THE BATTLE of Seattle prefigures another battle, now less than 11 months away. It’s the Battle for Seattle, the contest over who will be the ultimate beneficiary of those protests at the ballot box.

These implications were not lost on the two presidential candidates who were in Seattle — the Reform Party’s Pat Buchanan and the Green Party’s Ralph Nader — acid critics of the World Trade Organization and the controversial trade pacts that have accompanied unbridled globalization. Both Buchanan and Nader have been in the forefront of the anti- NAFTA, anti-fast track, anti-WTO movements — a testament to the extent these issues galvanize left, right and center.

Buchanan’s and Nader’s election day fortunes could turn on how well they tap into the new left/center/right populism — requiring that each goes beyond their respective ideological political borders.

Buchanan began that journey with a bang. He abandoned the Republican Party — his political home for 30 years — to enter the tendentious world of Reform Party politics. Reform is the electoral vortex of the new vertical paradigm — the bottom versus top (as opposed to the left versus center versus right) arrangement. The Reform Party is an amalgam of conservatives, libertarians, socialists and “goo-goos” who have carved out a simple but compelling message that crosses ideological, socioeconomic and geographic lines: structural reform of America’s political process to give citizens the democratic power to rein in the transnational corporate and big labor special interests. When Buchanan sought and received the endorsement of left Reform leader Lenora Fulani, their right/left alliance triggered a media melee over the impossibility of such a coalition.

Perhaps Seattle — where tree huggers and Teamsters found themselves on the same side of the police barricades — will make our fourth estate think a little harder about what is and isn’t possible.

Buchanan, for all his dreams of restoring social conservatism to its once and future (he hopes) glory — has made some pretty radical moves. By contrast Nader, his radical counterpart in the Greens, is playing a pretty conservative game.

Nader’s reluctance to formally announce and to commit to running a large-scale candidacy has some Greens and Green sympathizers worried. As Micah Sifrey reports in the Nation magazine, they want Nader to “launch one more institution of countervailing citizen power, the Green Party, into permanent orbit” and “to get at least 5 percent of the vote,” the threshold to become a recognized minor party and receive a proportional share of public funding in the next cycle. Sifrey says they want the same money in 2004 that’s coming to the Reform Party this year.

Some Greens, now engaging the hardball organizational realities of American electoral politics and the long road to crossing over from the margin to the mainstream, are putting the heat on Nader. He is their celebrity candidate, who polled 700,000 votes for them in 1996 — less than 1 percent — on the ballot in 22 states. They hope that a committed Nader will catapult the Green Party to a new level of political relevance.

The tough question for Nader, however, may be more than how much energy he is willing to devote to a run. If his campaign is geared solely to attracting left/liberal/enviro voters, he might top his 1996 totals, particularly if the Greens get him on the ballot in more states. But unless he hears the message of Seattle and crosses the Rubicon to explicitly reach out to the right and the center as well, he and the Greens run the risk of remaining marginal and little more than spoilers for the Democrats. As an alternative to Al Gore, Nader is merely a protest vote. As a nonideological populist alternative to Gore and Bush, he could be part of cracking the two-party monolith.

So far, Nader seems caught up in the droning mantra of left political correctness. He turned down offers to meet with Reform Party leaders interested in recruiting him into their primary process on the grounds of ideological incompatibility. Loyalty to the Greens? Perhaps. But also one of many signals that left leaders are afraid to aggressively partner with the right and center.

Can Nader or Buchanan, the independents, capture the momentum of Seattle on Election Day 2000? The Democrats and the Republicans fervently hope not. The leaders of mainstream environmentalism, economic nationalism and labor will back the usual two-party suspects. But will the rank-and-file of these movements break free of the bureaucrats’ allegiances and go independent? That depends in large measure on how far Reform, the Greens and the new populism go in uniting the “bottom” against the “top.” Anyone for Buchanan/Nader on a Reform/Green fusion ticket in 2000?

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Pat Buchanan has signed his declaration of independence. He did it with an appeal to a new patriotism – fittingly enough, as patriotism and political independence have been linked since the American Revolution. His announcement is big news on the political scene, bad news for both the Republican and Democratic parties, and an opportunity for the Reform Party.

It’s big news because Mr. Buchanan is a consummate insider who has defected to the outsiders – to the Reform Party. It has the potential to shake up the old coalitions of both major parties and peel layers of them away to Reform. It offers Reform a contender who has the capacity to make its issue – busting up the two-party monopoly and democratizing American politics – a centerpiece in campaign 2000.

Some say Buchanan is an opportunist looking to grab on to Reform to save his flagging political fortunes. Certainly, politics is all about seizing opportunities. But singling out the newly independent Buchanan seems a mite – shall we say – opportunistic?

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In his announcement speech, Pat Buchanan pronounced the two-party system a “fraud” and a “snare” – and pledged his investment in an independent antidote – a new political party focused on reforming the broken system rather than relying on the corrupt two parties to police themselves.

PHOTOS OF THE DAY Photos of the day 02/08
Contrast Buchanan with Bill Bradley, who left the United States Senate in 1995 because, as he said, “Politics is broke.” Mr. Bradley then reappears four years later, persisting as a Democrat, but portraying himself as the reformer. Who’s the opportunist here?

For its part, the Reform Party has been criticized for “standing for nothing” and thereby creating a vacuum into which ideologues like Buchanan or egologues like Donald Trump can hop. Yet this ignores the actual history of Reform, which deliberately created itself to be nonideological.

The American people seem to feel it’s actually the Democratic and Republican Parties that don’t stand for anything – other than their own reelection. They’re only interested in winning. They have no principled issues. They only have pollsters who tell them what to believe and when to believe it.

The Reform Party, not just a new party but a new kind of party, believes in one thing very deeply: The right to self-governance. It stands for restructuring a partisan political process that is entirely driven by the Democratic and Republican need to win and has become entirely corrupted along the way. It is precisely because the Democrats and Republicans don’t stand for anything that the Reform Party exists in the first place.

The acid test for Buchanan and any other candidate who ultimately enters the Reform primary process – including Donald Trump, Jesse Ventura, and Ross Perot – is how aggressively they articulate an agenda to deconstruct the power of the two parties. Trade, immigration, foreign policy, and fiscal constraint are all issues of concern to Reformers. But the paramount concern is how the process of policymaking and governance works.

Right now, it’s top-down, elitist, and heavily manipulated by corporate and big labor special interests. Legal restrictions aimed at excluding voters and outside-the-Beltway candidates, combined with a culture of negative campaigning, are promoted and protected by the two major parties. When, and only when, the American people can harness the policymaking process for themselves, will they overcome the special interests.

Political reforms are the key. Same-day voter registration, which brings new and young voters to the polls in record numbers, is needed on a national scale to reverse the frightening decrease in participation.

Treating candidate debates as civic events using inclusionary objective criteria, rather than as partisan events controlled by the major parties, would guarantee that the American people will hear from all candidates and elevate the level of national dialogue. Imposing term limits on elected officials and giving all voters the right to initiative and referenda will clean up the incumbency-protection racket while giving citizens a mechanism for grassroots policymaking.

These are the issues that Pat Buchanan must use to mobilize his peasant army if he is to storm the citadel of two-party power.

*Jacqueline Salit is a New York-based political consultant for independent parties and candidates. She is writing a book on independent politics titled “Reforming America.”

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BY NOW, many people are wondering what Lenora Fulani, the leftist, was doing having lunch with Reform Party hopeful Pat Buchanan, the right-winger. I was there. She was attending the funeral of social conservatism.

Fulani knows about funerals for dead ideologies. She was at the one for the American Left. The Left made its play to take over the Democratic Party with George McGovern in 1972. It didn’t work. When Bill Clinton’s anti-left New Democrats took over the presidency and the party in 1992, the Left finally expired.

Fulani was among the fortunate few to have gotten out. She’d gone independent in the early 1980s, breaking the inviolable laws of black and progressive politics, abandoning a corrupt ideology (also known as political correctness) in favor of trying to build a nonideological coalition of left, center and right. That led her to the reform populism of the ’90s, when she helped found the Reform Party.

That’s how Fulani got to the table with Buchanan. How did Buchanan get there? He was there because the social conservative movement is dead.

Pat Buchanan marks the beginning of his political journey as a leader of social conservatism with the 1964 Goldwater campaign, which forged an ideological coalition that sought to wrest control of the Republican Party from its liberal establishment hierarchs. Buchanan became one of conservatism’s most powerful crusaders.

The movement reached its zenith with the Reagan Revolution in 1980, but even as it occupied the White House, it found itself straining to enact its social policy agenda. Buchanan and his coalition partners discovered that while they might have permeated Republican Party activism with Christian evangelicals and conservatives, the majority of the American people did not subscribe to their vision.

The Republican Party, always attentive to its far right, incorporated a pro-life plank into its platform, but knew that the Moral Majority was in reality a permanent minority in American politics. They also knew the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress had as much or more to do with its co-opting Ross Perot’s movement’s demands for government and fiscal reform than with any surge toward social conservatism. Buchanan was denied a speaking slot at the 1996 Republican National Convention.

Going into the 2000 presidential race, Buchanan finally hit the wall. By his own account, the coronation of George W. Bush became complete when he was shut out from the party’s centers of power. The only conservatism promoted by the party would be the “compassionate” kind.

Buchanan saw that his future inside the Republican Party, which he had spent 35 years trying to take over, was grim. The conservative movement was split and near dead. And so the disaffected Buchanan began to look to the Reform Party, its $13 million and its national infrastructure, the largest of any independent party.

For Buchanan, Reform may be the key to continuing viability. America needs a party for social conservatives, he tells reporters. But America will not support a new party for social conservatism any more than it supported the old one. Major parties absorb and act upon issues that minor parties do not have the strength to win. But minor parties do not grow off of adopting programs that have failed to generate a national consensus. Still, Buchanan, the social conservative, is no stranger to multi-ideological coalitions. The anti-NAFTA, anti-fast track, pro- term limits movements which he has supported include political forces from across the spectrum. But the right/center/left alliance inside Reform is not just about issues in common. It is about a new vision for American politics, a vision of full participation and of deliberative democratic process. It is, among other things, a product of the failure of both the American Left and the American Right to create that kind of political culture.

Some argue that the next step is to create a centrist party, a kind of political Frankenstein in which choice pieces of dead ideologies are grafted together. But such a political beast cannot live for long. The future for Reform lies in creating a new kind of party that goes beyond left and right ideology to a new form of political life. That’s the “right to life” Buchanan can now be fighting for.

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The second-most asked political question of the past month, next to “Did you ever use cocaine, Governor Bush?” was this one: “How can Pat Buchanan and Warren Beatty both be interested in becoming the Reform Party candidate for president?”

Some presume the answer will tell us something (negative) about the Reform Party such as, “it doesn’t stand for anything, so its presidential candidate can come from anywhere on the ideological spectrum.” However ill-informed this presumption might be, it’s worth pursuing the flipside of the question.

If Mr. Buchanan – perhaps the paradigmatic spokesman for social conservatism and the American Right – and Mr. Beatty – an equally paradigmatic representative of 1960s liberalism and the American Left – both “go Reform,” what does that say about the Republican and Democratic parties? (Not to mention what it says about the liberal/conservative paradigm.)

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Buchanan is interested in the Reform Party for some obvious reasons. The Republicans are careening toward the political center, hoping that George W. will do for them what William J. did for the Democrats – namely, recast and reposition them at the center, with the extremists standing quietly in the background, as Jesse Jackson did for Mr. Clinton. But unlike Mr. Jackson, Buchanan doesn’t see himself as window dressing for compassionate conservatism. Thus, the Reform Party seems like a good exit strategy.

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But the Reform Party, contrary to the pundits’ notion that it stands for nothing, has embraced the quite specific philosophy of non-ideological political reform. The Reformers, diverse as they are, believe that if the process is rotten, the policy is going to stink. So reform of the political process is the threshold issue that must be tackled to clean up special-interest control of policymaking. Easing restrictions on voter registration and ballot access; enacting term limits, campaign finance and debate reform; and introducing legislative reforms like initiative and referendum and unicameral state governments are fundamentals of Reform’s program to level the playing field and recreate American democracy in a populist, non-ideological mode.

Thus, Buchanan faces an interesting hurdle. He might make a move to Reform wanting to carry his social conservatism with him (kind of like a portable 401K) but the Reform Party not only doesn’t subscribe to social conservative ideology, it rejects ideology altogether. Buchanan may leave the GOP for one reason. But if he goes Reform, it will have to be for another.

This naturally brings us to Beatty. In his 1967 movie, “Bonnie and Clyde,” Beatty (playing bank robber Clyde Barrow) stages a hold-up to impress Faye Dunaway (Bonnie). After the getaway, he takes her out for a hamburger and, as they leave the luncheonette, Beatty jumps into a car that is a fancier, shinier model than his own.

“Hey, that ain’t ours!” Bonnie exclaims.

“Sure it is,” he replies.

Bonnie is confused. “But we came in this one,” she says.

Clyde responds, “That don’t mean we have to go home in it.”

If Beatty proceeds with a campaign for the Reform nomination, he may want to take Clyde’s advice. He comes into the presidential race with a lot of Left ideological baggage. He acknowledges he’s a “bleeding heart celebrity.” And he, too, has castigated his party – the Democratic Party – for abandoning its ideology. He may decide to seek the Reform nomination because of that.

But, as Clyde told Bonnie, beginning a journey in one car doesn’t mean having to continue in that same car. If Beatty tries to ride in the same car, he’ll certainly be shot down by the Reform Party, which has no truck with his, or anyone’s, ideology.

Ironically, Beatty and Buchanan will have to abandon their polar-opposite ideological agendas and seek out roughly the same ground – political reform – if they’re to be competitive for the Reform nomination. Some call this “backburnering,” meaning sacrificing particular issues for the purpose of getting the Reform nomination.

Obviously, Beatty and Buchanan each hold to deeply felt personal beliefs – as do most Americans. Presumably, they’ll continue to do so. But for the Reform Party the concern is not so much “back-burnering” social issues (that goes without saying), as frontburnering the urgent need for political and electoral reform.

If Beatty or Buchanan or both choose to compete (and be competitive) for the Reform nomination, it will have to be on these terms. That turn of events would make the statement that traditional Right ideology and traditional Left ideology (and the mirror-image movements they fueled), have failed to position the country for progress. That’s a wholly different message for a presidential campaign.

But with $13 million (the federal campaign funding the party qualifies for because of Ross Perot’s showing in the 1996 presidential race) for next year’s election and a candidate as notorious as either Buchanan or Beatty, the Reform Party could deliver enough of a political culture-shock to undercut the ideologically driven divisiveness and opportunism that has so corrupted our democracy.

*Jacqueline Salit is a New York-based political consultant for independent parties and candidates, based in New York. She is writing a book on the Reform Party.

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THERE’S A NEW money-in-politics story in town. It’s the one about the Reform Party having $13 million for its nominee in the 2000 presidential race.

Commentators have been reporting on this small but noticeable political pot o’ gold, spinning various scenarios about who might want it, who might get it, how it’s gotten and what its impact will be. But how did it get there in the first place?

Here’s a little-known fact. Independents have been breaking ground on accessing public financing for 20 years. But now, Reform’s $13 million has upped the ante.

In 1980, former Rep. John Anderson of Illinois ran for the presidency as an independent. Garnering close to 6 million votes, or 6.6 percent of the vote, in the primaries, he topped the 5 percent threshold required to receive public funds in the subsequent general election.

However, Anderson chose not to run again. Instead, he asked the Federal Election Commission to transfer his $15 million to Democrat Walter Mondale. This was a no-no according to the FEC. Individuals or parties who get 5 percent or more get the money. Anderson, who had no party, was forced to forfeit the cash.

In 1984, the same year Anderson gave up the independent ghost, Sonia Johnson, the presidential candidate of the Citizens Party, became the first independent ever to qualify for federal primary matching funds.

Primary funds, as opposed to general election money, are awarded based on current, not past demonstrations of popular support. Candidates who raise a minimum of $100,000 in 20 states in units of $250 or less can have their funds matched to pay for their primary campaigns. This is the money Gov. George W. Bush isn’t taking this year because it subjects the recipient to spending limits.

Johnson met the threshold, and received $193,000. Nobody really noticed because the amount was so small, but the precedent was monumental. The FEC voted to liken the petitioning process independent candidates undergo to the primaries of the major parties. In other words, collecting signatures on independent petitions was equivalent to collecting votes in a Democratic or Republican primary. Thus, Johnson was eligible. And so, presumably, the candidates soon to be competing for the Reform Party nomination would be, too.

The second independent to qualify for primary funds, Lenora B. Fulani, a third- party presidential contender who was the first African American and first woman in U.S. history to access the presidential ballot in all 50 states, qualified for close to $1 million in 1988 and $2 million in 1992.

Much has been made of Bush’s 75,000 primary election contributors, but in 1992, Fulani had more than 90,000 contributors, making her presidential primary campaign the largest grassroots funded one in history. Her average contribution was under $25, while Bush’s average contribution is just short of $500.

In 1992, Ross Perot spent $66 million of his own money, forfeiting the opportunity established by the Johnson precedent to qualify for primary matching funds, and polled close to 20 percent of the vote. This meant that Perot would be entitled to $30 million for the general election if he ran again.

In 1996, Perot did run again and accepted the $30 million. But he took an additional step — he ran as the candidate of a political party — the Reform Party. He passed the 5 percent threshold, with 8 percent of the vote, and Perot’s supporters filed with the FEC to create a national minor party. Consequently, the money is no longer pegged to Perot but to the Reform Party.

In 2000, the party’s presidential candidate will be eligible to receive close to $13 million for the general election campaign, and the party will get an additional $3 million for its convention. To give you a sense of the scale between major and minor, the Democrats and Republicans each get $12.3 million for their conventions (the televised broadcast is thrown in by the networks) and $66 million each for their campaigns.

But whatever the inequities, $13 million now awaits the Reform Party nominee. And a whole bunch of people are looking at it. These include Pat Buchanan, New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith, New Age independent John Hagelin and former Connecticut Gov. Lowell Weicker, considered by many to be the most serious contender. Perot hasn’t ruled himself out of the presidential race in 2000. If he became the Reform Party nominee, he might decide to fund his campaign personally and forgo the $13 million.

But if you’re Buchanan or Weicker, how do you get the money? You get it by winning the Reform Party nomination. How do you get that? Well, you don’t get it at the Reform Party convention, as has been reported by such venerable media as the New York Times. The Reform Party doesn’t give its nomination during the convention.

It gives it via a direct popular vote conducted by mail ballot, telephone and computer. All Reform Party members and any eligible voter who signs a Reform petition or requests inclusion are eligible to vote. In 1996, in the Ross Perot-Dick Lamm contest, just under 50,000 Reformers cast ballots. In other words, you have to create a base of support in the Reform Party, on a wide-open playing field, in order to win. That means appealing to the party’s raison d’etre — sweeping political reform.

What’s the upshot? Well, $13 million is not $60 million. It won’t get you into the White House. But most Reform Party activists do not believe that 2000 offers them the opportunity to win the presidency. Rather, it’s an opportunity to secure the 5 percent sans Perot, perhaps to go as high as 10 or 15 percent, and use the presence of a well-known figure, like a Weicker or a Buchanan, to expand the base and infrastructure of the party and turn it into an independent populist electoral bloc.

With more than a third of Americans now identifying themselves as independents and a good amount of money available for a “party building” presidential campaign, 2000 may not just show us the money. It may show us the movement, too.

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According to Robert Borosage, the co-director of Campaign for America’s Future and an adviser to Jackson, the left should now take advantage of the weakened state of the Republicans by emulating the conservatives’ 1976 strategy that propelled Ronald Reagan and the party’s right wing into the White House four years later. Borosage wants a Reagan redux but with a Rainbow hue.

It was, says Borosage, the key to the right’s eclipse of the Republican agenda, Reagan’s presidential victory and the Republican majority in the Senate in 1980. Borosage asks: “Are today’s progressives prepared to take a similar risk in 2000?” Apparently not, now that Jackson and Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) have decided not to run. But even the premise of the strategy is flawed. The right’s post-1976 success involved, among other things, the mobilization of an independent base into the Republican Party. Some key architects of the conservative movement (Richard Viguerie, Kevin Phillips, Joseph Coors), according to accounts by historian James MacGregor Burns, initially counseled Reagan to run as an independent because the Republican Party could not be a viable home for social conservatives.

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Every day another headline sprawls across the front pages of newspapers, reporting the latest fund-raising allegation about the Clinton administration. The Chinese government sought policy influence through campaign contributions. Donors were enticed with a night in the Lincoln bedroom. Political contributions were trafficked through the White House. Americans are outraged. But, ironically, the sensational revelations of campaign finance transgressions have a kind of numbing effect on the public.

There’s something numbing, after all, about the fact that the public figure most associated with these grievous campaign finance violations – President Clinton – is also the country’s most vocal advocate for campaign finance reform. Mr. Clinton is the master of this most postmodern characteristic of politics. The man who faced career-threatening allegations of womanizing is today the champion of family values. The man who “feels the pain” of the poor signed the punitive welfare bill.

Obvious hypocrisy at the top
Many have pointed out Clinton’s obvious hypocrisy. But, with respect to the campaign finance debacle, the hypocrisy of particular politicians is the least of the problem. Far more significant is the fact that the guilty parties (pun intended) are the ones writing new rules to reform the system. Is it any wonder that the American people feel simultaneously outraged and powerless? In a word, they feel numb.
Politicians of both major parties are well aware of the “insider trading” advantage they have. One example of how they intend to hold on to it is McCain-Feingold – short for the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1997, strongly endorsed by Clinton in his State of the Union address.

McCain-Feingold has been criticized from across the political spectrum. The American Civil Liberties Union recently analyzed the bill as an effort “to insure that privileged candidates will always be able to counteract the messages of disfavored candidates and their supporters.” What are the inequities between privileged and disfavored candidates? Some of the most glaring and least reported have to do with the discriminatory categories McCain-Feingold sets up between major and minor, or independent, party candidates.

Democrats and Republicans running for the United States Senate, for example, receive free broadcast time in exchange for agreeing to certain spending limits. But independent candidates in the same race must collect signatures from 5 percent of the state’s voters in order to access a significantly smaller proportion of that air time. In Ohio that means 350,000 signatures; in California, 750,000. All of which would have to be processed by the state, at the cost of roughly $1 per signature.

If you’re the candidate of a minor party, defined by McCain-Feingold as one that got between 5 percent and 25 percent of the vote for US Senate in the last cycle, you don’t have to collect signatures to qualify for free broadcast time. But you get only a small portion – about 3 minutes out of 60. The rest gets split between major party candidates.

The bill is simply a reintroduction of an earlier version that predated all of the current scandals. The authors may have failed to note that, since 1990, one of the major-party candidates for United States Senate slipped to below 25 percent in Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, presumably putting that party into the “minor party” realm. As soon as Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona and Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin and their respective parties discover this, we can rest assured that this provision will be reworked.

Ultimately, the focus of McCain-Feingold is to limit campaign spending (in ways that favor incumbents) as a remedy for political corruption. The problem with the campaign system is not that there is too much money in it but that there is such a fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of it.

The government, which is controlled by the two parties, runs the election process and runs it in a manner that virtually guarantees incumbent reelection. The winners in any given election cycle get to run the government. Consequently, the two parties compete in elections according to rules and under the supervision of a government that they control.

Structural incest

Until you intervene in that structural incest, up to and including the possibility of creating impartial non-governmental bodies to run elections, there will be no real reform.

Term limits, leveling the election playing field for third parties, the full legalization of initiatives and referendums, and various other structural reforms – these are anathema to major party politicians. So is the growing call to depoliticize the Federal Election Commission, which is currently composed of partisan appointees. So are the efforts to create national and state-based independent parties from the Reform Party to the Green Party to the New Party and others.

These reform-oriented political parties not only advocate structural reform, they are a structural reform. The more they and the populist movement for democratic restructuring break in on the closed partnership between government and the two parties, the less futile efforts at genuine reform will be and the less numb the body politic will feel.

* Jacqueline Salit, editor of Patriot News, is an activist in the Reform Party. Since 1979 she has worked as a political consultant on dozens of local and national independent political campaigns.

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