ROSS PEROT AND HIS VERY STRANGE PARTY

By the time the introduction ends, even the dullest viewer gets the point. Lenora Fulani is an extremist, and she’s not shy about it. All of which makes what happens next even weirder: The camera pulls back to reveal Fulani sitting on a bench in a television studio. With her is Fred Newman, a Marxist psychotherapist who, like Fulani, was for years a leader in the now-defunct New Alliance party, a group once described by the FBI as “armed and dangerous. ” Seated between them in a dark suit, grinning happily, is . . . Russell J. Verney, the man in charge of Ross Perot’s most recent campaign for president.

It’s hard to imagine a more incongruous tableau — a leader of the radical center communing with members of the radical fringe. Yet from the start it is a lovefest. “Lenora, it’s a pleasure to be here with you and Fred,” begins Verney, who goes on to toast their “common interests, common goals” and thank both Fulani and Newman for their efforts on behalf of Perot’s latest political vehicle, the Reform party. Newman responds with equal enthusiasm. ” This coming together to me has been a marvelous and wonderful thing, and I think Perot has given us so much by providing this leadership,” he says. ” I’ve become more and more of a fan of Ross Perot over the last several years.”

The feeling is mutual. Newman, Fulani, and their followers have become some of Ross Perot’s most important political allies. Four years ago, New Alliance party lawyers advised the first Perot campaign on achieving ballot access in the 50 states. Four years later, former members of New Alliance party — self- described “Newmanites” — hold leadership positions in a number of branches of the Reform party. In California and New York, Newmanires were instrumental in getting Perot a place on the ballot in time for the approaching election. Come November, they will turn their considerable energy and experience to getting Perot elected president. For Fulani and Newman, the partnership with Perot has resulted in a stunning improvement in both prestige and power. For Ross Perot, the arrangement has amounted to one of the most unscrupulous political calculations in memory.

 

The Newtnanites

A certain amount of eccentric behavior can be expected from members of any political organization. And in a nascent third party, which must create quick coalitions to grow, it is guaranteed. But the Newmanites are no ordinary political eccentrics. Newman himself has since the mid-1960s founded a series of small, often bizarre political organizations, among them a “revolutionary cadre collective” called the Centers for Change, and the International Workers party. In 1974, Newman briefly allied himself with the godfather of the authoritarian fringe, Lyndon LaRouche. Several years later, in 1979, Newman created the New Alliance party. Among the early members was a psychologist from Pennsylvania named Lenora Fulani.

Newman and his followers quickly earned a reputation as odd, even by the standards of New York’s radical Left. New Alliance members opened — and to this day still run — a constellation of psychotherapy centers that offered a brand of Newman-inspired counseling called “social therapy,” a highly political understanding of emotional development based on the theories of Soviet psychiatrist Lev Vygotsky. A number of former patients have described social therapy as a recruiting tool used to isolate individuals from their families and friends while enlarging the New Alliance party, a group fanatical in its devotion to Newman. “When Newman was happy, everyone was happy. When he was angry, everyone was terrifled,” recalled a former party leader several years ago. An extensive FBI investigation in 1988 came to a similar conclusion, describing the New Alliance party as a “political/cult organization.”

For a group that was always relatively tiny in size, the New Alliance party put up an amazing number of candidates for elected office. Lenora Fulani first ran for lieutenant governor of New York in 1984, moving on to presidential campaigns in 1988 and 1992. During her first race for president, she garnered enough votes to qualify for hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal matching funds (which were later the focus of charges of financial mismanagement by the Federal Election Commission). In the New Alliance party, the difference between politics and therapy was never clear. At a fund-raiser in 1992, reported Bruce Shapiro in the Nation, Fulani made the connection explicit. “The more you give, the more you grow,” she said. “Take it out of your rent. It feels very, very good.”

Fulani’s pitch is not always so soothing. Over the years she and other Newmanites have expressed a consistent and unapologetic hostility toward Jews. During a 1985 speech in Harlem, Fred Newman, who was himself born into a Jewish family, announced that “Jews as a people” had sold their “souls to the devil,” thus becoming “the stormtroopers of decadent capitalism against people of color the world over.” Newman has expressed similar sentiments in such plays as No Room for Zion and his 1992 work Dead as a Jew. Fulani is a longtime associate of, and vigorous apologist for, race-baiters like Louis Farrakhan and melanin theorist Leonard Jeffries. “I do not believe it is insignificant that a slumlord is Jewish,” she asserted on one occasion. During a July 1992 appearance on the talkshow Sonya Live, during which she also came out in support of Ross Perot, Fulani explained that black anti- Semitism can be squarely attributed to “the very backward and reactionary role that many Jewish people have played, I think, under the guise and politics of Zionism.” Black “assimilationists,” she told the host, have made the situation worse by their willingness to “pander to Jews in this country.”

Rants like these — combined with their habit of infiltrating and taking over other political organizations — have made the Newmanites loathed and feared by just about every mainstream politician who has come into contact with them, including those who might otherwise be sympathetic ideologically. Concluded the Nation’s Shapiro: “One cannot support Fulani, whether with a vote or a contribution, without aiding the jackboot movement behind her.” David Dinkins seemed to feel the same way. So wary was the former New York mayor of being tainted by the Newmanites that upon discovering that the New Alliance party had been gathering petitions to aid his 1989 campaign, Dinkins demanded that the Board of Elections reject the signatures.

Ross Perot has had no such compunction. Indeed, in the past year, Russ Verney, Perot’s campaign manager, has maintained nearly continuous contact with Newmanite leaders, meeting with them at conferences, trading memos, and above all urging the group to become involved with Perot’s Reform party. Newman and Fulani have responded by organizing their followers to work for Perot by distributing literature and collecting the signatures needed to put the candidate on state ballots. In California alone, Newmanites claim to have convinced well over 10,000 people to register with the Reform party. Not long ago, the collaboration became complete when Newman and Fulani folded virtually the entire membership of the New Alliance party, which disbanded several years ago, into the Reform party. For the Perot campaign, the merger has been a windfall of volunteers and votes, particularly in black and gay communities, where the Newmanites traditionally have been strong, and Perot weak.

Of course, the arrangement has had benefits for the Newmanites as well. Fred Newman and Lenora Fulani are no longer simply washed-up members of the lunatic fringe, but key players in a growing movement. And so are their followers. Such developments excite Jim Mangia. Mangia, a gay activist and longtime New Alliance member from Los Angeles, recently became secretary of the California Reform party. “The gay community is in on the ground floor in the formation of a major and competitive political party in America,” says Mangia. “I’m an officer — that says something about the inclusiveness and diversity and vision of the Reform party and of Mr. Perot. I think he would bring that with him to the White House.” (Mangia dismisses Perot’s anti- homosexual positions in 1992, including his pledge not to appoint gays to cabinet-level positions, as “a manufactured political attack by the Democratic party.”)

Mangia points to a press conference he recently held with Verney and fellow Perot supporter Georgiana Williams (who first gained prominence when her son Damian beat truck driver Reginald Denny nearly to death during the L.A. riots) as evidence of Perot’s inclusive spirit. After all, says Mangia, “Russ Verney called me. He knew who we were. That was a reaching out to the constituencies that we represent. I mean, he could have called Ralph Reed.”

Mangia is right about one thing: Russ Verney knew who the Newmanites were. In 1992, in fact, it was Verney, then the head of the Democratic party in New Hampshire, who physically kept Lenora Fulani from speaking at a forum for presidential candidates. At the time, Fulani was considered too fringe. Verney blocked a doorway with his body, thereby preventing her from coming inside. It is an experience both Verney and Fulani chuckle about now. These days, Fulani says, neither Perot nor Verney seems in the least concerned about the past controversies that have surrounded her. “They’re all adults,” she says. They understand.

Certainly Russ Verney does. Asked about Fulani’s close, and well-known, relationship with Louis Farrakhan, Verney responds nonchalantly, “I’m not made uncomfortable with anything. I welcome everyone into the party to help build a new political party.” There is only one criterion for membership, he says: “We do not support or encourage or welcome anyone who has hate in their heart. We only want people full of love.”

It is not clear whether Verney is being sarcastic when he says this. If so, it wouldn’t be the most cynical statement to come out of the Perot campaign this year.

 

Perot Cwns Himself

Just ask Dick Lamm, Perot’s sole opponent for the presidential nomination of the Reform party. Lamm, the former governor of Colorado, isn’t likely to beat Perot on August 18 when the party’s nominee is chosen. But he doesn’t need to. Simply by joining the race, Lamm will have taught the country more about Ross Perot’s antidemocratic instincts than a thousand attack ads.

Consider how Lamm and Perot became the Reform party’s contenders. Originally, Perot had promised to send a nominating ballot to every person who had signed a Reform party petition. Candidates who received at least 10 percent of the vote would be declared eligible for nomination. It sounded simple enough, but before long the process disintegrated. TThousands of people who had signed petitions — including a large number in Dick Lamm’s home state of Colorado — never got ballots. Others who had never signed a petition did. A New York man who had been involved in Perot’s 1992 campaign got four ballots; before he could figure out what to do with them all, a call came in from Perot’s Dallas office with news that another ballot was in the mail. Those who called the party’s toll-free telephone number for help (which happens to be identical to the number for Perot ’96 campaign headquarters) were not asked whether they were registered with another political party — or even if they had already voted. They were told only to leave a name and address and a ballot would be on the way. A finally tally of the votes was repeatedly postponed to allow more ballots to be sent out. Throughout the process, Perot, a man who can talk for an hour and a half about the need to reform the election process, seemed unconcerned by the chaos, or by the awesome opportunity for voter fraud it presented.

By the time all the votes were counted and the results released on the last day of July, fewer than 5 percent of the 880,298 ballots sent out had been returned. Of these, Perot received just 27,833 votes. Which is to say, a grand total of about 557 people in each of the 50 states voted for Perot. Even for a candidate of the Reform party, it was not much of a mandate.

Of course, Perot didn’t need much of a mandate; what he got was good enough for him. Nor will he be held accountable for the disorganization that accompanied the voting, since there is nobody in his party to block or correct any decision that Ross Perot makes. Republicans and Democrats who behave erratically — by, for instance, refusing to debate primary opponents simply because they don’t feel like it, as Perot recently did — have a national organization to which they must answer. Perot does not. As yet, despite much fudging on the subject, there is no national Reform party. There are only state chapters. Such an arrangement has a number of benefits for Perot, and he has fought to maintain it, rebuffng the efforts of party activists who would like to create an independent oversight committee. Hence, there will be no platform drafted at the Reform party’s August 11 convention in Long Beach, Calif. The reason: Perot didn’t want one drafted there.

Two months into his campaign, Dick Lamm has become familiar with the power of Perot’s whims. Shortly after entering the race, Lamm asked Perot for a list of Reform party members, with which he hoped to raise money for his cash- starved campaign. After initially agreeing to the request, Perot then reneged, claiming the Federal Election Commission would consider the list a gift in excess of permissible contribution limits. (Legal opinions on the subject vary dramatically.) Outraged, Lamm took the controversy public, embarrassing the Perot campaign. In early July, Verney, who — conveniently — runs both the election process and Ross Perot’s campaign, replied with a letter in which he explained that the Perot camp would be happy to make the list available. The only caveat: Lamm would have to submit all proposed fund- raising letters to Verney, who would then check them for signs of “negative campaigning.” It was the equivalent of the Dole campaign demanding to approve all of Pat Buchanan’s direct mail. “Some people saw it as being sort of censorship,” explains Tom D’Amore, Lamm’s chief campaign aide, diplomatically. Lamm declined the offer.

Perot’s obvious unwillingness to relinquish his control over the Reform party has led some of the more cynical reporters covering the campaign to toss around a conspiracy theory of their own: Dick Lamm is, if not an agent of Perot’s, then at least a straw man, a patsy recruited by Dallas to make the race look legitimate and revive media interest in what many suspected would be a simple coronation. It is not an entirely nutty idea. At times, even Lamm himself seems convinced his entrance was a set-up. “One could say Perot suckered me into this race,” he said recently.

More likely, though, Lamm suckered himself. Invited to speak at a convention of Perot supporters in early June in Los Angeles, Lamm found himself on stage and remembered how much he loved it. Years out of politics and hungry for attention, Lamm may have concluded that the humiliation of losing was worth the free television exposure. In any case, says D’Amore, once Lamm spoke to the Perot people, he was hooked: “He went on a date and came back engaged.”

Judging by the state of Lamm’s campaign so far, his marriage to the American people may have to be postponed. According to D’Amore, “probably a dozen” heads of state branches of the Reform party have come out in favor of Lamm. If true — and it probably is — these would be among the Lamm campaign’s most important allies in the effort to wrest the party from Perot. Yet, D’Amore can’t seem to remember their names. Instead, he refers to them as “Minnesota” or “that guy in Oregon.” He’s equally vague when asked about his candidate’s chances for winning the nomination: “Hard to say. Better than they were two weeks ago.” Honest, yes. Yet somehow one expects more enterprising spin from a campaign manager.

 

Fun with Dick Lamm

Then there’s the problem of the candidate himself. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg once described Dick Lamm as “Tsongas with euthanasia.” But Lamm is both more and less than that: a man fixated not so much on the Hard Issues as on the morbid ones. At public appearances, he regularly attacks people on life support for wasting money. “We can keep a corpse alive,” he says bitterly. In an April 1985 op-ed in the New York Times Lamm explained how he would handle the thenraging famine in Ethiopia. “The United States,” he wrote, “should give no emergency food relief to countries that are unwilling to adopt long-term economic reforms and population control programs.” After all, Lamm mused, “the late Alan Gregg, a vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, once said that overpopulation is a cancer and that he had never heard of a cancer that was cured by feeding it.”

As if the Kevorkian-like outbursts weren’t enough, Lamm sometimes has trouble keeping his high self-regard under wraps. Asked recently by the Los Angeles Times to explain his nowfamous statement that older people have “a duty to die and get out of the way” in order to “let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life,” the 60-year-old candidate didn’t blush. Instead, he smiled and replied that bringing up “these tough subjects” was just “classic Dick Lamm,” more evidence of his “impressive record of anticipating the problems of society.”

Lamm doesn’t play much better in person. In fact the biggest surprise at a recent Reform party convention in Virginia — the first time since the race began that Perot and Lamm appeared before the same audience — was what a poor speaker Lamm is. Though a number of news accounts have described the former governor as a little short on humor, one really has to see Lamm at the podium to get the full flavor. As he blathered on to a room of third-party enthusiasts in a municipal office building in Charlottesville, it was hard to miss: “Success is not a permanent geopolitical status . . . “; “We simply cannot continue borrowing from our children . . .”; “All history tells us . . .,” and so stupefyingly on. Listening to it, you could almost see the bumper stickers: “Lamm ’96: It’s Midnight in America.” Plus, Lamm has a disconcerting tendency to crack a smile just as he is saying something particularly unpleasant, which is usually. And his speaking voice — high, whiny, ineffectual — is enough to make Ross Perot sound like Edward R. Murrow by comparison. Minutes into the lecture, the crowd looked restless.

After finishing his speech, Lamm headed for the lobby, where he was surrounded by reporters, each hoping the candidate would at last say something interesting. He didn’t, until an elderly woman in a surprisingly lowcut dress made her way through the crowd to ask a question. Suppose your 88g year-old father needed a liver transplant, the woman said. What would you do? This was it, the chance to witness Lamm’s legendary candor. The cameramen focused in on the exchange. “My father wouldn’t accept a liver transplant,” Lamm replied. So much for Tough Choices.

Back in the lecture hall, Perot took the floor and was being greeted with hearty enthusiasm. After Lamm, the Texan suddenly seemed better than ever: witty, upbeat, sane. Which, if you listen to the conspiracists, may be the whole point of the Lamm candidacy. Either way, it is clear that in this race Perot is by far the more skilled candidate. So superior, probably, that rigging the race against Lamm is pointless. Yet perhaps irresistible. As one network reporter who covers him puts it, “Perot is like an Albanian politician: He knows he’s going to win the election, but he wants to steal it anyway.”

Most of Lamm’s supporters seem to sense there is truth in this, but they toil on nonetheless.

 

The New York Lamm Committee (Pop. 2)

Over lunch in Manhattan not long ago with both members of the New York Committee for Richard Lamm, it becomes clear why. These are the people who want a third party for the sake of a third party, and not just because they hate politics. No, these are poor souls who at one point really believed Perot when he swore it wasn’t about him, betrayed activists who will almost certainly stage anti-Perot demonstrations when the Reform party holds its convention next week. Charles Riggs is one of these people.

A graphic artist in his early 40s, Riggs can barely contain his enthusiasm as he explains why he supports Richard Lamm for president. A waiter approaches, forcing Riggs to pause just long enough to order a Cobb salad with no lettuce or bacon, and a glass of pink lemonade. The waiter is confused — a salad with no lettuce? — and waits for Riggs to explain. But Riggs doesn’t; there isn’t time. With the convention weeks away and closing, Riggs has only days to convince the residents of New York state (and, via his home page on the Internet, the world) that Richard Lamm is the man to break the stranglehold of the decaying twoparty system and lead America into a brighter tomorrow. Riggs clamps his eyes shut and sways in his chair as he rails almost stream of consciousness against America’s inefficient allocation of health-care dollars. Riggs feels so strongly about topics like these — issues he is sure Lamm will confront in a way Democrats and Republicans do not — that he recently took $ 1,000 from his retirement account and sent it to Lamm for President. “I won’t have a retirement fund anyway unless this country gets back on track soon,” he reasons.

It’s not exactly a cheery vision of the country’s future, and as Riggs heads for the mens’ room, the Lamm Committee’s other member, a 21-year-old college sophomore from Queens named Scott Farrell, tries to put a lighter gloss on the whole enterprise. What really scares him, Farrell says, is Perot. His authoritarian impulses. The weird people who follow him. “You’ve got to get Perot out,” says Farrell. “Or else all of this just becomes an ego-based movement. Like a cult.”

By Tucker Carlson