Buchanan Gets Into Shouting Match Over Immigration as Arizona Race Tightens

Patrick J. Buchanan, his face darkening and his voice rising, squared off against an 18-year-old Latino student Friday in an across-the-room bellowing match about immigration as polls showed him gaining ground and the Republican presidential primary race in Arizona tightening into a statistical dead heat.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), who skipped a debate in Arizona on Thursday night, campaigned in Oregon, where voting by mail began on Friday for a March 12 primary. Under pressure by conservative Republicans to tone down his criticism of Buchanan, he split a lawyerly difference, calling the conservative commentator’s views “extreme” but stopping short of labeling him an extremist.

Buchanan, Dole and Steve Forbes share a statistical lead in an Arizona poll of 435 Republicans likely to vote in next Tuesday’s primary. The poll, conducted Tuesday and Wednesday by Political Media Research, shows Dole with 25% support, Buchanan with 21% and Forbes with 19%. Because the margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points, technically any or all of the three could be in first place. Since the poll was taken, however, Dole has received widespread criticism in the state for missing Thursday night’s debate, and Buchanan seems increasingly confident of winning here.

Forbes campaigned in Delaware, where GOP primary voters cast their ballots today. Polls in the state are mixed. One survey, conducted by Lou Harris & Associates for the News Journal of Wilmington, showed Dole leading with 32% and Buchanan placing second with 21%. Forbes placed third with 19%. A second poll of 1,000 Delaware Republicans conducted for WCAU-TV in Philadelphia showed Dole and Forbes essentially tied, with Dole at 28% and Forbes at 27%. Buchanan was in third place in that survey with 24%.

“I expect to win here,” declared Forbes, who is the only candidate doing extensive campaigning in the state.

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Lamar Alexander, the fourth major candidate, campaigned in Texas, where he held a news conference at every stop, seeking free TV time. Polls in Arizona and Delaware show him placing fourth. Pressed for funds, he hoped to enlist financial backers of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who has dropped out of the race.

It was Buchanan, however, who drew the most attention. He made a morning appearance at an Arizona Right to Life breakfast in Phoenix. His audience thundered into applause when he said he would not permit abortions for rape victims. “If you want to execute someone,” he said, “execute the rapist.”

From Phoenix he went to Gila Bend, a small cotton farming town, where he offered his standard remarks about immigration to a Rotary Club audience that included several young people from Gila Bend High School. A senior, Maciano Murillo Jr., shouted from the back of the room: “Why are you talking against Mexico when they’re coming here for a better life for their families?”

“Let me answer that question!” Buchanan responded, his voice rising. “We were told that illegal immigration would go down after NAFTA.” It has not, Buchanan said, and the Mexican government has defaulted on its debts. “You and I and your children were put on the books for loans that we will never see again. No more $60-billion bailouts for socialist regimes abroad!”

Murillo shouted a response.

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“Hold it, mister!” Buchanan bellowed. The Mexican people are good and hard-working, he said, but “they have got a lousy government.” There was scattered applause. Illegal immigrants, Buchanan went on, “have no right to walk [through] the borders of the U.S. with impunity.”

“Why do you only see Mexicans on welfare and not Caucasians or African Americans?” Murillo bellowed back. “It’s our future you’re dealing with.”

Sharply, Buchanan cut him off. “You’ve filibustered long enough, my friend!”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m not intimidated,” Buchanan added. “I don’t back down. I stand my ground.”

He was met with a burst of groans and some yelling from the audience.

Buchanan shot back, his voice hoarse: “I’ll stop this mess of illegal immigration cold. Period. Paragraph.”

Murillo told reporters after the shouting match that he is the American son of an illegal immigrant who became a U.S. citizen. He said his father is an irrigation worker at a local cotton farm.

“My father never took any help from the government,” Murillo said. “He worked hard all his life. . . . I don’t think he [Buchanan] should make stereotypes. People come here from Mexico, they work hard, they struggle, they get an education.”

Aides later announced that half of Buchanan’s television and radio ads before the Arizona primary will be about immigration and half will be about trade and jobs. In one ad, broadcast Friday, Buchanan says most illegal immigrants have no job skills. He blames them for exploding crime.

“Who pays the cost of their health care, housing and welfare?” Buchanan demands. “You do!” In the ad, Buchanan vows “a time-out” on new immigration and insists “on one language--English--for all Americans.”

Buchanan’s views have drawn fire from the Los Angeles Catholic archdiocesan newspaper. In an editorial, The Tidings said that, if Buchanan, a Catholic, wins the presidency, it could “sow seeds of confusion among Catholics over who legitimately speaks for the Catholic Church in this country.”

Buchanan and U.S. Catholic bishops share views on abortion but disagree about almost everything else, including immigration, health care, welfare, affirmative action and education.

Buchanan’s campaign fired a South Carolina organizer who worked for former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Buchanan told reporters in Arizona that he did not want anyone in his campaign associated with a racist group. But he added that he cannot “check the resume of everybody who happens to wander into my campaign.”

In Louisiana, three Buchanan delegates reportedly have ties to Duke.

As Buchanan presses his arguments in Arizona, Dole has become a target, with some Arizonans taking his decision to miss the debate as a snub. Conservative radio talk-show host Barry Young had this on-the-air message for the Senate majority leader: “To hell with you too, pal.”

From afar in Oregon, where he has said he wanted to concentrate on the mail-in vote, Dole ignored the gibe. Instead, he walked a fine line just short of calling Buchanan an extremist. He accused him of having “extreme views” about women and “about maybe giving nuclear weapons to Japan or Taiwan or South Korea.”

Campaign-finance experts said Dole might reach the federal spending limit for the primary season as early as Super Tuesday, March 12, or during a round of Midwestern primaries one week later. The limit is imposed on candidates who accept federal campaign funds. Super Tuesday is the date for primary elections in six states, including delegate-rich Florida and Texas.

The experts, quoted by the Washington Post, said that, if Dole does not have the nomination locked up by then, the spending limit would severely hamper his efforts to compete.

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Forbes, a multimillionaire who is using his own money for his campaign and has no spending limit, told his audiences in Delaware that the best way to enhance America’s power was to kill the Internal Revenue Service.

He said his flat-tax proposal would do just that and unleash the nation’s creativity, resulting in a dynamic economy.

In Houston, Alexander escalated his attacks on Buchanan’s protectionist policies, urging voters to recognize that Buchanan’s proposals to raise tariffs on Japanese and Chinese goods in fact amount to sales-tax increases on American consumers.

He said the sprawling Houston Port Authority, which generates more than $5.5 million in annual revenues, would be forced to shut down under Buchanan’s policies.

Braun reported from Gila Bend and Fulwood from Wilsonville, Ore. Times staff writers Ed Chen in Houston and John Dart and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles contributed to this story.