Buchanan's Air War Goes Awry

By Brooks Jackson/CNN

DETROIT (March 19) -- With time running out, conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan is desperately hoping for a Michigan miracle -- investing heavily in TV ads -- and stretching the facts.

For more than a week he had run no ads anywhere. Then Buchanan's ads lit up stations in Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids last week. For a while they ran twice as often as Dole's, according to CNN's consultant, Competitive Media Reporting.

"The rate of job loss hit 3.4 million in 1992 and has remained high since," one Buchanan ad intones.

Job loss? Wait a minute. Buchanan is quoting almost word for word from a New York Times story about layoffs. But it's not the whole story. Actually, the U.S. economy created far more jobs than were lost, overall gaining more than a million jobs in '92, and more than eight million since then. Not always the best-paying jobs, but there are more of them, not less.

In another Michigan ad, Buchanan sounds like a militant trade unionist. "Millions of our best jobs have been shifted overseas," he states gravely. "Our greatest industries have been gutted."

---

---

Gutted? Not Michigan's auto industry. In fact, there are thousands more auto production workers now than at the end of '92 -- 13,500 more in Michigan and 131,000 more nationwide.

Buchanan's Michigan strategy is a lot like former California Gov. Jerry Brown's in 1992. Brown got 26 percent against Bill Clinton, and Michigan's economy was a lot worse then.

For the fire-breathing conservative who loves to blast the liberal media, it's come down to this. Buchanan is sounding like a Democrat, quoting the New York Times and taking some liberties with the facts.

Copyright © 1996 AllPolitics
All Rights Reserved

Terms under which this information is provided to you