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This Ain't No Party

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The Reform Party's mildest gubernatorial candidate is Kent A. Benson, a Kansas City boy who took off his tie and moved to the Lake of the Ozarks in 1987. There he developed a liking for local politics, the kind where "you know all the players. I hung out last night with one of the county commissioners; he's not just an image on the TV screen. Washington, now, there's a reason they call it Disneyland. Nothing is real."

Benson used to lobby in D.C., and he still remembers watching a freshman congresswoman attend her first cocktail-party fundraiser: "She was there 27 minutes and walked away with $350,000 in PAC money." Then there was the time a VA broker sold a house down at the lake. Benson says that a few weeks after the new owner moved in, she received a parcel, postmarked Mexico, with $13 shipping fees -- and inside was a $7 smoke alarm provided by the VA.

"How many jobs did NAFTA cost the state of Missouri? Seventeen hundred in the first month," he exclaims. "We do have low unemployment, but people lost a $17-an-hour job for a $9-an-hour job, and they lost their dreams." He sighs heavily. "Somewhere along the line, 'protect' became a dirty word. If I ran as a protectionist, people would stone me. What is wrong with protecting what you should be protecting -- like jobs, or your family? When did it become socially irresponsible to take care of your own people?"

Benson thinks education in Missouri is a travesty; he'd like every child to be funded with the same amount of money, and he brought in motivational speaker Zig Ziglar to rev up Camdenton's schoolkids. He says the Missouri Highway Commission is inept and that the Department of Natural Resources needs overhaul -- "The James River is so full of phosphorus you can't eat anything out of it." He also wants a systematic reversal of the tax system and the elimination of the federal departments of education, housing and so on.

Like most of the Reform candidates, Benson's using all his own money to campaign, and like most of the Reform candidates, he doesn't expect to win. He enjoys the process -- "It's fun to debate career politicians; they get frazzled quick!" -- and he firmly believes that, elected or not, "anyone can make a difference. When you can get your message across, get people thinking, it will happen. It may not be with me, but it will happen."

Plucking the Imperial Vulture

In the Missouri Reform Party's August primary for U.S. Senate, Hugh Foley, a moderate, tolerant and temperate businessman eager to end political elitism and broaden economic opportunity, will face off against his two Reform Party opponents: quiet James M. Hall of Republic, Mo., who doesn't even list a Web page or show up at most candidates' forums, and Martin Lindstedt, who's anything but quiet.

Lindstedt lives on Rabbit Track Road in Granby, down in the southwest corner of the state. "I've always been interested in local politics," he says, "'cause most of 'em around here are just a pack of crooks. Their little police people were pretty mean to my dad, so I'm pretty much wantin' payback. My common-law wife, Roxie, I have her running for sheriff." He pauses to silence screaming children. "Someday this whole country's gonna go revolutionary civil war," he resumes, "and people like me's gonna get to settle old scores. It'll be a war of each against all, fought on racial, religious and class lines -- and it'll probably be fought with biological weaponry, too."

As a member of the U.S. Army's 42nd Field Artillery, Lindstedt says, he helped run a tactical-nuclear-missile system in Germany. Then he earned a business degree from Missouri Southern State College in Joplin. "Now I drive a truck, mainly," he says. "I've got a small inheritance, $7,000-$8,000 a year, and I've got a computer." He used these resources to run for state representative in 1994, governor in 1996 and U.S. senator in 1998 -- all with the Libertarians, whom he now calls "LibberToons" and vilifies as moral degenerates.

"It all started in January of '96," he recalls, sounding almost nostalgic. "This homosexual activist came to the LibberToons wanting the state to recognize same-sex marriages, and I like to have had a fit. 'This ain't gonna wash in the 7th District,' I told them. (By 1998) they were plotting to kick me out of the party, changin' their little bitty rules.

"Pat Buchanan brought me to the Reform Party," he continues. "Me and Pat pretty much look at things the same way: anti-immigrant, anti-New World Order." By running for the U.S. Senate with the Reform Party -- in a race he never expected to win -- Lindstedt hopes to "finish off the Republicans." Once a Ronald Reagan Republican himself, he says that in recent years, "They have done nothing but stab rural white Christian Americans right in the back. I'd rather have Al Gore and Mel Carnahan -- at least we openly know them and we hate them." In a formal statement to the League of Women Voters, he accused mainstream politicians of a "genocidal conspiracy" against white Christian America, predicting, "Once the right wing of the Imperial vulture is thoroughly plucked out, that bird will no longer fly." In other words, Republicans will be forced to join the Reform Party.

"I want Republicans where they either got the choice of joining the Aryan Nations or becoming some black boy's bitch," elaborates Lindstedt. "A few people in the Reform Party told me, 'Martin, you gotta tone down the racism,' but I said, 'You guys are trying to go after the moderates, who are gonna be the very last people in the world to vote for you. At least I got a strategy.'" He plans to join David Duke's National Organization for European-American Rights (NO FEAR) and push to close legal immigration to "all non-Europeans." "I'm not a white supremacist, I'm a white separatist," he explains carefully. "Whites need to have and maintain their own country, and blacks can go ahead and live like they do in Africa here." Other politicians don't dare say that, he adds, "but I notice that all of 'em are very, very careful not to live too close to the people they profess to love."

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