August 17, 1992: The Republican
Convention opens at the Astrodome in Houston. Despite the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was never any question that the incumbents, President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, were going to be nominated for 2nd terms.
However, that recession, and Bush having broken his promise from the 1988 Convention of, "Read my lips: No new taxes!" angered the archconservative wing of the Party. This led to an insurgent candidacy by Patrick J. Buchanan, who had served as a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and as White House Communications Director under President Ronald Reagan. Now a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist with a populist-conservative bent, Buchanan was one of the few people still willing to publicly support the disgraced Nixon.
He challenged Bush in the Primaries, getting a surprising 37 percent in the New Hampshire Primary. Bush and Quayle got the message: Double down on the attack of, "The Democrats will raise your taxes, we Republicans will not."
But the other main Republican message was now useless: With the Cold War over, the Republicans could no longer run on "The Democrats are soft on Communism." Or... could they? They would do their best to link the Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, his wife Hillary, and the Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, to "Communism" and "Socialism."
And then came the race riot in South Central Los Angeles. Instead of blaming it on the anger that black people faced over police officers getting away with police brutality, and other economic issues -- including, but not limited to, the recession that Bush's dedication to Reaganomics had caused -- they decided to blame it on "the breakdown of the family."
On May 19, Quayle gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club, a conservative outpost in normally liberal San Francisco. He said fathers leaving the home was a problem, which it was. He said women raising children as single mothers was a problem, as if it was their fault.
The previous night, CBS aired the season finale of Murphy Brown, in which the fictional TV journalist Murphy had her baby, and Quayle said that the show "glamorized single motherhood," was "mocking the importance of fathers," and "calling it just another lifestyle choice."
It did none of those things. Quayle wasn't lying: He was simply too stupid to recognize that he was wrong. The national media, which had mocked Quayle so many times before, did so again, the best headline being in the Philadelphia Daily News: "MURPHY HAS A BABY, QUAYLE HAS A COW!"
But the Republican Convention dug the hole deeper, with more speeches saying that liberals, dominant in the Democratic Party, were insulting "family values" by promoting single mothers -- and, worse still, by promoting gay rights. Signs were held up, reading, "FAMILY RIGHTS FOREVER GAY RIGHTS NEVER." Baltimore Sun political columnist Jules Witcover recalled that one delegate stuck his finger in his face and said, "You cannot be a Christian and a Democrat."
Buchanan gave a speech on the opening night of the Convention. He assured the Bush campaign that, in his speech, he would endorse Bush wholeheartedly. He did. But he also went out of his way to praise Reagan, and then...
There would be steps along the way. Newt Gingrich's "Revolution" in 1994. The Administration of Bush's son, George W. Bush, saying in 2001, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," and then being a bunch of draft-deferred Republican politicians insulting the patriotism of Democratic war veterans. The rise of the "Tea Party" in 2009. And the 2016 embrace of Donald Trump by evangelicals, seeing that incredibly immoral man as their best chance to overturn abortion rights. Each time, the conservative movement seemedg to get angrier, crazier, and more ignorant.
If you want to know when the Republican
Party lost its mind and decided that bigotry -- against women, against nonwhite people, against non-Christian people, against LGBT people, against immigrants, etc. -- was okay, this was the moment: Pat Buchanan's speech before the 1992 Republican National Convention. Here are some of the "highlights":
My friends, like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden – where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists – in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history...
This was a major misinterpretation: At their Convention, the previous month, the Democrats were completely open about their liberalism.
As President, George Bush presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the termination of the Warsaw Pact. And what about Mr. Clinton? Well, Bill Clinton couldn’t find 150 words to discuss foreign policy in an acceptance speech that lasted almost an hour. As was said of another Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes...
Really, Pat? I don't recall George H.W. Bush being the President of the Soviet Union. Or of East Germany. Or of Poland. Or of any country other than the United States. He didn't preside over any of those things. Although the IHOP line was a good zinger.
George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and a champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded. Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda. At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish Catholic Governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.
The reason there was no speech for Governor Casey at the Democratic Convention was because he refused to endorse Clinton. Except for former Governor Jerry Brown of California, himself a candidate for President up until that moment, every single speaker at that Convention endorsed Clinton in his speech. Casey wouldn't -- true, because he disagreed with Clinton on abortion, and on guns -- but that refusal was why he was not allowed to address the Convention.
Fast-forward to 2008: The Governor's son, Bob Casey Jr., had been elected to the U.S. Senate, and was every bit as anti-abortion and pro-gun as his father. But he happily endorsed the Democrats' nominee for President, the pro-choice and pro-gun-control Barack Obama, and was given a prime-time speaking slot at the Democratic Convention in Denver, and said that Party members need not agree with the nominee on every issue in order to endorse that nominee.
Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: "Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history." And so they do.
At that point, that statement was true. And in his Convention speech, Clinton said, to anyone willing to listen, "You matter to America. And don't you ever let anybody tell you can't become whatever you want to be. And if other politicians make you feel like you are not part of their family, come on and be part of ours." Now, that's family values.
Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.
Damn right, they need not apply. Says who? Says James Madison: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" -- which is exactly what the federal government promoting religious schools would be. And the federal government funding religious schools would be tantamount to promoting them, and their religion. There's a reason this particular Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was the First one.
Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.
Sounds like you're speaking for her, Pat. Hillary didn't say those things.
This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.
You may call it "God's country," but the 1st Amendment calls you a liar. Of course, the Republicans had a litmus test for the Supreme Court, and no abortions (never mind that rich people, as they did before 1973, would still be able to get around the law), discrimination against gays, etc.
My friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.
After a speech like that, a lot of people didn't want to be on Bush's side, knowing he was on Buchanan's side. Sometime later, after the bombing of an abortion clinic killed an innocent receptionist, even Buchanan admitted, "Sometimes, you don't want to be on your own side."
He closed with this:
My friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.
The cities were never yours, Pat. Nor was the country. As for your culture, please, yes, take it back, so the majority of America never has to see it again. There's a reason the 1960s happened, and it was that all that "freedom" you mentioned in that speech (in parts I haven't quoted here) didn't exist for women, for black people, for gay people -- as comedian Bill Maher would later put it, "which is why Little Richard was always screaming."
I remember watching that Convention, and while I can't say it got any worse than that, it certainly didn't get any better. Anybody who wasn't already for the Bush-Quayle ticket wasn't won over, the way many had been by the considerably more moderate affairs in Detroit in 1980, in Dallas in 1984, and in New Orleans in 1988. Buchanan and some of the other speakers had turned the Astrodome into a Nuremburg rally.
And when Bush, the last vestige of Reagan's "sunny optimism," lost badly to Clinton in November, those delegates and elected officials were now free to be who they always wanted to be -- which is to say, angry and mean, and bigoted to others who just wanted to be free to be who they always wanted to be.
Comedian Mort Sahl, who had been lampooning politicians of both parties since the Harry Truman Administration, said, "If anybody comes up to you and says, My kid is a conservative, why is that? You say, Remember in the Sixties, when we told you, if you keep using drugs, your kids will be mutants?"
Without Pat Buchanan's 1992 Republican Convention speech, the Congressional "revolution" that Representative Newt Gingrich led in 1994 would have been considerably harder to pull off. Without Buchanan's speech, there never would have been an Administration in which George Bush the son was much further to the right than George Bush the father. Without Buchanan's speech, there would have been no Tea Party to oppose President Obama from 2009 to 2014, before Donald Trump became the Party's standard-bearer. And without Buchanan's speech, Trump's philosophy of "Make America Great Again" through bigotry and unregulated capitalism would never have had a chance.
None of those things should have had a chance.
*
August 17, 1992 was a Monday. There were only 4 Major League Baseball games scheduled for that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Chicago White Sox, 4-2 at the new Comiskey Park in Chicago. (It was renamed U.S. Cellular Field in 2002, Guaranteed Rate Field in 2016, and just "Rate Field" in 2025.) Each team got only 5 hits, but the Pale Hose made more of theirs than did the Bronx Bombers.
* The Atlanta Braves beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-4 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Mark Lemke won the game with a ground-rule double in the top of the 10th inning.
* The Kansas City Royals beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Royals Stadium in Kansas City. (It was renamed Kauffman Stadium the next season.) George Brett went 1-for-4, and Mike Macfarlane went 3-for-4 with a home run and 3 RBIs.
* And the Los Angeles Dodgers beat their arch-rivals, the San Francisco Giants, 2-0 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Kevin Gross pitched a no-hitter. He walked Cory Snyder and Matt Williams in the 2nd inning, but got out of it with a double play. And he hit Mark Leonard with a pitch in the 9th. Those would be the only baserunners he allowed. Eric Karros hit a home run for the Dodgers in the 2nd inning.
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