The delegates seemed to be willfully ignoring political reality. Just a day after Ventura announced his disaffiliation from the national Reform Party, not a word was spoken from the meeting floor about the party’s loss of its most charismatic — and only successful — candidate for high elected office.

Nor did the assembled delegates devote any time to exploring the party’s underlying problems — its loss of ballot status in about a dozen states since 1996; the difficulties most state chapters have had in holding onto registered members, attracting strong candidates and building any kind of institutional base; and the negative image of party founder Perot. These issues, after all, were behind Gargan’s upset election at the party’s last national convention, in Dearborn, Mich., in July 1999, which signaled a clear break with the Verney-Perot regime.

Instead, the majority of national committee members who came to Nashville Saturday spent most of the day helping the old guard ram through its victory, though it was clear from the first hour which way things would go. After Gargan started the morning by refusing to gavel the meeting to order, insisting that it was improperly called, a well-orchestrated protest from the floor blew him away. Gargan had tried to keep his cool against the rising clamor of voices calling for his scalp, but finally his anguish broke through.

“This is the same group of people who, after six weeks of my being in office, haven’t turned the records of the party over to me. Since the day I was elected chair, I have been the target of unceasing harassment. But I will keep taking it on behalf of the grass roots of the party.” A few Gargan stalwarts stood to cheer as he shouted, “We will not have mob rule in this party.”

But mob rule is what it was, complete with pushing, shouting and the threat of police action. While a number of delegates held out hope that some kind of compromise might be brokered, the old guard was committed to tossing Gargan out.

A telling moment came midday, when the body got bogged down in a confusing debate over precisely how to define the two-thirds vote needed to recall a party officer. Wanting to keep the threshold as low as possible, Verney held the floor mike and, like a good machine boss, whipped his troops into line. “If I want to overturn the chair’s ruling and keep the vote to two-thirds of the delegates present, then I should vote ‘no,’ is that correct?” he repeatedly asked the parliamentarian running the meeting. Everyone knew exactly what he was doing.

When the time came for the final vote on Gargan’s fate, the crowd grew uncharacteristically still. But the outcome was anticlimactic: a whopping 109-31 for Gargan’s removal, with one abstention. And the mood of the moment was cold-blooded and harsh. David Goldman, chairman of the Florida Reform Party, had tried to put forward a compromise resolution that would have made Gargan the honorary chair of the party, while stripping him of real power, and called for balancing roles for each faction of the party in the distribution of the other top offices. But as the anti-Gargan juggernaut rolled on, he barely got a hearing. “I feel like a peacenik at a Veterans of Foreign Wars event,” he told this reporter.

Afterwards, Verney serenely prowled the meeting-room floor, looking like the cat that ate the canary. “It’s a very healthy day for the party,” he said, denying that Reform had just given itself another black eye. Verney — who these days draws a paycheck as Ross Perot’s public-policy advisor — turned down a nomination to stand for election to replace Gargan.

Lenora Fulani, whose strange-bedfellow alliance with Patrick Buchanan still makes heads spin, was less sanguine. “In my opinion, the entire leadership we elected last year in Dearborn has failed in their mandate to share power,” she said, arguing that they all should be replaced. “Right now, Americans everywhere are demonstrating that they want political reform, and the fastest-rising group are the independents. Instead of focusing on capturing that, we’ve been involved in a top-down struggle over control of the party.”

In retrospect, it’s clear that Gargan’s election last summer was never really the deep-cleansing action that he and others portrayed it as. Real day-to-day control of the party remained with an 11-member executive committee, and the old guard held a reliable majority of votes on most important issues. At the same time, Gargan probably overplayed a weak hand by speaking with unusual candor to the media about the party’s problems; this may have given some voters hope that Reform was reforming itself, but likely inflamed the potent and ultimately lethal backlash against him among the party regulars.

As the day wound down, some delegates made clear that they had had enough, and were going back to their state parties to urge that they disaffiliate from Reform and link up with Ventura’s fledgling Independence drive. Many pinned their hopes on Donald Trump, who, they excitedly told each other, was supposedly spending the weekend deciding whether to join Ventura and run for president under a new Independence banner. “There are Reform groups in 22 states that could announce their support for Trump if he runs,” said Mary Clare Wohlford, a leader of the Gargan outcast forces. She listed state parties or factions in Iowa, Mississippi, New Jersey, Virginia and Wisconsin as likely to join up if that happened, and pointed to possible followers in California, Indiana, Maryland and New Hampshire.

To those in the press who have built up many frequent flyer miles following the Donald around as he milks this crazy moment for all it’s worth, this just seemed like more pie-in-the-sky. Said one reporter who’s been tracking him closely: “This is just him stretching it out some more. He’s selling his hotels and casinos.”

The election of Choate as new chair was a fitting end to a day when all the cards seemed to fall Perot’s way. After all, we’ve seen this story before.

It happened in 1992, when Perot’s “brown shirts” took over the grass-roots petition drives for his first candidacy (pushing people like Jack Gargan aside in the process). It happened from 1993-95, when Perot’s hired hands oversaw his United We Stand America movement, which started with nearly 2 million dues-paying members but was quickly driven into the ground. It happened with the Reform Party’s first presidential primary in 1996, in which Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm was stomped on by the Verney-Perot campaign team. It happened in Nashville in 1997, when one large clump of Reform organizers splintered off in protest over the new party’s lack of internal democracy. And it happened again this weekend.

In every case, political activists struggling to build a new, independent political force have collided with the interests of the man in Dallas. “It’s hard to argue with $2 billion,” said one of the party’s newly minted outcasts.

Choate, who immediately upon his election announced his resignation from the Buchanan campaign, finished the day with a rousing speech, promising the assembled group that “Because of us, this year there will be a real debate over trade, over globalism, over illegal immigration, over our foreign entanglements and over real political reform.” (Maybe his resignation from the Buchanan campaign doesn’t take effect until the post office can deliver the letter next week.) Of course, the crowd gave him a series of rousing ovations. The fact that Buchanan’s latest foray into the news mix involved his outspoken support for Austria’s far-right leader Joerg Haider didn’t seem to faze them.

For a brief, imperfect period in late 1998 through perhaps the fall of 1999, it seemed possible that the Reform Party movement was poised for rejuvenation. That moment is over. The Reformers under Choate and their inevitable nominee, Pat Buchanan, will not be able to bottle the lightning that struck first for Perot in 1992 and again for Ventura in 1998. When it strikes again — and it will — it will light someone else’s fire.

Who could disagree? It’s been apparent from day one that the party apparatus brought into existence by Ross Perot’s 1996 run for the presidency was uncomfortable with the prospect of sharing the stage with Ventura or handing the baton to the new generation of leadership that he represents. And ever since Jack Gargan, Ventura’s candidate, was elected the party’s new national chairman last summer, there have been increasingly bitter fights between the factions.

One major focus of the battle has been over the transfer of power between Russ Verney — the Perot aide who was Reform’s founding chairman — and Gargan.

Indeed, at the same time as Ventura’s announcement, the party’s new national treasurer, Ronn Young, was filing suit against the outgoing leadership for failing to turn over the assets of the party, including its books, records, voter lists, press lists and Web domain, to the new slate of officers, who were either elected with Gargan or appointed by him. “They want to rule or ruin,” Young said of the “Dallas gang,” and “they have been very successful in their attempts to cripple the party.”

Friday, Ventura made it clear that the party was now over — at least for him. He mentioned several factors in his decision. First was his distaste for the party’s likely presidential nominee, Pat Buchanan. “I can’t stay in a party that will have Pat Buchanan as its nominee and is getting David Duke’s support.”

Then there was the effect that the national party’s turmoil was having on Ventura’s efforts to build the Minnesota Reform Party: “Seeing qualified people avoiding our party, like [moderate Democrat] Tim Penny, didn’t help.”

And finally, Ventura said, it was “seeing that Jack Gargan wasn’t getting his due” when he took over the party reins on Jan. 1 that propelled the governor to walk away.

“I’m an Angus King independent now,” Ventura declared, aligning himself with Maine’s governor, who belongs to no party.

But no one should conclude that this means Ventura’s own third-party project is over. For starters, it is likely that the Minnesota Reform Party will follow him in disaffiliating from the national party and changing its name back to the Independence Party — a question that will be formally taken up by the state party’s central committee this weekend.

And Ventura’s top aides left a trail of tantalizing hints about what else might be coming. No, not a Ventura presidential run — at least not this year. Minnesota Reform Party chair Rick McCluhan wouldn’t say if other state branches of the national party were ready to bolt too, but claimed to be fielding calls from leaders and activists in many other states.

Phil Madsen, the party’s webmaster, argued that the old top-down vs. bottom-up dynamic of the Perot movement had been discarded. “There’s an opening now for people in other states — not for us to do the work for them, but for them to emulate what we’ve done here in building a viable third party and then come and affiliate with us.” He envisioned the steady growth of centrist parties modeled on Minnesota, “now that we’ve taken out the garbage.”

But both Dean Barkley and Doug Friedline, the two men who ran Ventura’s successful 1998 campaign, left the door open to yet one other possibility: a fresh face running as an independent for president this year, with Ventura’s backing. Barkley argued that Ventura’s decision had enhanced his options in deciding whom he might endorse in 2000, saying “Now he has the choice of waiting to see who wins the nomination of each major party — or if an independent surfaces.”

And Friedline went further, insisting that the Minnesota party’s effort to find a centrist independent — something that they had wanted in part to stop Buchanan from getting the Reform nomination — was not dead. “There are discussions still going on behind the scenes, phone calls from people all over the country, people with real resources too.” Was this the harbinger of a Donald Trump announcement as the candidate of some new Independence Party? “Personally, I expect him to announce next Tuesday that he’s not running,” Friedline answered. “A lot also depends on what happens with McCain, and to a lesser degree, with Bradley by March 7,” he added.

One thing is clear from Friday’s news: Pat Buchanan now has a clear path to the Reform Party nomination. But with ongoing squabbles and lawsuits clouding the party’s future and the popular Ventura on the outside, pissing in, it’s doubtful whether that nomination will be worth very much.

Though the ARP is smaller than the Reform Party, with chapters in perhaps 20 states and ballot lines in none, it is a serious organization that primarily focuses on the issues rather than personalities.

Its platform, which has been developed through a process of ongoing deliberation, takes clear, specific stands on such topics as tax reform (move toward a graduated flat tax or a consumption tax), government spending (pay down the debt), immigration (tighten restrictions), political reform (term limits and public financing of elections) and trade (protection of labor rights and the environment).

And though its members are not currently part of the Reform Party, the two groups may reunite in the near future, making the ARP potentially a significant base for the more moderate voices in the whole Reform movement.

No doubt it was a desire to be seen as reaching out to these moderates (and to create some interference for Lowell Weicker, who had already agreed to keynote) that led Donald Trump to call the ARP’s convention planners the day before the meeting began and ask to be added to the agenda, via a live telephone hookup that he offered to pay for.

But while the phone connection was clear, and the hundred or so assembled ARP leaders were clearly pleased at the attention and the chance to grill a prospective candidate, the Donald couldn’t have played a worse hand.

“I am seriously looking at the Reform Party and the nomination,” Trump began. “A lot of people are saying that maybe Donald Trump is just promoting a book, but that is not why I am involved.”

“I am very comfortable with the Reform Party platform,” he declared. And then he started to grab both feet and insert them into his mouth, one at a time.

“I’m strongly in favor of a very deep tax cut for the working people of America.” People in the room started shaking their heads in bewilderment. If there is one thing all the various Reformers agree on, it is that paying down the national debt has to come before everything else, including tax cuts.

“Campaign finance needs an overhaul,” Trump went on. Charles Riggs, an ARP activist who has led the party’s thinking on political reform measures, asked for details. Does Trump support the McCain-Feingold bill banning soft money, or stronger measures being passed in the states creating full public financing systems? “I believe you should be able to help a candidate as much as possible,” Trump answered, after bragging that he may well be the country’s single biggest contributor to campaigns if you include the hundreds of thousands he’s given to state and municipal candidates.

How would Trump reduce corporate welfare? Nelisse Muga of San Diego asked. “I am a believer in corporations,” Trump answered. Someone murmured, “He is a corporation.” “Corporate welfare is a word I hate,” Trump continued. “I don’t think it’s a big factor.” (It didn’t help Trump that the group had earlier spent an hour listening to consumer advocate Ralph Nader on this very subject.)

How about moving toward a flat tax or a national sales tax? “We have a system that’s working pretty well, and big changes can do big harm,” Trump answered. There were more expressions of dismay from the audience.

What’s wrong with the two-party system, someone else wanted to know. “I don’t think anything is wrong with it,” Trump answered, “though having a viable third party is important.” Why was not clear.

The rest of Trump’s comments were equally vacuous. He promised to fix America’s trade deficit: “I do know something about negotiating.” How would he save Social Security and Medicare? “You have to put some money aside, call it rainy day money.” He refused to give any indication of who he would turn to for foreign policy advice: “We’d get the best people, the top talent.”

The verdict of many of the ARP leaders I spoke to after the teleconference ended was plain. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t know who we are,” said Kathleen Hopkins, the group’s communications director. “He killed himself with us,” said Charles Riggs. Rick Simon, a Reform Party candidate for George Brown’s old seat in Congress, said, “I thought Trump was a lot of bad answers and empty answers. On three of our core issues: reducing the debt, he didn’t care; campaign finance reform, he said he likes buying politicians; and corporate welfare, he said he doesn’t see a problem.”

So what did they think Trump was doing, arranging the teleconference and seeking their attention? “Being Trump,” said Muga.

A clear tip-off to the ARP’s real sympathies came in the special convention issue of its monthly newsletter, which featured a two-and-a-half page reprint of Bruce Shapiro’s article in Salon News touting a possible Weicker candidacy. The day after Trump bombed, Weicker got two standing ovations from the audience, and though the crowd didn’t applaud everything he said, it was clear that they had a solid and realistic sense that he was the best they were going to get.

This is clearly crunch time for the former Connecticut governor. Before he addressed the convention, he spent an hour with the ARP executive committee, reviewing the ballot access laws for all 50 states and weighing his options. In a handful of states, including California, the deadline for declaring any intentions is little more than a month away.

Dean Barkley, Ventura’s campaign chairman, had flown in from Minnesota to try to move Weicker closer to getting in the race. After meeting with him in private, Barkley told me, “It was definitely worthwhile for me to be here,” implying that Weicker was getting closer to a run. Tom D’Amore, Weicker’s longtime lieutenant, seemed to concur. “You could call that speech he just gave a trial stump speech, even though it wasn’t planned that way,” he told me. “I’ve never seen him this interested.”

Will Weicker give up the chance to relax, make good money, enjoy his seven children and seven grandchildren, all for what would be an uphill, if not quixotic, fight for the nomination of a party that can barely hold itself together? Will he risk his legacy of fighting the good fight — Watergate, health-care research, opposing the religious right, getting jailed to protest apartheid? These are subjects, he told the ARPers, that weigh heavily on his mind.

Still, Weicker laid out a respectable agenda for any national candidate, calling for federal funding to smooth out inequality in educational opportunity, a ban on concealed weapons and automatic firearms, debt reduction before tax cuts, new investments in poor children and in community health care — and specifically rejecting restrictions on choice, efforts to bring prayer into schools and gimmicks like term limits.

Personally, I wonder if there is enough edge to this package to attract the support of disaffected voters. Weicker is not a populist in most senses of the word, and while his commitment to using government to alleviate suffering and promote the general welfare is real, he makes no sweeping calls for change. Maybe, just maybe, his intense commitment to principle and to political independence per se would be enough to break through the political haze. That, plus an endorsement from the country’s only Reform governor?

“This is a very complex puzzle with a lot of moving parts,” says Weicker advisor D’Amore. “It needs some glue, and that’s a candidate.” He’s right. If Weicker decided to jump in, a lot of pieces would fall into place, and the tattered crowd of political independents now searching for an address not marked with a cross would have a home.

The Reform Party race would then become one pitting an organized minority — the Buchanan Brigades and their Perotbot allies — against a far less organized majority — the millions of political independents who are socially liberal. And while Buchanan would start with a big advantage, the election is still so fluid that anything could happen.

Which brings up the only funny political anecdote of the weekend, which came from Jack Gargan, the embattled chairman-elect of the Reform Party, who won the hearts of the press back in July with an acceptance speech that jokingly played on his fondness for pool, motorcycles and “the ladies.”

As the top representative of the party, he said, “Every chance I get to spread the Reform name, I say yes. So when I was invited a few weeks ago to a naturists’ meeting, I said yes, thinking that it had something to do with the environment.

“When I drove up, I saw it was a gated community, which should have told me something. Well, before I had driven in two blocks I knew: I was in a nudist colony!

“I was in a panic. As I parked my car at the meeting hall, right near the side entrance, I could hear the person at the mike already beginning my introduction. Well, I decided, when you’re in Rome, you do as the Romans do. Backstage, I quickly pulled off my clothes, and, in deference to my audience, strode out there as naked as a jaybird.

“Imagine how I felt when I saw that, in deference to me, they were all fully dressed.”

The conventioneers roared with laughter. Unlike Nader, Trump and Weicker, here’s a guy who really knows how to spin a yarn.

Gargan had this crowd in the palm of his hand. Somehow, after rocking everyone back in their chairs with his story he turned serious, and insisted to the audience that he would rebuild the Reform Party on a more democratic, grass-roots foundation come Jan. 1, when his term actually begins. Promising big changes, he called on them to come back home to Reform.

With their clothes on.

Trump told USA Today on Friday that he’ll make his decision sometime in January, after his new book, “The America We Deserve,” is published. Is Trump’s flirtation with Reform more than a way of hyping his book and his businesses? There’s no question that Trump is, as a non-Washington counselor puts it, “seriously engaged” in exploring the presidential race. His political advisers tell us that they’re currently negotiating with three Nevada-based signature-collection firms to see what it would cost to get Trump on the ballot in the 29 states where Reform has no ballot line.

Richard Winger, the country’s leading expert on ballot access, says that the going rate is about $2 per signature for paid petition gatherers, and that it would take around 350,000 valid signatures to get Trump on those state ballots. Figure roughly a million dollars — chump change to Trump, and a bargain for the all the publicity he’d reap from a presidential bid. One of the Donald’s political consultants estimates that he’d have to spend $20 million to get the Reform nomination. That would mean a lavish, Rolls-Royce campaign designed to lure as many as possible of the 6.5 million casino customers in Trump’s database into the Reform party. “We’ve been polling them periodically for years, and they just love him” says a Trump adviser. “We did a huge market survey six months ago. He’s spent 25 years building this persona, and they like it.”

There has been speculation that Trump has so much debt that his creditors wouldn’t let him run. Not so, says the top executive of one of Trump’s companies. “The debt is all held by Trump’s publicly-traded company,” he says. “It’s about $1.8 billion, and it’s all in the form of high-yield bonds held by thousands of people who only care if their dividend checks don’t arrive. This year we had a gross income of over $300 million.” Moreover, Trump’s father Fred, who was worth over $1 billion himself, recently died and Trump’s share of the estate — which has to be whacked up among his three living siblings and the children of a deceased fourth — is probably worth at least $200 million. That, added to Trump’s already considerable personal liquidity, gives him more than enough to run without feeling any pinch.

Contrary to public perception, while Trump may be an electoral neophyte as a candidate he is not green to politics. As a young man, he joined the family real-estate business — a highly politicized enterprise, especially in New York. Trump, in effect, became the company bagman, handing out contributions to politicians in return for favorable treatment for the family’s holdings. He’s been an equal-opportunity influence buyer, building his own empire in part by playing the pols like violins, ladling out the bucks to Democrats like Gov. Mario Cuomo and Mayor Ed Koch when they were in power, then switching with ease to Republicans George Pataki and Rudy Guiliani when they took office.

Like Reform presidential nominee Ross Perot before him, Trump’s entrie into the political arena may be motivated by personal disdain for other candidates. Both Perot and Buchanan are said to have long-standing rifts with the Bush clan. Trump is described by an advisor as having “a warm feeling for and cordial relationship” with George and Barbara Bush. Trump even threw a party at his New York apartment for Jeb Bush’s Florida gubernatorial campaign that netted $100,000. But the same source describes Trump as “not enamored” of either George W. or Al Gore. And Trump positively despises Bill Bradley. In a May Wall Street Journal op-ed piece attacking Dollar Bill, Trump wrote that Bradley’s success in eliminating a tax shelter for real-estate investments known as the “passive loss” in the 1986 Tax Reform Act “sent the real estate markets through the windshield — it was a hard time for developers like me.”

But will all this be enough to make a candidate out of The Donald? An outside-the-Beltway Trump consultant and golf partner says of his friend’s potential candidacy: “If you’re a guy who enjoys the public eye and enjoys the notoriety, why not? Every kid dreams of being president, and Donald is still really a kid. But I’m surprised he’s allowed it to go this far. He will never get into this race as just a spoiler. In golf, let’s say you’re on the green at the last hole and all you need to do is get down in two — tap the first putt to put it in. Donald doesn’t take that approach — he always goes for the win.”

If that’s so, then the odds against Trump’s running are doubly negative. He’d have to first fight Buchanan, who already has a substantial head start organizationally, and then take on the major-party candidates. And does Trump really want to endure nine months of insults from a bare-knuckles brawler like Buchanan? Already the Buchananites are cranking up their one-liners. Says wealthy former Reagan customs commissioner William von Raab: “It’s silly, isn’t it? When I hear his name I think of Taki’s crack, on hearing that he’d named his daughter Tiffany, that he’d probably name a son Rolex.”

Though Friday’s CNN poll shows Reforms favoring Buchanan 2-1 over Trump, the developer seems to be Jesse Ventura’s best hope of stopping Buchanan’s takeover of the Reform Party. Television’s talking lobotomies keep mentioning Warren Beatty as a possible anti-Buchanan horse. But Bill Hillsman, the populist media consultant who crafted Ventura’s winning gubernatorial ads, dismisses the notion. “My meeting with Warren was not at the request of Ventura,” Hillsman says, and underscores that “at no time has Warren, to my knowledge, thought about running as the candidate of the Reform Party” — a statement confirmed by members of Beatty’s unofficial “kitchen cabinet” of political advisors.

Ventura’s man Barkley says, “As we see the world today, the most likely candidates that Ventura would support are Lowell Weicker and Donald Trump.” But in talking up Weicker, the Venturans are clutching at straws. Weicker’s TV interviews since he returned from vacation have been passionless and schizophrenic about the Reform Party. Weicker’s former Connecticut campaign manager and closest political adviser, Tom D’Amore, now says that “if Buchanan wants the Reform nomination, nothing can stop it.”

Weicker is speaking next weekend to the minuscule American Reform Party, a tiny coterie of anti-Perot centrists who split from Reform over Perot’s authoritarian antics, but which has no money at all and is not on the ballot in a single state. While conceding that Ayatollah Pat might get Weicker’s fires burning in opposition, D’Amore wonders: “Is Weicker that interested in the Reform Party and building it? I don’t know.” He adds, “I sure as hell don’t want to have anything to do with the Reform Party if Buchanan is in it.”

For the last week Buchanan has been privately telling people that the only thing holding up the announcement of his Reform candidacy is an advisory opinion from the Federal Election Commission about money. The Buchanan camp says they can have FEC matching funds — for the money Pat has already raised as a Republican — applied to his Reform bid.

The FEC says it has yet to receive a formal written request from Buchanan. It will come after his book tour ends. But based on conversations with agency staffers, the Buchananites appear confident of their legal position. There is always a possibility that Republican members of the highly-politicized commission could screw Buchanan, but a top Buchananite says even that wouldn’t keep Pat from going Reform: “It would simply add to Pat’s aura of martyrdom at the hands of the undemocratic Republican establishment, and give him another way to bash George Bush.”

Buchanan has been taking a terrific beating on TV for his new book, “A Republic, Not an Empire,” and the Bushies have been hoping that this pummeling might drive Buchanan out of the race altogether, or at least weaken his appeal to Reformers. While there is ample evidence of anti-Semitism in Buchanan’s past writings, it is hard to find in this new text. Buchanan is right when he says that TV’s chattering classes — who paint Pat as a “Hitler-lover who opposed World War II” — are somewhat distorting his book. But these darts are unlikely to deter support among most of his heavily Catholic foot soldiers, who will flood the Reform Party and drown its existing core of activists.

The attacks only fuel Buchanan’s legendary stubbornness and make it more certain that he’ll run, not less — if only to preserve his image for future column-and-TV employment. Buchanan himself sent out a rousing e-mail memo to the Brigades on Friday: “Reports are coming in here that giant chain book stores … may be pulling the book from the shelves … call your local book stores … and demand to know if they’re carrying it,” wrote Buchanan, adding “We are taking incoming, but are holding up fine: Ride to the sound of the Guns!”[sic] The controversy has only boosted the book’s sales.

Given how the working- and lumpen-middle classes who are Buchanan’s target constituencies in this race distrust the media, it’s less than evident that the little-screen poundings will have a significant effect on their receptivity to him. Indeed, a new ABC poll of 1,000 voters, taken as the book controversy was dominating the air waves, showed 15 percent of voters would “seriously consider” voting for Buchanan in a three-way race — up four points from the ABC poll five weeks earlier — including 17 percent of Republicans, 16 percent of Democrats and an impressive 24 percent of independents.

A number of pundits who haven’t done their homework keep insisting that Ventura might still run to block the Buchanan takeover. That’s nonsense. Ventura excoriated Republican gubernatorial candidate Norm Coleman in 1998 for seeking the post only a year after being elected mayor of St. Paul; running this time would make Ventura look like a hypocrite and tarnish his iconoclastic image. Any of Ventura’s designs on the White House focus on 2004.

Another media myth is that Ventura’s forces “took over” the Reform Party when Jack Gargan, the candidate for party chair he backed, was elected at the July Reform convention in Dearborn. In fact, the party is basically an empty shell, composed of 50 state parties that are little more than letterheads with no base, apart from a handful of exceptions like Minnesota and New York. “That’s true,” incoming party chair Jack Gargan told us this week, adding that the party’s rules mean “someone with either a lot of money or a big following could stuff the ballot process. We are not well-enough established. They could walk in and take us over, and [prior to January 1st] I can’t do a darn thing about it.”

Perot loyalists still control many of the state parties, and even the New York Times, in a front-page Friday story, has now confirmed what we reported in the Nation three weeks ago: Ross Perot and his Perotbots are supporting Buchanan. So is the close-knit network of activists paraded into the Reform Party by Lenora Fulani, ex-presidential candidate of the cultish racket formerly known as the New Alliance Party, and her puppeteer Fred Newman, the NAPers’ manipulative guru. Add this support to the forthcoming inundation of the party by the Buchanan Brigades, and Buchanan’s emergence as the nominee of the Reform Party seems unstoppable.

Hundreds of those average Minnesotans came to the Capitol Rotunda Monday to witness Ventura’s swearing-in, many of them waiting hours in the subzero cold for a chance to meet the new governor and shake his hand. There was a bus driver from the east side of St. Paul, a 29-year-old single father, who said he was excited about the Reform Party because “we need something new.” There was a middle-aged car dealer in a sweat shirt who voted for Ventura because “he’s real people.” A 17-year-old in a leather jacket with his cap down over his eyes, who said he “used to go to Champlain High School,” where Ventura is a volunteer football coach, shyly admitted that it was pretty unusual for someone like him to come to the state Capitol, but he wanted to be there to help the governor. There were lots of families with young children in tow. People were dressed as if they were going to a hockey game, not an inauguration.

Ventura gave the kind of inaugural speech his crowd loves — unscripted. He made only two promises: to be brutally honest and to do his best. The only specific commitment he made was to increase voter turnout — which topped 60 percent this November, almost double the national average — to hit “no less than 70″ in the next election. The next day, a columnist in the St. Paul Pioneer Press gave the speech a D because it was full of “Jesse Speak and Ventura clichis, Champlain Park football metaphors and tried-and-true sound bites from the election campaign.” He urged the governor to “buy a pencil.” Once again, the media elite was missing the point: Ventura didn’t win by talking about substance; he won because he connected with two groups perennially alienated from American politics: young people and the working class.

A hundred years ago, this wasn’t the case. America had a vibrant political system that regularly drew more than 80 percent of the voters to the polls. Today, money and two-party collusion are invisible barriers that keep the political system closed. The reason it is so rare to see a candidate like Ventura is that most of the time, candidates have to be rich, or kowtow to a lot of wealthy people, in order to finance a viable campaign. Or if a candidate without means works up the ladder by dint of loyalty to one of the major parties, he or she almost invariably owes too much to institutional power brokers to speak or act freely. Talented politicians like Ronald Reagan and President Clinton succeed because they manage to convince voters that they are different (remember “the man from Hope”?), but the public — especially the non-voting majority — is good at sniffing out the phonies, and is disillusioned about the whole process.

Ventura has broken through that disillusionment, and he is stirring hopes that have been long ground down, especially among people who used to be loyal to Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party. The middle-aged shuttle van driver who picked me up at the airport was a typical and enthusiastic Ventura voter. “I don’t know what he’ll do. But he’s going to tell all those Bible-thumpers on the right and the tree-huggers on the left to vote for their own, and he’ll unite all the disaffected voters in the middle in a new party. I’m a lifetime DFL-er, from the ‘L,’ but I’m sick of union heads who negotiate contracts that sell out the workers, and I’ve had it with these professional politicians. We don’t have workers running for office anymore, just people who never worked a real 40-hour week in their lives.”

After the inaugural I headed up to Anoka County, a blue-collar suburb north of Minneapolis that came out in huge numbers for Ventura, to find out why. Everyone I talked to about Anoka — union leaders, progressive organizers, DFL House candidates, campaign managers, Reform Party activists, election registrars — pointed to Ventura’s popularity among blue-collar workers. All the counties where he won a clear majority of the vote, neat little bedroom suburbs that ring the Twin Cities to the north and west, are full of moderate-income families, with a high percentage of union members. By comparison, he fared poorly in the richer, Republican suburbs and in the yuppified sections of the metro area.

I drove up to the county to talk to some locals. Rev. Jerry O’Neill, pastor of a working-class Lutheran church in Anoka, told me over coffee and blueberry cream cheese muffins that he thought Ventura had reached deep into the working class, past the “winners with good jobs” and the “respectables who may not have good jobs but compensate by seeking respect in their community and church,” touching the “survivors who just get by and the hard-living, rootless folks who have completely given up on trying to be successful or live by conventional norms.” O’Neill observed that this was a tough community to minister to — “We in the clergy aspire to a middle-class, white-collar mentality and when I came here 15 years ago I had to prove to my congregation that I wasn’t uppity” — and he criticized politicians for “not relating to and serving with working-class people.”

“I think Jesse Ventura stirred up the hard-living people and the survivors,” O’Neill said, “rekindling their faith in the American dream and giving them a new sense of empowerment. He showed them what it means to work at yourself. It’s not an appeal to abstract principles or programs as much as down-to-earth issues — which leaves all sorts of questions. And I love his response: ‘What harm can I do in four years?’ It’s almost as if he’s done it already and now he can enjoy the ride. That’s got me a little worried since we want to know what his agenda will be. But freeing people to believe that the political system can work is great. And I think he’ll force the political system to address the needs of working people.”

Ventura is a millionaire who drives a Porsche and boasts about owning five Waverunners. He sloughs off press criticism that he is “too obsessed with making money” (he’s cashing in on his celebrity with a $500,000 book deal and he has complained that his wife ought to get a salary for performing her first lady duties) by saying, “I’m a capitalist — I’ve been obsessed with earning a living and going out and working hard all my life.” Still, the working people of Minnesota are solidly behind him: He’s living their dream.

The day after my trip to Anoka, I met with Gov. Ventura at the Capitol and asked him if he knew why he had done so well in the blue-collar suburbs. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. “All we did was go off of past numbers” — places where Ross Perot had done well and Dean Barkley, a co-founder of the Minnesota Reform Party, had run well in two Senate campaigns — “and said these are counties we can take and take strongly.” Ventura’s campaign strategists targeted most of their on-the-ground efforts and advertising there. Ventura’s honest answer, and his insistence that as the state’s top executive he now has to govern “for all of Minnesota,” suggests that he may not understand the full nature of his appeal. Or given his libertarian, entrepreneurial leanings, he may not feel comfortable with the implications of leading a working-class movement. (On the other hand, when he spotted the headline on one of my earlier articles that I had handed him — “Can an anti-establishment, working-class populist go all the way?” — he read it aloud and answered in his deep voice, “Oh yeah!”)

Ventura seems far more at ease casting himself as the guardian of the hopes of a new generation. In his inaugural remarks, he talked a lot about young people. In the name of “these new young people, this generation that came on board, and yes, might well have elected me,” he called on the state’s politicians to “put down the partisan party politics and look at the bigger picture. We cannot fail, we must not fail, because if we do, we could lose this generation, and we dare not let that happen.” His first public appearance the next day was before an overflow crowd of students at the University of Minnesota campus, where he repeated his promise to reduce class size in secondary schools and stressed the importance of students becoming more self-reliant. “If you’re smart enough to be [in college], you ought to be smart enough to figure out how to pay for it.”

Comments like those have some observers here likening Ventura to Reagan, which may yet turn out to be an accurate comparison. I asked him if he worried about suggestions coming from some quarters that he seemed heartless. “Heartless? You mean, people standing on their own two feet is heartless? People not looking at the government as their parent is heartless? I would say to them, pick up the Constitution of the United States and tell me where it says that welfare is a right.”

Do you think there should be no social safety net? I asked. “Absolutely not, absolutely not,” he responded. But some people are nervous about you, I said, because they’re not hearing that commitment to a safety net. “Well, I’m just giving them a bigger message. Why do you think I’m lecturing this new generation of young people? … I can be an influence on them to not be dependent on government. I can’t change the world, but I can certainly influence a generation that voted for me in some manner.”

It would be silly to try to predict where this will all lead. No doubt the halo surrounding Ventura will fade as his administration starts to stake out its policies and the neophyte politician makes some inevitable missteps. The Reform Party will grow and try to run a slate of legislative candidates in 2000, at which point it will be possible to say for sure if Minnesota has a full-blown multiparty system. By then it will also be clearer how Reformers in government reconcile their libertarian, fiscally conservative, working-class and anti-elitist impulses.

Outside the temperature is minus 17. But inside, a long-frozen part of the body politic has begun to thaw out. Things can only get more interesting if the warming trends continue.