New Hampshire’s xenophobe voters get another shot
by digby
I wrote a little bit about Trump and New Hampshire for Salon today:
Tonight we will see if Donald Trump can win the New Hampshire primary by being totally himself. It’s true that he seems to always just say whatever comes into his head, but the Iowa campaign actually marked a show of restraint for the blustery billionaire. He didn’t swear on the stage. He talked a lot about the Bible. He carted his family all over the state and especially showed off his 8 months pregnant daughter Ivanka as a show of family values. He did his best to prove that he could represent true-blue ultra-conservative family values Republicans.
Alas, no one can out-conservative Ted Cruz, so Trump came up a little bit short. But Iowa was never a slam dunk for him in the first place. Trump was telling the truth when he said that he had been told he couldn’t win and hadn’t put a lot of effort into it. When the polls showed him neck and neck with Cruz he spent more time there, but he knew it wasn’t really his kind of state.
New Hampshire, by contrast, is a place where he can really let it all hang out. After all, 20 years ago Pat Buchanan made a run at it there with almost exactly the same message as Trump’s. Take a look at this New York Times article from February of 1996:
Mr. Buchanan revels in controversy. But as he assails illegal immigration as an “invasion” and refers to Mexicans en masse as “Jose,” his critics are accusing him of taking controversy a step too far. They say Mr. Buchanan is speaking in code, using xenophobic images like those or anti-Semitic references to excite bigots without alienating mainstream voters…Trying to shout down a heckler in Gila Bend on Friday, for example, Mr. Buchanan said of illegal immigrants: “They’ve got no right just because you have a lousy government down there to walk across the borders of the United States of America, because this is my country.”But Marciano Murillo, 18, a native-born American whose father was a naturalized illegal immigrant, replied: “They help your economy as well as any American here helps it.”Mr. Buchanan shot back:”They’ve got no right to break our laws and break into our country and go on welfare, and some of them commit crimes.”
“There isn’t any name in American politics Pat Buchanan hasn’t been called,” he told the crowd. “Not one. But let me tell you something. I’m not intimidated. I won’t back down. I’ll stand my ground, you’ve got my word. No matter what they say about me, I will defend the borders of the United States. I will stop this massive illegal immigration cold. Period, paragraph.”In an interview on Friday night, Mr. Buchanan rejected the idea that he rhetorically winks and nods to bigots. “It’s silly,” he said. “There are people out there with anxieties and concerns about their future and their children’s future. What I’m saying is, ‘Don’t turn your back on politics. Don’t despair.’ I’m offering them something besides the back of my hand.”
He also made anti-Semitic comments and his version of the tough guy mantra “Make America Great Again” was a promise to the far right:
“When I raise my hand to take that oath of office your New World Order comes crashing down.”
(The New World Order is a doozy of a right wing conspiracy theory that’s still around today. It’s been more or less supplanted by terrorist fear-mongering in the popular imagination but the Bundy militia types are still at it.)
Buchanan ran in 1992 and didn’t make much of a splash. But he gave a notorious speech at the convention, about which the late great Molly Ivins famously quipped: “It sounded better in the original German.” Then in 1996, Buchanan gave the presumptive nominee Bob Dole a run for his money by winning a straw poll in Alaska, the Louisiana caucus, and then taking a surprise win in New Hampshire. His message was resonating with a certain group of Republicans. He won with 27 percent, just about the percentage most polls are predicting Trump is likely to have.
Buchanan and Trump are not the same. Buchanan was a man of the right and a political professional. But you can tell from those quotes that his pitch was very much the same as Trump’s. He didn’t even try to hide his xenophobia, he didn’t dog-whistle it all. (He was a little more subtle with this anti-semitism although it was obvious.) The main thing was that he was tough, he took no guff and most importantly, he was going to do something about foreigners who were destroying the American way of life.