CHAPTER 16

ON MARCH 20, 1995, Pat Buchanan had one of the worst rollouts in the history of presidential politics. The location of Buchanan’s announcement of his campaign—the Manchester Institute of the Arts and Sciences—was in keeping with the conservative culture warrior’s plan to once again make New Hampshire the lynchpin of his early state strategy. Buchanan had taken the same tack during his first White House run four years earlier when he’d put a minor scare into the incumbent President George H. W. Bush’s campaign (and wounded Bush heading into the general election) by managing to corral 38 percent of the vote in the Republican primary. Although his overt religiosity wasn’t an ideal fit for the state, large swaths of the New Hampshire Republican electorate suited Buchanan’s profile quite nicely: feisty, allergic to big government, and unafraid to be a little outlandish. In some ways a precursor to the Donald Trump phenomenon, Buchanan knew how to court controversy. The anti-NAFTA, anti-immigration, anti-feminist, anti-affirmative action, populist crusader often attracted detractors who were every bit as passionate as his supporters.

Seconds after Buchanan began his remarks on that March day in Manchester, flanked by his wife and sister, three protesters jumped from their seats in the front row and rushed up onto the stage. Before anyone could react, one of the protesters was standing directly in front of Buchanan’s face, holding a homemade sign up for the cameras that read, “Pat Buchanan Is a Racist!” A second protester, holding a different sign, got even closer to the candidate than the first one. Buchanan, who’d been suspended for a year as an undergraduate at Georgetown after picking a fight with two cops, grabbed the interloper’s collar to keep him at bay. With news photographers standing just a few feet away from the melee, members of Buchanan’s staff dragged the protesters off the stage with at least as much aggressive force as the instigators had used to disrupt the event. As the situation began to subside, a female voice could still be heard shouting, “You’re a fascist!”

Buchanan took it all in stride, to the extent that anyone in his situation could have, maintaining his composure and extending his arms to his sides in the manner of his former boss, Richard Nixon, but giving the “thumbs up” rather than the “V” for victory sign. As the audience began to settle down after what had been a scary situation, Buchanan used the chaos as an opportunity. “Now you know what we’re fighting against in this country, my friends,” he said.

The protesters had been unusually committed to their cause of ruining Buchanan’s rollout. They’d arrived on site early that morning and told members of the candidate’s staff that they wanted to volunteer for the campaign. No one suspected a ruse, as the three strangers said and did all the right things, even helping the advance crew set up the stage. For their efforts, they had been rewarded with front row seats. Oops.

The violent disruption inevitably became a focal point of much of the media coverage that followed—an impending fate that Buchanan seemed to anticipate. About halfway through his announcement speech, he once more returned to the men who’d instigated the melee. “So like our visitors this morning, the custodians of political correctness do not frighten me,” Buchanan said. “And I will do what is needed to defend the borders of my country, if it means putting the National Guard all along our southern frontier.” The room loved it. But for much of the country, the scene served only to highlight the most negative perceptions of Buchanan as a resentment-driven extremist who had said some nice things about Hitler in the past, referred to gay people as “sodomites,” and now had his very own team of brown shirts to rough up his enemies.

The opening day of Buchanan’s campaign cemented the impression that he had little chance in New Hampshire, or anywhere else for that matter. Buchanan began his 1996 run as a significant underdog against Senate majority leader Bob Dole, the GOP front-runner, and Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who was a fund-raising dynamo. Buchanan also had a slew of other plausible contenders to deal with, ranging from publishing executive Steve Forbes, who had a personal fortune at his disposal, to former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander, who wore a snazzy checkered shirt and liked to go on long walks when he was campaigning.

During the next few months, the outlook didn’t appear much brighter for Buchanan, but he did have two key factors quietly working in his favor. The first was that all of the other Republican candidates underestimated him. The second was that he genuinely enjoyed being on the trail and was totally at ease on the stump. Buchanan loved picnics and barbecues and delivering his stump speech to the passionate supporters who would chant, “Go, Pat, go!” He loved learning about the people who lived in the far-flung mill towns that he frequented and about the products that workers made in the factories he toured. He loved sitting in the passenger seat of vans as he was shuttled between events—time that he’d often spend interrogating his volunteer drivers about their own lives. And most of all, he loved the intellectual give-and-take of running for president in New Hampshire. Buchanan marveled at how the questions he received from voters at town hall meetings would often be far tougher than the ones he was asked by the national media—a card-carrying member of which he’d been as a host of CNN’s Crossfire and of his own radio show.

Peter Robbio, who ran Buchanan’s New Hampshire campaign, remembers that one of the candidate’s favorite activities was to stop by the various headquarters of the state’s still-powerful local newspapers. When he sat down for meetings with the often left-leaning editors, Buchanan would be presented with what he referred to as “golden oldies”—binders filled with some of the most incendiary pronouncements that he’d made over the decades. “Without fail, they’d throw those quotes at him, and he’d say, ‘I didn’t exactly say that, and here’s why,’” Robbio recalls. “They’d get into a little contentious debate, then the editor’s manner would change a bit and you’d realize they were thinking, ‘I really hate what this guy’s saying, but I really like the guy.’ He’d win people over that way all the time.”

By mid-autumn, Buchanan’s momentum was becoming evident to many of the same people who’d once discounted him, and it wasn’t just confined to New Hampshire. Two states—Alaska and Louisiana—had scheduled contests of questionable relevance ahead of Iowa in 1996 (they managed to avoid triggering the requisite leapfrogging response from Bill Gardner, because neither contest was a primary election and thus did not infringe upon New Hampshire state law). On January 29, after campaigning in the forty-ninth state, Buchanan edged out Forbes in Alaska’s nonbinding straw poll. Fewer than 10,000 Alaskans participated in a vote that generated minimal national press coverage, but Buchanan was soon able to piggyback on that victory with a more meaningful upset win in the Louisiana caucuses. In doing so, he terminated the campaign of Phil Gramm, who hailed from neighboring Texas and had been widely expected to win. Gramm was so confident of victory in Louisiana that he’d mostly ignored the state until right before Caucus Day. He dropped out of the race a week later.

The Republican establishment was suddenly bordering on collective panic, determined to do whatever it took to stop Buchanan, whose momentum continued to build. Meanwhile, Buchanan’s rivals began pushing negative stories to the press. The week before the New Hampshire primary, the Center for Public Integrity—a Washington-based interest group—published a damning report that linked the Buchanan campaign’s co-chairman, Larry Pratt, to meetings that had been organized by white supremacist and militia groups. This was just about the last kind of scandal that Buchanan needed, as he sought to make his closing argument. Internally, Buchanan aides discussed whether to throw Pratt overboard and dismiss him from the campaign. The pugnacious Buchanan, however, had other ideas.

At the final Republican presidential debate before Primary Day, Buchanan used his closing statement to lambaste what he called the “savage attack” against Pratt. “Larry Pratt is a devout Christian,” Buchanan said, as he karate chopped the air in characteristic fashion. “He’s being attacked because he supports me. He’s being attacked because he’s defended Second Amendment rights his whole life. And that’s why they’re going after him.”

Inside the WMUR green room where they were watching the debate, a small contingent of Buchanan aides could not believe what they were seeing. Buchanan hadn’t told any of them that he intended to defend Pratt, and they were in a collective panic that the move would backfire—one step too far for the unapologetic populist. The New York Times and other national media outlets rendered their own verdicts in scathing editorials that denounced Buchanan for his defense of Pratt. The next week, the Republican primary voters of New Hampshire rendered their own verdict. Buchanan won the primary, edging out Dole by a single point. His supporters in New Hampshire, it turned out, didn’t much care what the New York Times thought.