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This story line has a promising subplot, too. Dr. Fulani, as she prefers to be called, is a psychologist and one of the foremost practitioners of a controversial discipline known as "social therapy." Pat Buchanan, with his blustering manner and tendency toward bigoted wisecracks, is clearly deeply in need of counseling.

Joe Conason Joe Conason's column appears in Salon News every other Tuesday. + Biography + Archives

Every week, the show could open in Lenora's office, with Pat stretched out on the couch, muttering about his uptight boyhood and his nostalgia for Joe McCarthy and General Franco. Working through his hang-ups about gays, Jews, immigrants and other minorities is truly liberating for him, while his black female therapist strips away his benighted prejudices to reveal the core of humanity within him. It's sort of a '90s update of "All in the Family." Beautiful!

Yeah, the "Lenora and Pat Show" has just the right combination of humor and pathos to make wonderful American entertainment. Best of all, it's pure fantasy.

The truth about Fulani and her faction within the Reform Party is actually far more interesting than the version served up by the national media last week. The sharp-tongued therapist and her sheeplike followers have come a long way from their weird origins on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but some things haven't changed. They are as opportunistic and unprincipled as ever, and they have no real connection with "the left."

However disorganized, disunited and difficult-to-define the American left may be, virtually all of its constituencies have had at least one thing in common during the past two decades: an unfortunate encounter with the Fulani faction, which has traveled under a variety of names and disguises since it first appeared in New York during the 1970s.

Liberal and left-wing Democratic clubs, gay rights groups, black community organizations and many others have been infiltrated, disrupted and denounced by the "social therapists," who have then moved on to their next project.

Before Fulani's outfit merged themselves into the Reform Party several years ago, they were known as the New Alliance Party, but their murky origins stretch all the way back to the early '70s. That was when a philosophy teacher at City College named Fred Newman, who at age 64 is still believed to control the group, began to formulate his own theory of politically-tinged psychotherapy.

Among his small group of acolytes, Newman developed a guru status that apparently permitted him to build what is now a substantial network of therapy centers and related cultural and political institutions. Therapy patients were encouraged, and some say coerced, into giving time and money to whatever political formation Newman and his fellow "therapists" were operating at the time.

Lenora Fulani joined up in the late '70s and was soon elevated to a leadership position. Given the quasi-Marxist and feminist pretensions of Newman and his colleagues, a black female like Fulani provided the perfect public face. But the secret inner leadership of the organization remained wholly under Newman's control, with many of its members taking their mandated "therapy" directly from him. Because they have changed their organizational moniker so many times, those who follow their antics refer to them as "the Newmanites."

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