The presidential campaign of 1992 was a turning point in my own personal political history. I was 22-years-old and had developed as a standard Reagan conservative, going back to my first spark of political interest in the Reagan re-election landslide of 1984, and then through my early college years. The ensuing two decades have seen me retain a certain conservative identity, but with an increasingly sharp Democratic edge to it. That all started in that ’92 campaign.
This post is a personal walk down memory lane, from the early rumblings of 1991, to the Buchanan Challenge in the primaries, to the conventions of New York and Houston, to the insurgency of Ross Perot and ultimately to the Clinton-Bush Sr-Perot finale. Like pop singer Taylor Swift, I’m feelin’ 22 right now, and thought I’d wake up a few of the echoes.
RUMBLINGS FROM THE RUSTBELT
I was sitting in an upstairs bedroom in the college apartment I shared with four other guys, just south of the campus at Indiana University, and the TV set was tuned to C-SPAN (yeah, I know how pathetic that sounds). It was springtime in 1991, Bob Knight’s Hoosiers were coming off a tough loss in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament, and now the political focus was on the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, then simply known as “Mexican Free Trade.”
Free trade was something I supported, but it wasn’t a topic I’d given a great deal of thought. It was one of those issues that fell in the category of “Everyone that I like seems to like it, so why not?” Not the strongest case in favor, and as a result I found myself increasingly persuaded of the case for protectionism.
One by one, House Democrats from the Rustbelt laid into the proposed trade deal. They said it would enable manufacturers to take their shops south of the border, pay low wages and set up under low environmental standards, then ship back to the American market. It would undercut companies that chose to stay home, and it would cost jobs in the American labor force.
It was an argument that made sense to me, and the answers from free-trade Republicans amounted to nothing more than saying that free trade was about the free market, and that a tariff was really a tax. All true enough I suppose, but I concluded the debate feeling that House conservatives were treating a free market as some type of idol, to be fallen down and adored whatever the cost.
I saw the free market as a means to an end, which was a more prosperous life for everyone, but if you ran into a situation where that wouldn’t work, than it was the free market which was expendable. In later years, as I embraced Catholicism, I would find that my view was in harmony with the social doctrine of the Church in which I believe—not that I think being Catholic requires one endorse a protectionist agenda, or that free trade and Catholicism are incompatible. But the prism for which Catholics evaluate economic affairs should subordinate the free market to the good of man, not vice-versa. I not only disagreed with what conservatives were saying, I had a more fundamental disagreement in the values they were expressing.
CROSSFIRE CHALLENGE
In the post-Reagan era, my political hero was Pat Buchanan. I loved his witticisms on the CNN debate program Crossfire, and his autobiography Right From The Beginning was not only hilarious, it opened my mind to the Catholic Church, something that would bear fruit a few years later. I had written him a letter asking him to run for president, and got a handwritten postcard back (since then, friends who worked for PJB tell me that he answers his mail while sitting on the beach during the summer. I say this with all due affection—that’s about as pathetic as me watching C-SPAN. But it shows Buchanan was a man after my own heart).
In November of 1991, Buchanan came off the set of Crossfire and waded into the snows of New Hampshire to challenge incumbent president George Bush Senior in the Republican primaries. The focal point of the grievance were standard conservative issues that united the Right—Bush’s cave-in on racial quotas and his surrender to the Left for tax increases. But Buchanan threw a curve ball and it was the wholehearted embrace of protectionism.
The candidate toured New Hampshire and told the stories of men and women who had lost their jobs, as free trade destroyed their companies. Economic hardship was the order of the day. Buchanan was aggressively shouted down—not just by the GOP Establishment, but by the conservative political establishment, from then-Vice-President Dan Quayle to his chief of staff, William Kristol, who remains one of conservatism’s respected figures today. Their answer to Buchanan—criticism of free trade was “protectionist” and violated the free market.
My distance from conservatism grew, and when the GOP and conservatives teemed up to savage Buchanan as a racist and anti-Semite, based on selective misquoting of his columns, I was in full-scale estrangement. I not only had a political disagreement with them on an issue that had taken on some prominence, but I felt they had shown a lack of character in the process.
POPULIST THUNDER
Buchanan wasn’t the only one raising the protectionist banner. It was a blazing issue in the Democratic primaries as well. While Bill Clinton endorsed free trade, he had to constantly back away from the topic, in the face of blistering attacks from challengers ranging from Iowa senator Tom Harkin, to former California governor Jerry Brown (who has since returned to that same office).
I couldn’t vote for Harkin or Brown, because even prior to my coming home to the Catholic Church, I considered the rights of the unborn to be paramount. But the rhetoric on behalf of working people was powerful, and the most anyone could answer with was that…well, you know that to criticize free trade was protectionist.
The Democrats didn’t throw out the free market idolatry, but their own corporate candidates, of which Clinton was decidedly one, saw free trade as a way of demonstrating they were different from the old-time liberals who had lost five of the previous six presidential elections. I’d have rather they demonstrated their difference by standing up for the right to life of the most innocent and sticking with the noble defense and advocacy of middle-class incomes, but my kind of Democrat was being buried, as subsequent events that summer would demonstrate.
NEW YORk, NEW YORK
The Democratic Convention that nominated Clinton gathered in Madison Square Garden. If you see, as I do, the battle in the party as being between those who want to speak up for working-class people and values, and those who want to speak up for the yuppies in the ‘burbs and their social liberalism, then this convention was an atrocity. One by one, speakers celebrating abortion rights strode to the podium.
Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey Sr., a proud economic liberal and even prouder pro-lifer—the kind of candidate I’d gladly back today and was warming up to back in ’92—was denied the opportunity to say even a few words outside of prime-time on behalf of the unborn. To this day, polls show that at least a third of the Democratic electorate favors some type of legal protection for society’s most innocent, but the Madison Square Garden Massacre was a disgrace that moved the party even more radically in the opposite direction.
THE MYTHS OF HOUSTON
The Republicans gathered in Houston, with Bush facing a double-digit deficit in the polls. People were angry about the economy. And while Bush has revived his image thanks to his genuine human decency, he was despised in the summer of 1992. Including by this writer, though I would, along with the rest of the electorate, eventually soften.
Ross Perot had been in the race briefly, moved to the top of the polls, in a three-way race that saw everyone packed within a few points. Perot dropped out during the Democratic Convention, and Clinton’s lead soared as high as twenty points.
Buchanan addressed the convention on Monday night, and while he didn’t address protectionism per se, he did invoke several anecdotes of working people struggling. He told of the brave people in Koreatown in Los Angeles. Their neighborhood had been ransacked by thugs who rioted in the wake of the Rodney King trial that summer, but in the world of the Left, speaking up for Koreans wasn’t chic. It was Buchanan who reminded the nation of how much these immigrants had suffered.
The overnight polls showed Bush closing the gap hard. When the convention ended, and Bush was left to his own political devices, he fell behind. Republican strategists, who have never been as good as taking the same kind of personal responsibility for their own failings as they insist others take in theirs, blamed Buchanan’s speech for the poll drop. That’s an interpretation that’s contradicted by every piece of available data.
PEROT TAKES UP THE CAUSE
I was in the Bush camp now, but really grudgingly. Then Perot got back in the race, and he began to articulate the case against free trade all over again. His most memorable line came in one of the debates, when he said the Mexican trade deal would create “a giant sucking sound” of jobs going south. We should note that the deal would be passed in Clinton’s first year as president, and while the economy has been great for stockholders and investors, the Rustbelt has never recovered.
DECISION
It was time for me to decide. I really wanted to vote for Perot, and I was unmoved by the “he can’t win” theory. Frankly, if that was the point the candidate for everyone to vote for was Clinton. Because not to realize he was going to win was to be in denial if you were a Republican, or being overly nervous if you were a Democrat. I understand the latter—you never want to get overconfident, even in a world of reliable polling, but I wasn’t going to let that be a motivating factor.
The problem is that Perot was as pro-abortion as Clinton. Bush professed to be pro-life, but I didn’t really believe it. He’d changed his position upon entering the 1980 Republican primaries, and he’d appointed a walking disaster in David Souter to the Supreme Court. Bush only appointed Clarence Thomas after he (Bush) realized he needed to do something to keep conservatives happy. I really lacked confidence in what Bush might do in a second term, unencumbered by the need to keep support on the right or from the pro-life movement.
So considering abortion a lost cause for the general election, I voted for Perot. He got 19 percent of the vote, a huge figure for a third-party candidate. Of course Clinton won, beating Bush by six points.
If I had it to do over again I’d vote for Bush. Not because I think Perot’s vote cost him the election. But because Perot would prove to be a nutcase, and there were enough warning signs by 1992 to guess that was the case. My mistake had come with getting too involved in following a campaign where I felt my candidate had already lost, and my issues were already done. It was like getting emotionally involved in the World Series after your team has lost in the first round.
The Republicans have since put Perot up along with Buchanan as the people who cost them the 1992 election. It remains astonishing how thoroughly GOP strategists can scapegoat people, although none of this was quite as bad as Mitt Romney’s people blaming New Jersey governor Chris Christie this past fall because Christie had the audacity to give President Obama a hug when the president appeared to survey the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy. The blame-shifting of Republican operatives hasn’t changed.
REFLECTIONS
The campaign of 1992 was the one that introduced a permanent feeling of estrangement from me and today’s body politic. Even as I studied and embraced the Democratic tradition of my Irish ancestry, I grew further apart from the radical Left wing that masquerades as the heirs to that tradition.
But in embracing the traditional, pre-1968 Democratic party, I grew further isolated from the Republican mainstream. Even in pulling the lever for GOP presidential candidates (with the exception of Buchanan’s third-party bid in 2000), I did so with distaste, and found myself casting about and looking for a Democratic horse, who would unite the right to life and true economic social justice, the way Buchanan had in the primaries of 1992.
I would also go through some separation from the Buchanan Brigades themselves. Immigration increasingly became the issue that defined the Brigades, even more than trade. I had tended to agree with PJB on immigration, but it was for the same reason that I initially supported free trade—the “well, I haven’t really thought about this, but the guy I like is for it so…well, okay". I would partially separate with Buchanan on the issue. He deserves credit for being the first to speak out against the amount of illegal immigration and the predictable charges of racism have gotten to the point I just tune them out. But I don’t share the Brigade view of legal immigration. In retrospect, my kind of voter was the kind Pat Buchanan needed more of—the ones who simply united social tradition and economic populism.
If it wouldn’t have been for the rise of free trade as an issue and the campaigns of Pat Buchanan, which started in 1992, I might have become a standard conservative. Instead, I ended up with this Democratic edge, a believer in the rights of labor amidst a sea of politically “red” allies. It’s been over twenty years since that whole process unfolded, and I can still mentally play it back as though it were yesterday.
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