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The Amazon.com primary
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But Trump is a major wheeler-dealer who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has since 1995 given more than $250,000 in campaign contributions, including $181,500 in soft money, to a bipartisan array of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and candidates ranging from Republicans Steve Forbes, Bob Dole and Al D'Amato to Democrats Ted Kennedy, Charles Rangel and John Kerry. It's hard to see how Trump could really meet the standards of an "out-of-the-box" insurgent like Ventura. Fat cats like Trump built the box Ventura and his allies are trying to escape.

Ventura's control of the Reform Party also should not be overstated. The fact that he helped elect the party's new chairman, Jack Gargan of Florida, at the July convention in Michigan means less than it appeared to at first, since Gargan doesn't formally take over till Jan. 1. In the days after the convention, outgoing chairman Russ Verney -- a Perot loyalist through and through -- gave assurances to Gargan that he was ready and willing to step down as early as Sept. 1.

But then he issued an ultimatum: Gargan must publicly endorse the party's nomination rules as they now stand before Verney would surrender his post. Under the current rules, supported by Verney and Perot, the party's candidate will be selected by a mail ballot starting next July and culminating at the August convention. Potential nominees have to be working to qualify as an independent candidate in enough states to win a hypothetical majority of electoral votes. Ballots will then be mailed to people who sign their petitions, as well as anyone else who requests one.

This process in effect makes the Reform Party a party for rent. Anyone with a strong grass-roots base and/or deep-pocketed backers can try to take it over. As matters now stand, the Democratic and Republican nominees could each flood the Reformers' "national primary" with mischief-making voters seeking to nominate whatever candidate might hurt their opponent most.

Gargan refused Verney's demand, in part because he is worried that the process could put the party "at grave risk of bankruptcy should outside forces mobilize to take [it] over." (For starters, they are going to have to come up with millions of dollars to pay for the mail-in balloting process.) So he won't be taking the reins until next year, when it will be too late, under the party's constitution, to make any changes in the process.

There are also many signs that Ventura's chief rival, Perot, is ready to pass the torch to Buchanan. His 1996 vice presidential candidate, Pat Choate, has been loudly beating the drums for Buchanan, with Perot's evident approval. And despite Perot's moderate views on abortion, in his personal and business life he is much closer to Buchanan's uptight views than Ventura's libertine ways.

Though no one can say for sure what the temperamental Texan will do, it's also worth noting that he has good reason to stay focused on his business. Last I checked, Perot Systems stock had dropped to around $20 a share, after an IPO in February that went from $16 to a high of $85.75.

So, with Buchanan the clear front-runner for the Reform nomination, what does this all mean?

I don't buy the current theory that this spells Bush's doom, though the parallels to 1992 -- when Buchanan wounded Bush's father in the primaries, and then Perot helped do him in in the debates -- are real. But while current polls do show Buchanan drawing more from the Republican column than the Democrats, scoring as high as 16 percent in one survey that asked about a three-way race between him, Bush and Gore, so far Buchanan has spent nearly all of his time targeting the Republican base. If he moves to the Reform Party, that will change.

Few recall that in the 1996 primaries, he started drawing big crowds -- and votes -- from union halls in the Rust Belt. Buchanan's vote totals in labor strongholds like Racine, Wis., and Dubuque, Iowa, jumped dramatically between his 1992 and 1996 campaigns.

For example, in 1996 he got 8,604 votes in Racine, a blue-collar industrial city south of Milwaukee, compared to just 2,654 in 1992. The difference: in 1992 Buchanan ran primarily as a hardcore social conservative with a nativist, even racist, tinge; in 1996 he had added a broad critique of corporate greed and footloose capital that was pitched directly at workers displaced by the amoral forces of globalization.

He even told John Nichols of the Capitol Times in Madison at the end of that run that he would have enjoyed the opportunity to run in the Democratic primaries that year.

Buchanan's bolt will be a challenge to both Bush and Gore, therefore. It will give Bush a chance to show that he really is a different, more compassionate, breed of Republican -- one who won't make nice with a racist demagogue. And it will give Gore a reason to aim his campaign less at suburban, moderate women and more at the working-class majority that used to be the Democrats' loyal base.

Can a third party be built on an alliance of hardcore social conservatives and disaffected blue-collar unionists? Yes. In some cases -- think pro-labor, pro-life Democrats like David Bonior and Marcy Kaptur -- no huge leap is required.

Of course, what happens to the economy over the next year will determine how big Buchanan's campaign will get. But to the extent that Pat gets a free ride on his past record of hate speech, and no one else emerges to speak for the people most hurt by globalization and corporate greed and irresponsibility, comparisons to Le Pen in France and Peron in Argentina will soon be in order -- if not eclipsed by his likely successes here.

There are still a couple of possible silver linings, however. One is that a Buchanan third-party run will force more attention to third parties in general, as it becomes clearer to even the corporate-owned media that the public wants more choices than Bland A and Bland B.

And finally, with Buchanan seemingly hurting Bush more than Gore (or Bill Bradley), his candidacy may liberate someone like Ralph Nader, or perhaps Warren Beatty, who might otherwise be worrying about hurting the Democratic candidate, to run hard as a progressive populist on the left. Strange and surprising things are already happening in this election -- maybe even more are just around the corner.
salon.com | Sept. 15, 1999

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