The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, February 5, 2024

Notably: Back in the good newspaper days in Beckley, W.Va., a nowhere town where our eight-county paper was based and all the national candidates tended to visit for some reason, Pet Buchanan was among those who dropped by to campaign, and since the Register-herald and the papers in Charleston were all there was, we were always first in line, always the only ones in line, to get the candidates’ attention, national reporters notwithstanding. So it wasn’t that unusual when Buchanan, after I asked for an interview, suggested I hop into his limmo for the one-hour ride from Beckley to Charleston soi we could talk at length. As Bennet says in the quote below: he was, in fact, all “conviction, humour and even joy,” speaking without a hint of condescension, having a lot of fun, being inquisitive about West Virginia, my paper, me. I’m pretty sure that was before the Houston convention speech where he went all Trump before the age of Trump, declaring a “culture war” and calling Democrats names (and cross-dressers) and having a lot of fun doing that. “The agenda Clinton and Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants.” Actually, it kind of was: compared to today, things were a bit stifling back then, people felt it, and got the changes they wanted. So much of it that the reaction followed, with a vengeance. Buchanan was the embryo. Bush was the child. Trump is the mutant. Buchanan is still around. 85 years old. Maybe he can be a headliner at the Republican National Convention in, what, Milwaukee? He can put on his Fonzie impersonation and tell us how Trumpism is working out for him. It appears to be prolonging his life: some people only need bile for vitamins. The difference of course was that Buchanan had some joy. Trump is all carnage.

—P.T.

 

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I began to write about presidential politics two years later, in 1996, and as the most inexperienced member of the team was assigned to cover a long-shot Republican candidate, Pat Buchanan. I packed a bag for a four-day reporting trip and did not return home for six weeks. Buchanan campaigned on an eccentric fusion of social conservatism and statist economic policies, along with coded appeals to racism and antisemitism, that 30 years earlier had elevated George Wallace and 20 years later would be rebranded as Trumpism. He also campaigned with conviction, humour and even joy, a combination I have rarely witnessed. As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

–From James Bennet’s “When the New York Times lost its way,” 1843 Magazine (The Economist), Dec. 14, 2023

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