Blood and Politics (87 page)

After the speeches, Buchanan signed copies of his most recent book,
A Republic Not an Empire
, and the Council of Conservative Citizens activists in the room passed out
The Spotlight
’s
Buchanan 2000
insert.
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It was an ecumenical, even interfaith event, worthy of a genuine candidate. By the usual standards of small third parties, collecting one hundred supporters at a hundred dollars a plate was a grand success. But the highly visible presence of white nationalists in the campaign machinery was like oiling the gears with sawdust and sand grit. And for a brief moment it almost ground the works to a halt at headquarters.

A British national living in the D.C. area named Mark Cotterill had been raising funds for the British National Party among white nationalists in the States, building a network of supporters among Council of Conservative Citizens activists, National Alliance members, and prominent individual operators such as David Duke. He was also spending time doing volunteer work in the Buchanan headquarters in Vienna, Virginia, and recruiting others to do the same, writing in his newsletter: “Many of our members are already helping out the Buchanan campaign . . . as the campaign heats up they need all the extra help they can get . . .”
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Soon after a printed account of Cotterill’s activities surfaced, campaign manager Bay Buchanan “fired” him from his headquarters position and threw out about another twenty volunteers as well. The move intended to demonstrate the campaign’s disavowal of racists and anti-Semites but only proved the accuracy of a
Washington Post
story on Buchanan’s transformation of the Reform Party.
¹⁶

The coverage caught the Buchanan camp at a particularly vulnerable moment. Anti-Buchanan elements in the Reform Party had finally awakened to the fact that the party that they had originally built was no longer in their hands. The revelations added an edge of desperation to the anti-Buchanan camp, and it once again threatened to tar the candidate as a bigot. If voters had forgotten about the revelations from campaigns past, if they had missed the discussion of Buchanan’s views of World War Two, or if they agreed with him on immigration or trade but did not want their neighbors to think they voted for “haters,” a new group of reformers now stood ready to remind them.

Nevertheless, Pat Buchanan’s brigades had already ground their way through the party, state convention by state convention. Perot loyalists were unable to offer any substantial resistance. The remaining anti-Buchanan forces finally rallied behind John Hagelin, a physics professor at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. Hagelin also served in the 2000 election as the candidate of the Natural Law Party, a group every bit as obscure as its name implied. When it came time to send out “primary” ballots, Hagelin brought a list of twenty-four thousand to the party to receive mail-in ballots. Buchanan, by contrast, provided a list of five hundred thousand names. His two runs through the Republican primaries had left him with a residual hard-core base of supporters. Campaign manager Bay Buchanan knew how to master the rules and marshal the troops. With the additional backing of white nationalists, Buchanan easily commanded the most formidable force in the party, more powerful even than Perot. Also, Buchanan did not shirk from a crass bit of organizational opportunism when the situation demanded it.
¹⁷

At the last minute the Reform Party executive committee, the one body still largely in the hands of Perot loyalists, tried to stem Buchanan’s brigadiers. Meeting in Dallas, the committee voted to disallow Buchanan’s mail-in ballots.
¹⁸
His list included an unknown number of ineligible names, it charged. As the Reform Party convention in Long Beach, California, loomed, the conflict within the Reform Party and the public’s association of Buchanan with racism threatened to undo his candidacy.
¹⁹

The Reform Party convention opened with 150 Hagelin supporters marching behind their candidate from a hotel to the convention center, chanting, “Go, John, go.” At the second floor entrance to the delegate hall they ran into a line of tables and security guards blocking the entrance. The chant changed to “We want in, we want in,” until they decided
to leave and hold their own rump convention. They may have controlled the executive committee in Dallas, but in Long Beach the Buchananites controlled the credentials committee. For the moment Hagelin’s crew met at the Performing Arts Center and pinned their hopes on the mail-in “primary” ballot. They paid for an outside auditor to count votes. The announcement upset Hagelin’s claim to legitimacy, however. Of the 887,000 ballots mailed out, less than 10 percent were returned. Of those, Buchanan took 49,529, or more than 63 percent; Hagelin won 28,539, or almost 37 percent. Two to one, Buchanan had it. Undeterred, the rumpers voted to disqualify Buchanan from the ballot and then nominate Hagelin. The physics professor from Maharishi University said: “I accept with pride the mantle of H. Ross Perot.”
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Over at the convention center, the fighting shifted from the front door to the seating of competing state delegations. Buchanan’s team was the only one with a floor operation, individuals strategically placed around the hall wearing orange ball caps and waving them to instruct voting. From Wisconsin and a few other states more than one group claimed official status, and the Buchanan forces managed to vote their opposition out of the room. Among those who did have sanctioned seats were Christopher Bollyn, a Liberty Lobby official who was a member of the Illinois delegation.
²¹
In the California delegation a white power musician named Eric Owens stood out. William Grutzmacher, the Reform Party’s state campaign chair in Nevada, had run for mayor in the Chicago primaries five years before and was known in that city for writing: “It is a fact of recorded history that while my ancestors were building cathedrals and composing symphonies, the Orientals were feeding their babies to the pigs and the blacks were eating each other.”
²²
And

when the chief of the California delegation gave the opening remarks and said this is a “national convention that doesn’t have to be held hostage to Political Correctness,” an overhead video screen fixed on a man wearing a ball cap emblazoned with a Confederate battle flag. The delegate was not from South Carolina.

Late on the first day the conventioneers watched a video from Buchanan’s 1996 Republican campaign. The segment that won the biggest applause was his infamous culture war speech from 1992. On day two an almost audible gasp escaped from the pool of reporters after Pat Buchanan announced his vice presidential candidate, Ezola Foster.
²³

A churchgoing sixty-two-year-old black woman, born in Louisiana but long active in California’s anti-immigrant politics, Ezola Foster had grown up under Jim Crow segregation. She had attended all-black
schools through college. While Pat Buchanan was writing Republican speeches for President Nixon, Foster was voting Democratic. She switched to the Republican Party during the Reagan era and began a long, lonely trek to the far right. She taught typing in Southern California until 1996, when she applied for workers’ compensation on the basis of a mental condition. (She alleged that she suffered emotional distress at the hands of her students.) Although she could no longer handle the stress of teaching in the public schools, Buchanan apparently believed Foster’s political pedigree rendered her a suitable candidate for vice president. She had joined the John Birch Society in the mid-1990s and was familiar with the entire panoply of issues animating the far end of the right wing, including the Confederate battle flag. It was a symbol of heritage, she told reporters in South Carolina. And she had given a platform speech at the same Buchananite American Cause meeting where Sam Francis had invoked Gramsci as a guide for race-conscious white politics.
²⁴

During her acceptance speech at the convention she excoriated the opposition. “Well, you hear these two parties talking about reaching out to minorities. That’s a code word. Let’s break it down to what it means. It means giving black leaders affirmative action and reparations for slavery. It means giving Latino leaders an open border policy and saying to the world, come on the price is right, the American taxpayers will pay.” She also gave her running mate a rousing endorsement: “If anybody knows a racist, I do. Pat Buchanan ain’t no racist.” When answering questions from the press, she was asked, Isn’t this a white party? Her concerns were more with ideology than the color of skin, she replied. Across the convention center, some of the sentiment echoed hers. Some didn’t.
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At the
Reform Party News
booth the response was: “Buchanan made a bold and positive move.” Over at the T-shirt vendor, one of the remaining Perotistas said Foster “helps show we’re inclusive.” At a table stuffed with pamphlets from the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, they remembered Foster from the Proposition 187 election. She was smart and ethical and “loves America,” they said. At a table for the Missouri Reform Party the reply was short and not sweet: “I don’t know anything about her.” At the
Spotlight
table, which doubled as an outpost for the Maryland Reform Party, Willis Carto didn’t want to talk much about Foster.
²⁶

Outside the convention center, each white nationalist camp reacted in its own way to Buchanan’s selection of Foster. Jared Taylor at
American Renaissance
felt neither disappointed nor betrayed by Buchanan because he had never believed that the former Republican understood the biological underpinnings of “European character and traditions.”
Buchanan might be good on issues such as immigration and crime, Taylor reasoned. And he might have once said that Englishmen assimilated more quickly than Zulus. But “Mr. Buchanan appears to base these positions on his conception of conservative principles rather than because he has a clear racial identity,” Taylor wrote in an analysis posted to the newsletter’s website.
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Taylor opposed Ezola Foster’s candidacy simply because she was black. He could countenance a few men of Jewish descent on his conference podium, but he did not believe that Foster’s face could promote the Reform Party, not if it was going to be the “organized political voice” of white people. Clearly it wasn’t. Taylor also contended that Buchanan was just another candidate. “Those who saw his campaign as an expression of racial identity have quite properly withdrawn their support.”
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In contrast with Taylor’s assessment, Liberty Lobby finally expressed in print some mild disappointment that Buchanan had chosen a black woman as his running mate, but it supported the Reform Party in much stronger terms. Liberty Lobby reasoned that Buchanan’s selection had been “designed to mitigate the media’s inevitable attack on him as a racist and anti-Semite.” It had not worked, however, and had only driven away those (like Taylor) who could not countenance her face on their propaganda.
The Spotlight
would have preferred that Buchanan had chosen a white family man from the ranks of labor, not a “labor boss,” it editorialized, but someone who could draw white working-class votes to the Reform Party.
²⁹
At the end of the campaign, just as it had been at the beginning, Liberty Lobby remained most concerned with creating a viable third party. The purity of its politics could wait until later.

Willis Carto personally reinforced this view two days before the election. Thinking back on the time, more than thirty-five years before, when he had pursued a strategy of building a faction within the Republican Party, he now deemed it unfeasible. “The big money crowd has its tentacles into every moving part of the Republican Party,” he argued. The idea of grafting racially conservative southern Democrats onto the northern Republican tree, which he had advocated in the 1950s, was now an accomplished fact. But the realignment had not brought all the changes he wanted. Now he believed that there was “no getting around” the creation of a third party. “America is trending toward a Third World status right now,” he argued.

“Any so-called patriot or so-called conservative leader or publication not supporting the Reform Party is too corrupt or stupid to have your support,” Carto told
Spotlight
readers. “People tell me that advocating support for the Reform Party and its activities will undermine Liberty Lobby, but I don’t care,” he continued.
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Carto talked as if his personal financial affairs were under his full control, not in the hands of a bankruptcy court. From his conduct at the Reform Party convention, no one would have known that Liberty Lobby was a year away from dissolution. Or that George W. Bush would win more votes from confirmed racists that November than Patrick Buchanan and his entire third party team.

On election night Al Gore received a half million more votes than George W. Bush: 50,999,897 to 50,456,002. While the popular vote’s results were unequivocal, the race was far closer in the electoral college. In that count, Pat Buchanan’s placement on the Florida ballot apparently contributed to George Bush’s ascendancy to the presidency. On the first count, Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, Florida, a liberal Democratic stronghold with large numbers of elderly Jewish voters. Local Reform Party officers knew the total was greatly inflated. And their candidate believed that only 300 to 400 of those votes were actually his. “The rest, I am quite sure, were Gore votes,” Buchanan told John Nichols, author of
Jews for Buchanan
, a detailed story of the postelection voter count mayhem in Florida.
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The butterfly ballot form apparently confused some voters, and recounts were demanded and rebuffed by Florida’s secretary of state (who also served as a Bush campaign cochair). The process went into the courts. After a final decision by the United States Supreme Court that halted the recounts, the federal election was finally decided—five weeks after election night.
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The 3,000 votes that Buchanan reckoned were not his were counted in his column nevertheless. This decision pushed George W. Bush ahead in Florida by about 500 votes. Like a set of tumbling dominoes, this gave Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes to Bush and then won him a four-vote margin of victory in the electoral college.