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Like any other seasoned writer, Buchanan spends time not only on what he says but also on how he says it; he searches for the tangy phrase, the sticky epithet, the cartoonish image that will lodge in voters' minds and either inspire or terrify them: When he attacked the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster as Surgeon General, it was because "you can't have an abortionist as America's family doctor." On the stump, Department of Education employees become "some guy in sandals and beads...telling us how to teach American history," and the Democrats are "the party of national health insurance and Joycelyn Elders." His campaign speech is made up of lines he has honed carefully. "You work on it and you work on it and you work on it," he says. "And then you get the cheer line that comes to you. You try it again. And then you get it down to the point where it really works." He calls getting the lines just right "going iambic."
The heart of his message comes down to this: you have lost control over your lives, your money, your choices, your government. Who has power instead? Your enemies. Some of the enemies Buchanan serves up seem a bit farfetched. The fact that the National Endowment for the Arts has little to do with the collapse of the American family, for instance, does not prevent Buchanan from announcing that if he is elected, "the first week I'm going to walk out of that White House down to the NEA. I'm going to padlock the place and fumigate it."
Next in his hierarchy of demons are corporations, the "transnational institutions that show no loyalty to a country now at all. They are concerned about the corporate economy. I'm concerned about the national economy. They are no longer one and the same." These are the moments when Buchanan sounds like an unreconstructed liberal Democrat, defending labor unions and denouncing rapacious Big Business. But he does not extend his aim to the rich, perhaps because he understands what many have missed: most Americans do not want to hate rich people--they want to be them. "I really have no problem with Ted Turner making $2 billion or $3 billion," Buchanan says. "If the real wages of everybody are going up, nobody's going to complain whether somebody is going to make all of that. The problem is, the rising tide is not lifting all boats."
For this he blames shrewd foreign competitors and American free traders, a message especially potent with displaced workers. He recently attended a rally in western Pennsylvania, where his mother was born and where his cousins still live. He remembers it as a thriving manufacturing region. And it is all disappearing. "We allowed those other countries to take over American industries: TVs, radios, motorcycles, cars. We gotta wake up and look these guys in the eye and say, Look, these are not like our golf partners. These people are rivals, competitors and, in the case of China, potential mighty adversaries. We have got to start being very tough."