take a look at the chicago trading pit or you take a look at leveraged buyouts or ipos or all these people who are then doing all these big financial deals and working 18 and 20 hours a day it's one area where you don't see a lot of women women go into the professions no they go into law they go into they go into various things they are not in those professions it could have been better stated yes sir on hopefully a less controversial subject um in your speech you referred to madison in defense of your national initiative proposal um and i was curious doesn't madison also clearly state in federalist 10 that the role of government is to refine and enlarge the public opinion and that tyranny is defined by having absolute power in any place whether that be the king whether it be 10 people whether that be 50 of the population plus one in an initiative and doesn't a national initiative by its very nature um remove all power from any minority whether it be african-american whether it be italian catholic whether it be a registered member of the reform party um well uh yeah all right i take your point but look this is a country where the majority rules now the assumption behind a lot of what's going on lately is that the majority is tyrannical and what we need is the supreme court to protect the rights of the minorities but what's to protect us when the supreme court usurps power and imposes its ideology on the country and abuses its rights and privileges and starts rewriting the constitution instead of interpreting how do you stand up to a judiciary which is behaving unconstitutionally amended well you say amend the constitution look they hand down these decisions you know why look we are a self-governing people for heaven's sakes and yet we wait every monday in october for each week for a supreme court to tell us how we shall govern ourselves look not too far from here what went on at lexington in concord was the idea that people stood up to say we will govern ourselves i believe the supreme court has usurped power that doesn't belong to it secondly on issues as i said where the people have direct knowledge whether it's a death penalty issue or something like that not whether you buy an f 22 fighter plane or an f-16 they can't decide that but on issues like the death penalty on issues like property taxes where the people can have knowledge in this modern age through uh through communications i believe they're fully qualified to write the laws for themselves [Applause] my name is paul i'm a student here at the kennedy school my question is simply will you go out on a date with me tonight [Applause] okay what a little candlelight dinner maybe [Applause] one question can i ask shelly shelley would it be okay if i went out with him she said she didn't care [Applause] yes sir mr buchanan yes sir my name is paul stimers i'm one of the very few conservative republicans at the kennedy school and uh i've i've watched you for a long time followed your work for a long time and i uh i just wanted to thank you for leaving the party um okay all right my question my question is do you feel that it's appropriate for uh for a real reformer to be articulating the valuable message that you have uh brought today or do you think that it is more appropriate for a reactionary in reforms clothing well i don't think i think you know you might call our proposal somewhat radical today i guess they would be considered so in washington but i don't think it's reactionary to call for term limits you know term limits for example it's uh something like 70 of the american people favor that idea the idea for example of getting rid of these lavish congressional pensions probably 70 of the american people now that may be reactionary up here and it may be reactionary in the in the republican party but you know i really believe in the post-cold war era this republican party which i've loved and i've served probably longer than you've been alive uh and i've gotten tremendous receptions i was at the ames eye with straw poll and anybody that saw that on national television saw that i got the the greatest applause of any of the candidates despite the fact we only were fifth in delegates in in even in that group of republicans fifteen thousand of them they cheered a condemnation not only of clinton but of what the republicans were doing in washington and this is my problem you know i'm a conservative and you call yourself a conservative but i was in the conservative movement you know i was for barry goldwater at the columbia school of journalism in 1961 and i was with nixon's white house i was the conservative in his white house i believed in this cause and i've loved it but i'll tell you what people have ruined the conservative cause for the last seven years they've conflated the conservative cause with clinton bashing it's about more than that it's about a lot more than that in the post-cold war era we got to think our cold war is over i mean we i was for nato for 30 years but why do you need a gigantic nato alliance who you defending against why is there no sense of let's take a look at all these institutions of the cold war they work then but what is good for now and there's no fresh thinking down there in washington none whatsoever and that's why we're going to the reform party [Applause] hi mr cannon my name is cj mahoney and i'm a senior at the college and like yourself i'm a pro-life roman catholic and i know that you would maybe argue that governor bush's position on abortion isn't entirely favorable from a from a pro-life standpoint it's maybe not his top priority but i think that any reasonable person has got to admit that the kinds of judges he would appoint would be much more favorable to the pro-life cause and the kinds of judges whom al gore to point right so as a roman catholic how can i vote for you in good conscience knowing that your 10 15 of the vote could potentially give al gore the chance to appoint three or four supreme court justices and you know maybe would never see roe v wade overturned at least in my lifetime you know that's that's not only a good question it's a question that i turned over my mind again and again and again uh and uh and let me say that that you ought to vote uh for the one you think will best advance the really good causes which you embrace when it comes to november the reason i went reform even though you're right if it came to supreme court justices mr bush's choices would clearly be better than al gore's even though governor bush simply will not say that he will appoint justices who will overturn roe v wade the way lincoln was committed to over to to appoint justices who would overturn dred scott so if it came down to simply a choice of justices and who the al gore or bush vote bush the reason i ran against him is this i came to the conclusion that he was going to win the nomination he's an establishment candidate and then al gore is going to beat him and we're going to go down to defeat for the third time and the people that believe in me as a leader and believe in all the causes i believe in they're going to go unrepresented in the general election once again and there are other issues and causes that's one of the most important to me but the cause of getting american troops out of kosovo and bosnia and stop getting involved in these stupid wars abroad that are none of our business a trade policy that gets rid of a 350 billion dollar merchandise trade deficit a china policy that doesn't grovel to beijing because the business roundtable tells you to do it these two are important and they will not be in the debate they won't even be heard if i don't run because gore and bush agree on and so it was a tough call i went down and i thought over it and prayed over it and i know there is a possible danger that my campaign might damage and set back the causes i fought for my whole life it could there is no guarantee that it won't you don't have those kinds of guarantees but i made the decision at that time on my best judgment as to whether i could do good for the causes i believed in thank you yes hi mr buchanan my name is john majori i'm a student here at the kennedy school it seems to me that aside from the issue of campaign finance reform a lot of what you're trying to do is very much out of sync with a lot of what kennedy school students are trying to do do you think that the kennedy school is um what are you trying to do well a lot i mean uh yeah a lot a lot i think a lot of the students at the kennedy school are going into public service well i mean it's wonderful to advance uh uh multiculturalism uh internationalism sure well look you think that the school itself is built uh is designed uh to produce public servants fighting against what you're trying to do uh you know i mean uh look um i you know i think public service uh the senator's career and the eight years i spent in the white house are the only ones i've been in public service i'm as proud of them as anything my whole life i think it's an honorable thing to do i i think even though i went as i say i was in two of the biggest train wrecks in history right through watergate and iran contra and uh i'm i think i served honorably there and i think we tried to do good things for this country and all the people i work with did and so i think what you're doing is honorable and going into public service i simply happen to believe in a philosophy basically more of a federalist philosophy i do believe in dramatically downsizing the federal government for example i think all of not only welfare but hud should be downsized and sent back to the states primary and secondary education should be downsized and sent back to the states probably food stamps a lot of these things and and folks like al when they go in there ought to be dealing with whether or not we go into bosnia they ought to be dealing with the tax policy of the federal government they shouldn't be dealing with these things that are better done by some of our outstanding governors but my party no longer wants to downsize i mean the department of education was one thing bob dole agreed with me on in 1996. and clinton asked for a certain amount for department education increased the republicans gave him 500 million more than he wanted so i know i mean i mean you all mean i respect people on the other side of the political spectrum you know everybody got a right to be wrong my name is aaron friedman i'm a student at the law school in the candidates call you told president nixon or wrote him there's a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time in every issue that the black militants loudmouth at we come up with more money if we can give 50 phantom jet fighters for the jews and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks why not help the catholics save their collapsing school system in 1988 you wrote today to that george um when next time go ahead that's a memo to nixon from wynn when he was president he wrote that george bush should have told in 1988 that george bush had told the naacp convention that black america has grown up and that the naacp should close my up shop its members should go home and reflect on jfk's admonition that's not what your country can do for you but rather what rather ask what you can do for your country could you think of any other american politician today that like hitler uses the rhetoric of patriotism to promote the cause of bigotry you mean come on you mean telling saying that the naacp's work is done and uh that ought to close up shop and work on some other agenda by and large i think the civil rights revolution was rightly a success but i think by and large all those laws have been changed and we do need a uh i think black americans should have a different agenda than they had in the 1960s sure and despite the fact you lose a little rough rhetoric and you compare that with adolf hitler friend the problem's not with me it's with you he said he said that he said he believed that there was racism mr buchanan you look at the pit of the chicago trading floor and it's under representation of women as a indication that women may not have the natural endowment to be there you look at harvard university and it's under representation in your mind of white christians like you and you suggest that harvard has a problem so to me that that leaves one of two possibilities one is that you as a white christian don't have the natural endowment to be at harvard or two that as the previous question suggests there's a fundamental inconsistency with your position which depends on uh who you think is being discriminated well let me say this perhaps well your suggestion is that those of us who are catholics and christians probably aren't smart enough to be at harvard now that may be true may be true if that was it you got to prove it you got to prove that and you got to prove it just like for example the police department down in alabama had to prove maybe folks weren't qualified to be state troopers what i'm saying is that simply because you're at harvard does not exempt you from the same kinds of rules and regulation that harvard lovingly imposes upon the rest of america and maybe you ought to examine your own consciences instead of constantly telling the rest of america what it ought to do i mean pat buchanan is not a beloved figure in america but neither is harvard i think i think rather than impugn the person let's impugn his ideas i don't want to hear any more of those about the person i'll try to clean up my language al wow i never was able to clean up mine hi mr buchanan my name is swami i'm a sophomore at the college and everyone's been sort of antagonistic so i'll try and be a little bit more conciliatory um i share your concern for hard-working blue-collar american laborers who too often are found out of work and unemployed because of corporate downsizing and other things that are beyond their control um often when they're unemployed they don't have access to healthcare insurance often when they're employed they don't have access to healthcare insurance the ones who suffer are their children um this applies to laborers to the rural areas to urban poor areas people who can't afford health care insurance and their children who are not responsible for that obviously have you made any proposals or do you have any ideas as to how we can expand health care insurance and how we can help people get into it let me talk about one of the problems i was up in new hampshire with clinton back in 1992 and at that point there were 36 million americans was the figure constantly brewing about without health insurance and now the figure we constantly hear is 44 million and it is my argument that as you continue to shut down these factories and ship the jobs abroad you are getting rid of jobs that carry with them health insurance for the entire family and folks are going to work at walmart and they're going to work at other places they're getting jobs but those jobs don't carry health insurance so we got to get back for the working people who i am concerned about we got to get back people who go to high school and don't go on to college we got to get back for these folks the really high paying manufacturing and industrial jobs that give them a sense of creative what they're creating something a sense of respect and the high wages so that one spouse can support a family on a single income the way my father supported nine kids on one income back in nineteen fifty now that's one way you gotta get those jobs back and we're to have frankly you might call it industrial policy but we call it economic patriotism to stop exporting manufacturing jobs and bring those back because they're the jobs that working people need secondly my wife shelly and i saw this lady in ohio unbelievable case she has a daughter who cannot keep solid any kind of food down not only can't keep it down you give her normal food and she's two years old and she will die and she can only eat this combination and it's that's produced by the british for forty dollars a can and she's gotta have it for the child every single day and and there's nothing the only way she can get someone to pay for it she's about christian it was his little christian church and she will not go on welfare if she goes on welfare they'll pay for it and she says i don't want to do that my husband works we don't want to do that that's for people that's not for us we can work and it does seem to me that if government has a role here it is a catastrophic health insurance policy in other words that families would pay a certain amount and if they got a situation let's say a husband was 28 or 30 years old and he had a stroke and he's going to be incapacitated for 50 years that in that case that a catastrophic policy for which you would pay something would would would break in and provo take care of that situation in other words you can't have frankly we can't afford now because it's going to come from some people working people to you know 100 percent you know uh taking care of retirement and people in nursing homes and things but a catastrophic health is something we ought to be able to agree on right here mary tonight harvard alumna uh mr buchanan in the past you were very critical of the united nations you feel still feel the same and if so why well uh i'm critical of the united nations because i think as an institution it's become bloated and bureaucratic and corrupt and arrogant i i you know the idea of the united nations as a place in the cold war when the united states and the soviet union were at loggerheads and neither of us wanted really to back down that we could throw it in there and we could argue it out and argued out in the security council and and calm things down this idea of the un is a forum for debate but i think it is like all government institutions that's had a tendency to grow and i see with regard to mr kofi annan when i see the new international court of justice which is going to be a global nuremberg tribunal with the right to arrest american military officers and put them on trial i see the world trade organization as basically dictating to the united states they've told the senate of the united states of congress you've got to repeal the foreign sales corporation subsidies to exports what are we doing we americans allowing global institutions to start dictating to us when our very history and heritage is that we would be independent forever that was a deathbed toast of john adams independence forever and i see the un the world trade organization the international monetary fund and the world bank and these other institutions they're embryonic now but gradually encroaching on that and if you read the great walter cronkite or strobe talbot you will see mr cronkite said this fall to the world federalist association when he got an award it is time for america to begin to surrendering its sovereignty to a world government and that we ought to give up our veto in the u.n and we want a world government and that ultimately is how we're going to achieve world peace this is an old idea emanuel kant you've got the classical liberals and others believe in that i don't my ideas go back to washington and hamilton and madison and economic nationalism and independence forever that to me is the great struggle of the post-cold war era that republicans are clueless about it is whether america 20 30 50 years from now is going to be a truly independent nation or are we going to be like the european nations which right now are being dictated to by the european union which is telling them to change their laws they're surrendering their authority over trade over immigration over defense everything do we want that to happen to america now that's the cause i'm battling about and maybe it's not mature as a political cause but it will be thank you two more questions if the time is running and we'll take a question here and this question here and have to conclude thank you um mr buchanan you said at the beginning today that campaign finance reform over okay here campaign finance reform was the issue in politics today if somebody from the other end of the political spectrum say for purpose of example um warren beatty who spoke here several months ago if a liberal of this sort who is pro-choice who's in favor of homosexual marriage who you are opposed to on virtually every issue but who's in favor of campaign finance reform just as much as you are was to become a presence in the political scene today would you throw your support to them or join forces with them so to speak um well let me give you an example uh lenora fellaini you want to stand up lenore lenora lenora and i do not come from the same parts of the political spectrum to put it mildly where she was on crossfire in 1985 and i don't know that i got a word in edgewise but lenora comes from the the left the far left and she's joined our campaign and supported me for president and she and some of the ideas in here frankly were advanced by her even before i advance them i agree with them so let me say this i believe that in causes when you do battle in politics like the nafta fight we had the establishment of both parties we had washington post and the washington times national review and new republic heritage foundation and brookings the republicans in congress the democrats in congress all the secretaries of state they're all on one side who was on the other side pat buchanan ross perot ralph nader and jesse jackson they called us the halloween coalition but i'm willing to fight with those guys if we're fighting to keep good manufacturing jobs in america for american workers it's an ad hoc coalition sure so i'll do battle with them you know i described to somebody that asked me at the reform party i said well we're like the french foreign legion you know uh when you come we know terrible things were in your past we don't know where you come from we don't care we're all marching together to fort zindernoof and uh so that's sort of the way we are and so i'm willing to work with folks who have disagreed with me in the past for causes in which i believe and yeah i think you got to be able to in politics thank you yes sir yes sir hi mr buchanan my name is arash davalu i'm from the harvard business school um i wanted to thank you for coming today thank you and my question is regarding e-commerce i was wondering what your views are regarding taxation of e-commerce my view with regard to taxation of e-commerce on the internet i know the governors are very concerned because it is exploding and they see themselves losing sales tax revenue to the to the the computer commerce e-commerce my view is that we ought to maintain for say three to five years a complete moratorium on taxation on e-commerce so that this is allowed to develop and grow before the politicians get a hold of it thank you all very much i appreciate it yes right here yes i did thank you thank you very much thank you pat we appreciate you may i have your attention please just a moment well to hell with it thank you pat for being here we appreciate your coming go get them got one here [Music]

Channel: Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School

Views: 14,884

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Id: 2nj_WQGQTUY

Length: 61min 17sec (3677 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021