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This Ain't No Party

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Missouri's delegates might back Buchanan, but the state's more moderate candidates can't even keep a straight face when somebody mentions his name. "Let's face it: The Republicans didn't want him to represent them," says Foley. "He went to the Reform Party because he could. But I don't think he's got the chance of a snowball in hell." Gimpelson, asked his opinion, bursts out laughing: "Well, I think he has some good ideas, and some funny ones. I'm not necessarily really endorsing a presidential candidate at this point." Terry Frank, the Reform candidate for Missouri treasurer, says he's "just trying to stay below that mess. Buchanan's getting us national attention, and if he gets into the debates (he's suing to do so), it will be a great thing for the party -- as long as he controls himself. What the party really needs, though, is a Reagan/Clinton type, somebody who can play the media a little better instead of always being an angry male."

Even Kline is wary. "I have yet to read or hear anything that Pat has said that I disagree with," he admits. "But he put his own people in and stripped out the old-timers." He chuckles at his own term. "Old-timers! What's it been, eight years? Still, I'm getting mental whiplash, between the Buchanan group and the Perot group. When Buchanan announced that he wanted to run with the Reform Party, everybody, including me, said, 'Attaboy! We'll support you.' But then there was this bullish takeover. My bottom line on Pat Buchanan: He's either a Republican mole and the Republican Party has decided to destroy the Reform Party -- and they're doing a good job -- or Pat Buchanan views this as a vehicle, a last straw to save the country. It's one or the other."

Under the Big Top

More than 20 candidates are running for office with the Missouri Reform Party this year, and part of the delight is their variety. There's Gimpelson, a respected gynecologist who lives in Ladue but speaks fluent populist, describing himself as "a solo practitioner, just a little guy working for a living. I face the federal government every day by myself." There's George "Boots" Weber -- a former corrections officer, licensed pilot and Missouri Flying Farmer who once transported an elk herd to Lone Elk Park -- running simultaneously for lieutenant governor of Missouri and president of the U.S. One of seven candidates for state representative is Rob Penningroth, a 27-year-old North County schoolteacher who lifeguarded at the YMCA for 12 years and believes that "all the issues that face our country are important ones that must be dealt with." Another is Anthony J. Windisch, a former Department of Agriculture computer specialist who filed a whistleblower's complaint about the government's "gross waste and mismanagement of federal computers" and then wrote a book about it. As one party insider put it, "He thinks he's grabbed onto the issue that will change the world -- and it's a yawner."

Some of these candidates are true believers in the founding Reform principles; some are Buchananites eager to stamp out the New World Order; some just want their own brand of change. Many have campaigned unsuccessfully in the past as Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, U.S. Taxpayers or all of the above. What draws them to the Reform Party now is expediency, not ideology.

Frank, for example, grew disillusioned with the Republicans' $100-a-plate dinners and exclusive power. He'd been interested in politics since age 12, when he met Nelson Rockefeller at the Republican National Convention. Then he graduated from St. Louis Country Day School and Loyola University, worked for large national brokerage firms, started a picture-perfect family and became, at 28, the youngest alderman in Frontenac's history. But when he watched John McCain suffer the slings and arrows hurled by good ol' boys supporting George W. Bush, he says, it "soured" him. So he turned to the Reform Party, but not because he embraced their central tenets. "I'm a free-trader," he shrugs. "Probably the only place I agree with the Reform Party is campaign-finance reform."

If the Missouri Reform Party is anything, it's tolerant of disagreement. You don't even have to belong to the party to run on their ticket. When Kline accepted their invitation, he "didn't even know their platform." Benson "met Perot years and years ago at a party. He wouldn't remember me. But it was a good year to run as an outsider. If I go in with the Reform Party, I can do things that Republicans and Democrats can't, and if I have to embarrass the General Assembly into acting, I can."

Foley calls himself "an independent running as a Reform Party candidate. I can look at myself in the mirror shaving and say, 'That's OK, because it's an open party -- just about anybody can run.'" Pause. "That's a weakness in the party."

Ah, but third parties can't afford weakness. They have to revolutionize the voters, amuse the masses and steal the show away from the mainstream parties, whether that means standing on stilts, clown-fighting or swallowing flaming torches. "Americans like circuses," remarks Wayne Fields, co-director of the American-culture-studies program at Washington University and a scholar of American political rhetoric. "In the big parties, you're never sure what's really going on, but all the clowns are out in the open when they're running their own campaign. It's entertainment, it's spectacle, it's the central drama of whether we can endure as a people so divided in opinion."

Besides, we're so bored with bejeweled elephants lumbering in circles -- and the earnest donkeys who imitate them in the second ring -- that we do look over occasionally, diverted but unconvinced. Some of the performers refresh our jaded eyes with their old-fashioned enthusiasm. Others look more like exiles from the Island of Misfit Toys, and their extremism places the rest of us in an awkward position.

"I don't think the future of the party is very bright," admits Foley. "It's fractured at the top, and it has no spokespeople to push its platform, which is reasonable and moderate, even though it can be interpreted in other ways. I would hope that, should there be debates for the senatorial candidates, the Reform and Libertarian candidates would be invited. It might be embarrassing, depending on how we comport," he adds wryly. "But if access is denied, we'll continue to have the problems I'm running to change."

Asked his opinion of his Reform Party rival, Foley tries hard: "Martin Lindstedt is a 42-year-old man with some very definitive political ideas on the kind of America he believes we should have. Whether you would call him a racist or a separatist, I suppose, depends on your definition of those terms. But he will have appeal ..." He breaks off, pushes his yellow legal pad aside and abandons the calm, measured rhetoric altogether.

"This is what will hurt the Reform Party," he blurts. "Guilt by association."

Related Links:

moreform.org

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