A Party Stuck In the Shuffle

Long beach, Ca.   -   It's the new reform Party: The pitchfork brigade is now a peasant's army, the issues and novelty that attracted one of every five voters in 1992 have been co-opted or forgotten, and the advertised political convention for the people has turned into a donnybrook.

            After four days of fisticuffs and confrontations, the factions of Pat Buchanan supporters and Ross Perot loyalists adjourned their sometimes tedious and frequently comical parallel conventions last night after nominating two candidates who will vie for $12.6 million in federal campaign funds, the primary reason for holding the convention.

            Former Nixon administration speech writer and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and his troops marches from the four-day convention boasting that they had reshaped the once formidable political party founded by Perot.

            John Hagelin, the Iowa physicist nominated as the presidential candidate by a faction loyal to Perot, said, "The party has had a catharsis." Russel Verney, Perot confidante and former national party chairman, called the week's events another colorful chapter in our short and tumultuous life."

            The nomination revives Buchanan's eight-year presidential quest, which has lost much of its fire since 1992 and 1996, when he and his pitchfork brigade" stunned republican front-runners George Bush and Bob Dole with surprising support in the New Hampshire primary. Last fall, he left the Republican Party and, at Verney's invitation, began campaigning for the Reform Party nomination. Verney hoped that competition between Buchanan, developer Donald Trump and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura would energize the remnants of the Perot party that had deteriorated sharply from its 1992 glory days.

            The incentive is access to the $12.6 million due the party's nominee because Perot collected 8 percent of the popular vote in the 1996 presidential election. The Perot loyalists have filed two claims with the Federal Election commission aimed at blocking Buchanan's access to the funds.

            We have a very big carrot," Versey said last week, but only Buchanan took up the chase.

            Buchanan and supporters orchestrated by his sister, Bay Buchanan, began challenging the remnants of Perot's party in state after state, converting supporters of their past campaigns into followers will be whether Buchanan's party is the same party that earned the $12.6 million.

            The issues have changed. Perot galvanized support with his personality and concerns for fiscal conservatism and campaign financial reform. Buchanan trumpets a full social agenda opposing abortion, homosexuality and immigration and voicing concern about America's moral decline.

            Cultural decadence goes hand in hand with the death of republics and the end of empires," Buchanan said in a statement issued Thursday that promised no women in combat, no gays in the military and appointment of Supreme Court justices who oppose abortion.

            New York delegates were in the middle of this weeks fray. Frank MacKay of Rocky Point came to the convention expecting to chair the delegation, but he was challenged on the first day by upstate conservative and anti-abortion activist Edward Heelin, who demanded MacKay's pledge to reserve the Reform Party's place on the state ballot for the winner of the convention. MacKay said that decision wouldn't be made until next month at the state convention of the Independence Party, as it is known in New York.

            Howling in protest, MacKay and his 20 delegates were barred from the convention by the party chairman loyal to Buchanan. Two days later, they were invited back, in part to provide legal support for Buchanan's claim of party continuity. MacKay addressed the convention, saying, " The New York delegation will accept no compromise. To compromise democracy is to accept tyranny." He then led his 20 followers out of the Buchanan convention, around the block and into the convention that by default was nominating Hagelin as the candidate to its Reform Party.

            The dispute was evident in the electronic primary the party had called to select a nominee. Last month, when it became clear that Buchanan would win, Perot loyalists accused him of padding the vote. On Friday, in a dizzying sequence of motions and votes, the anti-Buchanan convention announced that Buchanan had won, 49,529 to 28,539, but that because the votes could not be certified, Buchanan is "disqualified from the mail-in ballot and from the presidential nomination."