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 Or, Bring Your Own Buchanan
* Pat Buchanan has all but announced he will leave the
Republican party and join the Reform party. Here’s a hint for
Pat: There IS no national Reform party. It exists in
Minnesota – as do those other national organizations, the Democrat-Farm-Labor party and the
Independent Republican party. It has, maybe, one candidate for the U.S. House and no
candidates for the U.S. Senate in the rest of the country.
* Carolyn Barta of the Dallas Morning News, who has done a significant amount of reporting on
the Reform party, suggests the Reform party has almost no presence in Texas – where it is
based – but that founder and chief funder, H. Ross Perot, might like Buchanan, personally.
* No Reform party candidate has ever won a single electoral vote. Going from zero to 270 in one
cycle will require acceleration which would make getting shot off the deck of an aircraft carrier
look like a hot air balloon rising gently aloft.
* The Reform party is on the ballot in 20 states. There were, at last count, 50 states plus the
District of Columbia. It will be somewhat difficult for Buchanan to win those 270 electoral votes
unless it qualifies in the other 31 states and DC.
* Pat Choate, the Reform Party candidate for vice president last time, said on MSNBC’s Equal
Time the other night that a prospective presidential nominee has to come to the convention having
used his time, money, organization, and energy to get the party qualified in additional states.
* I said this made the Reform party the B-Y-O-B party – Bring Your Own Ballot.
* Pat told me off the air that the new party chairman (who was elected in July) will not take office
until January so he will be prevented from changing the way the party’s nominee is selected.
[Choate and I are engaging in a colloquy on Buchanan at the National Review web site
http://www.nationalreview.com]
* The Reform party, paradoxically, is using its own rules to prevent any reform within the Reform
party.
* Even with the Reform party stacking the deck there is no guarantee that Buchanan would get its
nomination. Jesse Ventura (whose candidate for chairman won that election) has been somewhat
less than enthusiastic toward a Buchanan candidacy.
* If Perot takes his checkbook and goes home because he doesn’t like the way things are being
done it will leave the Reform party in something of a cash crunch until the Federal funds show up
next August. So Perot gets a say, too.
* Yesterday’s Pew poll showed Bush leading Gore by 16 points with two candidates, and by 15
points with Buchanan in the race. The Gore people can finally see a strategy to win this thing:
Have an election with 18 candidates in the race.
* In order to gain support Buchanan will have to intensify his positions on America-first items like
foreign policy and trade, and will have to make his pro-life position a cornerstone of his campaign.
His largest base of support, should he run under the Reform banner, might well turn out to be the
Ethnic-Labor-Liberal wing of the Democratic party.
* Now, wouldn’t THAT be ironic?
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