ood morning. Today, I am ending my lifelong
membership in the Republican Party, and my
campaign for its nomination; and I am declaring my
intention to seek the nomination of the Reform Party
for the presidency of the United States.
This decision was not made without anguish and
regret. I will forever cherish the memory of having
been perhaps the only Goldwaterite in the Graduate
School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1961.
Nor will I ever regret my nine years of service to
Richard Nixon, from his comeback campaigns of
1966 and '68, to our 49-state triumph of '72, through
the final days of Watergate. I was with Nixon in
China. And I also had the high honor of being Ronald
Reagan's second in the Panama Canal debates, and
at his side when that great president refused to give
up missile defense and walked out of the summit at
Reykjavik in Ronald Reagan's finest hour of the Cold
War.
From the thunderous reception we got at
Houston in 1992, when I told the Buchanan Brigades
we had to come home and stand beside George
Bush, to the ovations at Ames, Iowa, last summer,
when I faced off with his son, the Governor, the
Republican party has been good to me. And I have
tried to be loyal to it. But, as John F. Kennedy said,
Sometimes party loyalty asks too much. And today it
asks too much of us.
Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted
two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud
upon the nation. Our two parties have become
nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey. On
foreign and trade policy, open borders and
centralized power, our Beltway parties have become
identical twins. Both supported NAFTA and GATT
and the surrender of our national sovereignty to the
WTO. Both supported the extension of nuclear war
guarantees to the borders of Russia. Both supported
the illegal war on Serbia. Both support IMF bailouts
of corrupt regimes. Both vote for MFN trade
privileges for a Communist Chinese regime that
today targets missiles on American cities. The
appeasement of Beijing is a bipartisan disgrace, and
we will not be a part of it.
Neither party speaks for the forgotten Americans
whose jobs were sent overseas to finance the boom
market of the 1990s that the rest of us enjoy. Both
parties are addicted to soft money. Both write laws
with lobbyists looking over their shoulders. Both
embrace the unprincipled politics of triangulation.
And neither fights today with conviction and courage
to rescue God's country from the cultural and moral
pit into which she has fallen. The day of the outsider
is over in the Beltway parties; the money men have
seen to that. Never again will our political
establishment permit a dissident to come as close to
capturing a nomination as we did in 1996. They have
rearranged the primary schedule and rigged the
game to protect the party favorites.
Candidates of ideas need not apply, as both parties
seek out the hollow men, the malleable men, willing
to read from teleprompters speeches scripted by
consultants and pollsters for whom the latest
print-out from the Focus Group is sacred text.
We choose not to play our assigned role in their
sham election. My friends, this year is our last
chance to save our republic, before she disappears
into the godless New World Order that our elites are
constructing in a betrayal of everything for which our
Founding Fathers lived, fought, and died.
Only the Reform Party offers the hope of a real
debate and a true choice of destinies for our country.
"If we don't go now, Pat," I have been told by
loyalists all across America, "every cause for which
we fought for seven years will die." Well, we can't
let those causes die, because they are America's
cause. So let me say to the money boys and the
Beltway elites who think that, at long last, they have
pulled up their drawbridge and locked us out forever:
You don't know this peasant army. We have not yet
begun to fight.
So, let me lay out our Patriots' Road for America.
With the Cold War over, we shall craft a foreign
policy for a new century rooted in the great tradition
of Washington, Jefferson and John Quincy Adams
who wrote:
Wherever the standard of freedom and
independence...shall be unfurled, there will
[America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers
be....But she goes not abroad in search of monsters
to destroy.
I pledge to you: I will never send an American army
to fight in a foreign war, unless our country is
attacked or our vital interests are imperiled. They call
us "isolationists." Well, if they mean I intend to isolate
America from the bloody territorial and ethnic wars
of the new century, I plead guilty. It is the first duty
of a statesman: to keep his country out of wars that
are not his country's quarrel. And the junk yards of
history are strewn with the wreckage of republics
and empires that failed to learn that lesson.
We intend to dust off an ancient document and
restore it to its rightful place as the altar piece of
American government. You may have heard of it.
It's called the Constitution of the United States.
Under the Constitution, before America goes to war,
the Congress must declare war. By my reading of
the Constitution, the soldiers, sailors, airmen and
Marines who take an oath of loyalty to the United
States, are never to be used as the imperial troops of
anybody's New World Order. We will bring our
soldiers home where they belong; and rebuild our
military might and morale so no nation will dare
attack us.
And the first step to restore that morale is to evict
from the Bully Pulpit of the Oval Office, our own
Elmer Gantry, Mr. Clinton, whose desecration of that
temple of our civilization, and squalid behavior,
render him unfit to serve as Commander in Chief of
the Armed Forces of the United States.
We Americans are a good and generous people. Our
tradition of being first at the scene of natural
disasters, providing food and shelter for the victims,
is rooted in deep our hearts. That tradition we shall
maintain. But IMF bailouts of deadbeat dictators
must end; and we must phase out foreign aid and
start looking out for the forgotten Americans right
here in the U.S.A.
It is time for a New Patriotism, where America's
sovereignty is wholly and fully restored. And if, as
Secretary General Kofi Annan has threatened, we
will lose our vote in the United Nations, if we don't
give him the billion dollars he says we owe him, I
would give Mr. Kofi this word of advice: Sir, don't go
there. Because if our vote in the UN is in jeopardy,
your lease on Turtle Bay is in jeopardy.
As for America's immense trade deficits, even Mr.
Greenspan is now alarmed, as they approach four
percent of our entire economy. Because of NAFTA
and GATT, America's industrial base has been
hollowed out, our manufacturing workers, who
support families on a single wage, have been forced
to compete with sweatshop labor abroad; and our
country has been left dependent on imports for the
vital necessities of national life.
We must cut out these cancerous trade deficits and
make America a self-reliant nation again. And to
those who prattle on about out duties to the Global
Economy, let me say it again: I'm not running for
president of the world; I'm running for President of
the United States.
But of all the needs of this nation, none is greater for
our peace and happiness than racial reconciliation.
The backsliding toward hyphenated-Americanism
must end. Let us abolish quotas and set-asides, these
un-American devices that reward individuals based
on what color they are, or what continent their
kinfolk came from. Let us abandon a sterile and
futile politics of victims-and-villains, and rediscover
what brings us all together as one nation and one
people.
All of us must learn our English language. All
of us must come to know our common history,
heritage, and American heroes, so we can get our
great Melting Pot working its magic again. Any man
or woman from any continent or any country can be
a good American. We know that. But it takes time to
assimilate the thirty million who have come in the last
thirty years. And we need time. Indeed, we need a
time-out on legal immigration, to ease the downward
pressure on workers' wages and to defeat the forces
of separatism that threaten us and nations all over
the world.
This land is our land; it belongs to all of us, immigrant
and native-born alike; and it would be unpardonable
ingratitude if we, the children of pioneers and patriots
of every color, continent, and creed, lost this last best
hope of earth, because we could not learn to live
with one another, and could not learn to love one
another.
If America stands for anything in this world, it is
freedom. Yet today America is among the most
over-taxed, over-regulated, and over-governed
societies in history. Our Federal Government collects
a fifth of all the wealth we produce and controls
perhaps half of it. Can anyone name a single
regulation that has been repealed in ten years, or a
single agency that has been abolished? Even the
National Endowment for the Arts soldiers defiantly
on.
We need to restore the old constitutional division of
labor in government. Defense and foreign policy are
the province of the federal government, but welfare
and education are the business of state and local
governments. And in children's education, parents
come first, teachers second, and federal judges not at
all.
Mr. Bush says his Department of Education will
write tests for fourth grade children in Idaho. But if I
am elected president, the bureaucrats at the
Department of Education are not going to be testing
kids; they're going to be testing the magic of the
market place. And all federal money for the school
children of America will be sent back to the school
districts of America, where accountability begins and
authority belongs.
We need a new Supreme Court where only
constitutionalists need apply, a court that will respect
both states rights and human rights, that will begin to
undo the damage done this nation by judicial
aggressions, beginning with that abomination they call
Roe v. Wade.
We need a President and a Congress that will pick
up the whip the Founding Fathers left in Article III of
the Constitution-to herd the justices back into the
narrow stalls to which they were first consigned by
Hamilton and Madison.
What is a self-governing people doing, waiting
meekly each week for nine jurists to tell us how we
may govern ourselves? As our fathers threw off a
tyranny of kings, let us throw off this tyranny of
judges-and let America be America again!
As for our IRS tax code, it is an insult to a free
people, the product of an endless series of corrupt
bargains between lobbyists and legislators. Let us rip
this weed out by its roots, cut taxes to the lowest
level in modern history, eliminate taxes on savers and
small business, and shift the burden where it belongs,
on a transnational elite that has no loyalty to any
country.
For every tax on manufactured goods that are made
in the U.S.A, let us put an equal tax on foreign goods
dumped in the U.S.A. For every tariff China puts on
us, let us put an equal tariff on them. That way, Mr.
Clinton's campaign contributors down at the Chinese
embassy can start contributing to the upkeep of the
Seventh Fleet.
Friends, ours is truly the best of times and the worst
of times. With our miraculous advances in medicine,
science, and technology, none of us would want to go
back to yesterday. But something good has been lost
from those years as well: The old patriotism, a
popular culture that undergirded the values of faith,
family, and country, the idea that we Americans are
a people who sacrifice and suffer together, and go
forward together, the mutual respect, the sense of
limits, the good manners; all are gone. My life has
been spent in the great and good vocations of politics,
journalism, and government. None commands the
respect it once did; all today are in disrepute.
I cannot think of a time since Watergate, so poisoned
with rancor and hostility, and I don't know if any
president can change that, the way Ronald Reagan
infused his time with his spirit and unabashed love of
country. But I do know this: I will try.
America needs a Government of National Unity and
Reconciliation that draws from the best of all parties,
and I promise you: I will create that kind of
government. And if we build it, they will come.
My friends, all the great empires of Europe that
began our century so full of swagger and bombast
came crashing down to ruin. All are now
surrendering their identities and their independence to
a super state that pays homage to the god of
Mammon. America alone still endures, independent
and free. The great questions before us are these:
Shall we, too, yield to their temptation, follow their
path, and suffer their fate? Is the call to empire
irresistible? Is a world government inevitable? Or
can America remain forever a light unto the nations,
an example to mankind of how a free people should
govern themselves, a republic above whose
sovereignty stands the sovereignty of God alone.
That is our cause. And so it is that in the name of the
Founding Fathers, we go forth to rescue America,
and we will not quit this fight as long as there is
breath within us.
God save the Republic, and God bless America.
