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Reform's raison d'être
Reform Party activists prepare for what could be a showdown between the forces of Ross Perot and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.
By Sarah Keech
[07/23/99]

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But when it was all over, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura's backers won a big victory when their candidate, Jack Gargan, defeated Patricia Benjamin of founder H. Ross Perot's wing of the party, in the race for party chair.

However significant the political battles, the most striking feature of the convention was its assortment of odd characters. Men who looked like potential assassins mixed with harmless outcasts with too much time on their hands; right-wingers and left-wingers came together, sharing suspicions about corporations and the political establishment; and eager activists dead serious about the need to challenge the Democrats and Republicans vied with personality cultists. Everyone paid his or her (or its) own way to participate in a scrappy three-day political convention just outside Detroit that sometimes resembled more of a high school week-in-Washington trip or a national gathering of "Star Trek" fans.

"Lousy communists! They killed Onassis' son and now they killed Kennedy's son!" steamed Reform Party member John Savas, an engineering consultant, reflecting some of the black-chopper and New World Order sentiment that could sometimes be heard among the 305 delegates and 150 or so observers on the convention floor.

The stakes were higher than the party's daffiness might suggest, however. Whomever the Reform Party nominates to run for president will receive $12.6 million in federal funding. Pat Choate, the party's vice-presidential candidate in 1996, estimates that the Reform Party ticket in 2000 will have a total of $30 million-$50 million at its disposal and should be on the ballot in every state.

"We are now a three-party system," Choate told Salon News. Choate says the Reform Party's positions on government reform issues -- term limits, campaign finance reform and protectionist trade measures -- stand as a clear contrast with the status quoism of the major parties' likely nominees, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush. "Then it's just a question of framing the debate as our candidate versus the other two," Choate explained.

Choate added that the virtual coronations of Gore and Bush are in themselves indicative of the bastardization of the Bill of Rights that is American politics at the end of the 20th century, and will drive even more voters into the Reform Party circus tent.

The weekend had been billed as a showdown between the party's two megalomaniac stars, Perot and Ventura. Ventura and his lieutenant governor, Mae Schunk, are the only Reform Party members to hold statewide elected office, and they got elected without any assistance from Perot and his Dallas cohorts.

Next page | Perot's waning popularity