Ross Perot's reform party is about to do something no third party has done in a century: transcend its founder. And it will be thanks to Pat Buchanan. Although Buchanan won't give either major candidate a scare in this year's presidential election, he'll probably line up enough disenchanted social conservatives, blue-collar workers threatened by imports, and disillusioned independents to win 7,000,000 votes. That would give him five percent of the popular vote--enough to qualify the Reform Party for federal money again in 2004, as well as an automatic place on the ballot in many states.
But the Reform Party will pay a price for survival. And that price will be Buchanan's lasting influence. "What you have seen--there is no doubt about it--is a Buchananization of the Reform Party," the candidate told me on the eve of the Pennsylvania party's June 10 convention. He's absolutely right. Under Buchanan's influence, the Reform Party is drifting from the socially tolerant, good-government identity of its infancy to a darker place occupied in the late '60s by George Wallace's American Independent Party and in the nineteenth century by the Know-Nothings. Buchanan is bringing into the party new members from the Christian Coalition and hardline GOP caucuses like Missouri's Republican Assembly, and in so doing he is splitting state organizations and expunging the party's old guard.
Nobody understands this better than the old guard itself. Veterans of the Perot campaigns are apoplectic, and they blame Buchanan himself--not merely, they say, because he is betraying Perot's vision but because he is betraying the promises he made to them when he decided to run last fall. "Here is somebody you invite over to your house," complains Russell Verney, the former chairman of the Reform Party, "and the first thing they do is start evicting you." Verney and the others are right about what is happening, but they are letting themselves off too easily in their explanations why. In truth, Buchanan didn't steal the Reform Party's soul. He purchased it, using his name recognition as currency. And it was Perot veterans like Verney who presided over the transaction, out of sheer desperation to survive.
Successful third-party candidacies depend on two things: a charismatic leader and a collage of troubling issues that the major parties are determined either to ignore or to view one-sidedly. In 1968, for example, Wallace focused his inflammatory oratory on racial integration and government spending on minorities, expressing an anger many Americans felt but neither party would articulate. In 1992, Perot played a similar role--channeling popular frustration with economic decline, political corruption, and government incompetence. Many politicians had spoken to one or the other of these concerns. Democrats, for instance, railed against corporate greed, campaign finance abuse, and Japan's unfair trade practices, while Republicans attacked budget deficits and "big government." But no one combined them and summed them up as powerfully as Perot did.
But while Perot, like Wallace, tapped into popular frustrations, he had one major advantage over his third-party predecessor. Whereas Wallace was avowedly a politician of the extreme right, Perot hailed from the political center. He opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but he was not anti-immigrant. He was pro-choice and had a commendable record on civil rights and education in Texas. If not for his erratic personality, he might have actually challenged for the presidency in November.
In 1996, even though he had lost half his issues, Perot was still a recognizable political presence. America's economic rebound and Japan's nosedive undercut his message of economic nationalism. But Perot could still run on a centrist platform of government reform, campaign finance regulation, balanced budgets, and the rescue of Social Security and Medicare. With the Clinton administration plunged into scandal and the Republicans identified with corporate special-interest groups, this set of issues was sufficiently distinctive to garner Perot eight percent of the vote. If the debate commission, which is controlled by the two parties, had not excluded him, Perot could have won double that and earned his party millions of dollars more this year.
Further proof of the Reform Party's enduring appeal came in 1998, when Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota governorship on a similar reform platform (minus the economic nationalism). Ventura's success appeared to demonstrate that if the Reform Party could field credible--and, even better, highly original--candidates, it could establish itself as the party of government reform. Even if it never supplanted either of the major parties, it could substantially influence them--as the campaign-reform-oriented campaigns of Bill Bradley and John McCain seemed to suggest.
And yet the last two years have been, by any standard, difficult ones for the Reform Party. Romantics like to envisage third parties as bottom-up institutions whose local success provides the foundation for their national prominence. In fact, the opposite is historically true: third parties have depended on presidential elections for their success. In presidential elections, third parties can exploit openings created when the major parties, driven by their constituency groups, ignore or slight important issues--in ways that local Democratic and Republican candidates, more in tune with local idiosyncrasy, rarely do. As a result, third parties tend to flounder between presidential-election years.
That is what happened to the Reform Party. After 1996, most state Reform Party organizations outside Minnesota atrophied. In 1998, the party ran House candidates in just 16 states and Senate candidates in only eight, with no candidate getting even two percent of the vote. In Iowa, when its gubernatorial candidate failed to receive two percent of the vote, the Reform Party lost its ballot status. In Pennsylvania, one of the original Reform Party states, members couldn't even gather the 36,000 signatures necessary to get their gubernatorial and Senate candidates on the ballot.
And so, as the 2000 presidential election approached, party leaders knew they desperately needed a presidential candidate who could inspire the party's base and secure its funding and ballot access. The obvious choice was Ventura, but, while he made no secret of his desire to run in 2004, he insisted on keeping his pledge to Minnesota voters not to run in 2000. Ventura, in turn, tried to convince former Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker and millionaire Donald Trump to run. But the Reform Party leaders in Dallas, locked in a bitter, issueless power struggle with Ventura over who would control the party, wanted nothing to do with anyone the Minnesota governor recruited. They began frantically casting about for a candidate of their own.
Enter Buchanan. By last September, he was growing amenable to quitting the GOP. His Republican presidential campaign had fizzled. In contrast to 1992 and 1996, in 2000 he had to share the social conservative vote--with Gary Bauer, Steve Forbes, and Alan Keyes. Only his protectionism distinguished him, and the economic boom had left most Republicans indifferent to it.
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