Pat Buchanan began his address bolting the Republican Party today by
wishing everyone a happy St. Crispin's Day. The line alludes to the famous
speech by King Henry in Shakespeare's
Henry V: "For he today that sheds
his blood with me/Shall be my brother." Unfortunately for Buchanan, that
speech was actually delivered in the course of one of those foreign
adventures Buchanan spent much of his time denouncing this morning. It's
spoken by an English king making war on French soil in an effort to
capture territory on the European mainland. And Henry's motives aren't
just geopolitical, they're personal. He means to remove all doubt among
those who knew him as a carefree youth — character traits firmly
established in an earlier drama,
Henry IV, Pt. 2. Indeed, in that play, as
David Bevington writes in his introduction to the Bantam edition of
Henry
V, Prince Hal's father urged him to put down political opposition at home
by distracting it abroad: "busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels." King
Henry is just following dad's advice.
Another point about Henry V: During the Second World War, Laurence Olivier
produced a vividly patriotic reading of the play on the London stage in a
blatant effort to stir national spirits. This is the story, after all, of
England landing troops in France. Sound familiar? That's also the western
front Buchanan the armchair historian believes should never have been
opened.
As a political strategist, Buchanan has always had a real genius for
identifying wedge issues. In recent years, however, they have tended to be
issues that drive a wedge between him and his natural base. To judge from
his remarks today, the latest such issue is campaign-finance reform.
Pushing campaign-finance reform is part of the Reform Party's reason for
being, so it's no surprise to see Buchanan talking it up. But if he goes
much further with it, he may further alienate anti-abortionists, who are
already concerned about Buchanan's move to the Reform Party and fear
campaign-finance reform as a threat to their organizations. Social
conservative organizations have been hostile to John McCain's presidential
bid because he's on a crusade to regulate political activity, and the
activists and voters those groups represent have gotten the message. Will
they turn on Buchanan next? . . . Speaking of abortion, we goofed on the
21st, writing that
Roe v.
Wade is almost 29 years old when it is in fact
almost 27.
Writing in
The Nation, Eric Alterman accuses Sam Tanenhaus of being an
"unwitting ideological dupe" for his favorable profile in
Vanity Fair of
several right-leaning ladies. A friend asks us whether there is such a
thing as a "witting ideological dupe." And there is: Eric Alterman.
