Countdown

The Buying of the President 2000

Patrick Buchanan

Patrick Buchanan moved into his first White House office three decades ago. The Vietnam War had cast a neat part through the men of his generation, with short-haired men falling to the right and long-haired men to the left. Pat was a short-hair. Writing in his frequent newspaper columns, the Nixon aide never missed a chance to open fire against draft-dodging liberals.

Angela Buchanan is 10 years younger than her brother Pat. The women of her generation went to college and planned careers their mothers had never even dreamed of. Angela studied graduate-level mathematics at McGill University in Montreal. There she found herself surrounded by long-haired Americans, many of whom had come there because they preferred carrying books to rifles. Her big brother’s tirades weren’t helping her reputation, and she feared they would soon damage her grades. So she wrote him in response, “Could you calm down a little bit?”

Pat invited the sister he called “Bay” to work for Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. She did. And though their disparate duties kept them apart — she was a campaign bookkeeper, he a White House speechwriter — they communicated frequently. Sprinkled through Pat’s files are handwritten notes from his sister. “Here are the astounding figures,” proclaims a page torn from a yellow legal pad. “See what can be done, if anything.” Within these notes lay the seeds of a remarkable political partnership.

The Buchanans today operate a highly profitable political machine. Pat is the front man. Every four years he takes a break from his work as a television pundit to hit the campaign trail. He tosses out his trademark sharp-tongued barbs as quickly as he can think them up; his are often the best one-liners of the campaign. Bay is the back office. As compulsively organized as her brother is freewheeling, Bay keeps the campaign trains running on time with an attention to detail that aides describe as obsessive. Together, they have built a semipermanent political organization that both promotes conservative causes and earns millions of dollars for “Buchanan, Inc.”

Pat and Bay Buchanan have accomplished nothing less than a complete overhaul of the rules by which the game of presidential politics is played. By embarrassing President Bush in 1992 and briefly sidelining Robert Dole in 1996, they prodded mainstream GOP leaders into queuing up behind a centrist like George W. Bush early in 1999. And by demonstrating the viability of an unabashedly right-wing candidate, the Buchanans encouraged rival Gary Bauer into the contest and pushed Malcolm “Steve” Forbes, Jr. further to the right.

In late 1999, however, the Buchanans abandoned their lifelong commitment to the GOP — “the party of Lincoln, Nixon, and Reagan,” as Pat liked to call it — and moved to reincorporate Buchanan, Inc., in the Reform Party. Having raised less than $4 million — pocket change in the cash-flush GOP field — the Buchanans surely realized that their prospects for reaching the top of the Republican ticket were dim. In announcing his decision on October 25, Buchanan became the overnight front-runner in the contest for the third party’s presidential nomination. “Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation,” he said. “Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Except for adding campaign finance reform to his political laundry list, Buchanan hasn’t overhauled either his message or tactics in his switch to the Reform Party. He would restore America’s “lost sovereignty” through a protectionist trade policy he has long called “economic nationalism.” He would lift restrictions on gun ownership, call “a time-out on legal immigration,” and ban all abortions.

The key to understanding what Buchanan will do as a card-carrying Reformer lies in the political events that shaped his worldview, the evolution of his sister’s permanent campaign, and the way the campaign’s direct-mail fundraising tactics shape the message of Buchanan, Inc.

The Great Betrayal is the title Pat Buchanan chose for his 1998 book, which advocates his “economic nationalism.” He could easily have chosen the same title to describe the dominant theme of his own life, which has been haunted by three powerful men — Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom Buchanan believes were betrayed by a phantasmic liberal elite.

Senator Joseph McCarthy was a hero of Buchanan’s boyhood. His father, William Buchanan, was a government accountant who steadfastly defended McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusades. His mother, Catherine Buchanan, was a nurse and a teacher who raised seven boys and two girls in their home in northwest Washington, D.C. All nine Buchanan kids attended Catholic schools and the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament.

Patrick Buchanan was a rowdy boy who inherited his father’s belief that McCarthy, like Spanish dictator Francisco Franco before him, was felled by power-hungry leftists. He skipped military service to attend Georgetown University, from which he was suspended for punching a police officer who had stopped his car. He was ultimately readmitted, and graduated in 1961. After earning a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, he took a job as a writer at the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat. There, he often editorialized against liberals and their causes, particularly the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement.

The youngest Buchanan brothers were still babblers when Angela was born. They were either unable to fully pronounce the word “baby,” or were unable to finish a word with Pat and his father around, so they simply called her “Bay.” The nickname stuck. She graduated from Rosemont College, a Catholic school near Philadelphia, before earning her master’s at McGill.
In 1965, thanks to his newspaper job, Pat got a chance to interview another family idol: Richard Nixon. As soon as Buchanan learned that Nixon was planning a political comeback, he said, “Sir, I’d like to get aboard early.” In 1966, Pat joined the Nixon team at a starting salary of $10,000 a year. Two years later the 30-year-old Buchanan moved into an office next door to the White House.

The roots of Buchanan’s present-day style of conservative populism were evident from his earliest days with Nixon. He coined the phrase “silent majority” and helped shape the strategy that drew millions of “hard-hat” Democrats to the GOP. “We should move to recapture the anti-Establishment tradition or theme in American politics,” Buchanan wrote in a typical 1972 memorandum. “We need to shed the ‘in bed with Big Business’ image . . . we should seek out the opportunity to ‘take on’ some egregious, giant . . . corporation publicly — as Kennedy did with Big Steel in 1962.”

And in a White House that became notorious for its dirty tricks, Buchanan quickly developed a reputation as the toughest trickster of all. He popularized the phrase “political hardball” and repeatedly showed his elder colleagues what it meant. He co-authored the 1972 “assault strategy” that promised “not only to defeat” Democratic nominee George McGovern, “but to have him indicted.” He and assault strategy co-author Ken Khachigian are widely believed to have been the authors of phony pamphlets and forged letters that viciously attacked Edmund Muskie, one of which caused the Democratic front-runner to break down in tears at a New Hampshire news conference and irreparably damage his own presidential prospects.

Buchanan’s defense of Nixon grew even more pugilistic as the Watergate crisis began to unfold. In December 1972, after CBS News began reporting on The Washington Post‘s allegations of a cover-up, he proposed drawing up the now infamous “enemies list” of hostile reporters, and suggested “firing the first guy in the bureaucracy found talking to [then-CBS reporter] Daniel Schorr.” When the White House tape recordings came to light the following summer, he advised Nixon to destroy the tapes. Nixon didn’t. When special prosecutor Archibald Cox pressed the president to hand over the tapes, Buchanan told Nixon to fire Cox. Nixon did. The firing — which triggered what came to be called the “Saturday Night massacre” — turned leading Republicans against the White House. It was a critical miscalculation that made impeachment possible, and resignation inevitable.

At the height of the scandal, Buchanan received a call from his father. “Pat, why aren’t you fighting?” his father asked. “That was the right question,” Buchanan later wrote in his 1990 memoir Right From the Beginning. “Whether Nixon was wrong was not the relevant issue. Even if he had booted it, he had a right to be defended; and his friends had a duty to be there.” Buchanan stood by Nixon until the bitter end.

Nixon’s downfall was a blow to Buchanan. Though he emerged unscathed legally — back in July 1971, when his White House superiors asked Buchanan to investigate the president’s enemies, he turned the job down and documented his decision in a memo — he was crushed emotionally. He’d been the first full-timer to join Nixon’s comeback in 1966, and the last to leave in 1974. For those eight years, Buchanan’s personal and professional lives revolved around Nixon’s: He met Shelley Scarney at Nixon’s New York City law office in 1967, courted her while she worked as a White House receptionist, and married her in 1971, with the president and his family in attendance. Nixon had become like a second father.

Bay was so disillusioned after Watergate that she quit both the United States and the Catholic Church. After finishing her degree at McGill, she moved to Sydney, Australia, and found work as an accountant. There she dated a Mormon. The relationship didn’t last, but her interest in the Church of Latter-Day Saints did. She converted shortly after her return to the states. Neither Pat nor her father attended her 1982 wedding to a Mormon lawyer.

After a failed bid to be named U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Pat took up writing a syndicated newspaper column and wangled a seat on a Washington talk show called The McLaughlin Group. He was angry at the liberal establishment he blamed for toppling both McCarthy and Nixon, and bitterness became the central theme of his commentary.

Bay returned from exile in 1976 to work on the long-shot presidential bid of a California governor. After he lost the GOP primary, Bay landed work as controller of “Citizens for the Republic,” the organization that was created with money and mailing lists left over from Ronald Reagan’s ‘76 campaign. Headed by Reagan confidant Lyn Nofziger, Citizens for the Republic used direct-mail solicitations to help finance (in ways later determined to be illegal) Reagan’s political activities. Bay’s hard work at Citizens for the Republic got her the job of treasurer of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, which ultimately drew about half its receipts from direct-mail appeals to conservative voters.

President Reagan rewarded Bay by appointing her treasurer of the United States. In that post she spearheaded a drive to sell more U.S. savings bonds, started making pennies out of cheap zinc (instead of copper) to save money, and lent her graceful signature to millions of greenbacks. At 32, she was the youngest person ever to hold that post — though only the second thirty-something Buchanan to have an office next door to the White House.

Pat followed his younger sister into the Reagan administration during its second term, serving as White House communications director from 1985 to 1987. Buchanan liked Reagan, and he accompanied the president on the historic Reykjavik summit and other high-profile trips. But he never became a part of Reagan’s innermost circle, as he had been at the Nixon White House. By the time the Iran contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke, though, those in Reagan’s inner circle were working to keep the former actor away from the television cameras. They turned to Pat as stand-in.

Buchanan found himself in an eerily familiar place: defending a conservative president he loved against the liberal establishment that had betrayed him. He took Reagan’s case to the public during halftime on ABC’s Monday Night Football, in a segment of an NBC News special, and in frequent bites on CBS Evening News. The exposure raised his value as a pundit, and he cashed in after leaving Reagan’s service. He rejoined The McLaughlin Group and soon became a highly paid regular on CNN’s Crossfire and Capital Gang.

It was Bay Buchanan who initiated her brother’s transformation from TV pundit to what columnist Jack Anderson called “the Energizer bunny of the Republican presidential primary.”
Pat Buchanan toyed with the idea of running in 1988, but he stayed out of the race in deference to Jack Kemp. He began attacking George Bush for “betraying Reagan’s legacy” almost as soon as the election was over, and the accusations grew sharper as the year wore on. After reading a particularly critical column in December 1991, Bay rang up her older brother. “We don’t have any time for any further discussions,” she reportedly said. “If you’re interested in running, give me a call.”

He called. Bay urged him on and offered to manage the campaign. She was divorced, with three sons to support. Her career as a political consultant had stalled after managing a losing Senate campaign in 1986 and losing her own bid for California secretary of state in 1990. Her primary source of income was a $58,500-a-year salary from the nearly moribund Citizens for the Republic, which was supporting itself by renting its contributor lists to marketers of everything from magazine subscriptions to cheese. Bay needed a new gig.

And so it was that, after decades of chasing each other around the pews of conservative politics, brother and sister Buchanan finally joined forces. In the years since, he has shaped himself into the candidate he spent years urging first Nixon and then Reagan to become. And she sits atop one of the most independent — and profitable — political machines in the country. “Bay Buchanan runs it like a general,” Pat’s wife, Shelley, told a reporter in 1996. “There wouldn’t be a campaign if it weren’t for Bay.”

The Buchanans began their 1992 campaign by recruiting an exceptionally young but remarkably talented staff. Finance chairman L. Brent Bozell III, pollster Frank Luntz, political director Paul Erickson, and press secretary Greg Mueller were all still in their twenties when they started working for the Buchanans. Bozell, Luntz, and Mueller had cut their political teeth at the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), renowned for hitting liberal incumbents with devastatingly dirty television ads. Also on board was Scott MacKenzie, a veteran of two Reagan campaigns who’d worked for Kemp in 1988.

Buchanan ran in 33 state primaries in 1992 and won 3 million votes. He humiliated President George Bush in working-class New Hampshire by winning 37 percent of the vote. The Buchanans carried their conservative crusade as far as the National Republican Convention in Houston, where Pat used a nationally televised speech to invite the faithful to join him in a “Culture War” against the liberal establishment.

As successful as Buchanan was at the polling halls, Buchanan, Inc., was even more so in the locked “caging rooms” where the envelopes containing contributions to the campaign were opened. Out on the campaign trail, Buchanan wrote and refined his own speeches, most of which urged supporters to join his “fight against” one liberal cause or another. Back at their headquarters in McLean, Virginia, a well-to-do suburb of the nation’s capital, Bay Buchanan transformed her brother’s various battle cries into tightly written fundraising letters, which were mass-mailed to carefully selected target audiences. By the time the ‘92 campaign was over, Buchanan, Inc. had raised at least $7.2 million, most of it through direct-mail solicitations. It was a record-smashing haul. Not since Reagan had a candidate used direct mail so successfully.

Once the convention was over, Pat Buchanan rejoined the punditocracy. His quixotic campaign boosted his ratings — and his take-home pay. The year before the campaign he made $457,000. In 1994 he pulled down $608,579.

Bay Buchanan had no such career to which she could return. But there was enough money left over from the campaign to pay her a salary for two more years. She took home $112,538 from January 1993 through March 1995, and campaign treasurer Scott MacKenzie’s consulting firm was paid $222,856 in the same period. She needed a way to keep the rest of her core team in place. And so, in February 1993, Bay changed the name of her defunct nonprofit organization to The American Cause, and moved it into the offices in McLean, Virginia, from which she’d run the campaign. The American Cause would allow Pat Buchanan to keep his name in front of conservative voters — and squeeze them for money at the same time. It raised $2,495,709 between the 1992 and 1996 elections, most of that from donors to the 1992 presidential campaign. An affiliated organization, the Coalition for the American Cause, collected millions more.

Through these noncampaign organizations the Buchanans were able to accept donations far larger than the $1,000-per-election maximum (for individuals) that’s allowed under federal campaign finance law. In 1994, for example, Roger Milliken, the owner of the nation’s largest privately held textile company, gave $250,000 to The American Cause and another $1,902,000 to the Coalition for the American Cause. Milliken, whose businesses have been hurt by the flood of cheap textiles, received the Buchanans’ help in lobbying Congress against adopting the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The Buchanans received literally millions of dollars worth of television exposure. They bought ads on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN, which starred a very presidential-looking Pat Buchanan stating: “Bill Clinton is bringing back his rejected Congress to ram through his GATT trade treaty. That is a crime against democracy.”

As a not-for-profit organization, The American Cause pays no taxes on its activities, but it has run afoul of the IRS for repeatedly failing to file its tax returns on time.

With an office and staff in place, the creation of a 1996 presidential campaign team was relatively simple. On the last Friday night in 1994, Bay locked up the generic glass and concrete offices of The American Cause. When she returned the following week, the offices once again were home to Buchanan for President. The name on the door had changed, but the faces inside all remained the same.

Buchanan did even better in 1996 than he had the first time around. He won high-profile early victories in Alaska, Louisiana, and all-important New Hampshire; and he almost won Iowa, in Bob Dole’s backyard. Buchanan made the cover of Time magazine in February — and was briefly considered to be the Republican front-runner — until the GOP’s moderate wing steamrolled him on Super Tuesday.

Once again, Buchanan’s showing at the ballot box was exceeded only by Buchanan, Inc.’s take at the mailbox. It collected a total of more than $16.3 million, mostly through direct mail. In just the first three months of 1996, Buchanan had spent more than four times as much on direct mail as the campaigns of President Clinton and GOP front-runner Dole combined. And the Buchanans didn’t stop there. Even after the nomination was hopelessly lost, Bay continued seeking funds. Around May 1 — weeks after Bay had laid off half the campaign’s hundred salaried workers — roughly 140,000 Buchanan supporters received a letter asking for money to continue Pat’s fight for “the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”

Buchanan, Inc., has proven itself astonishingly adept at collecting federal matching funds. In 1992, Buchanan got more than $5 million in federal matching funds; only Clinton and Bush qualified for more. And in 1996, Buchanan got nearly $11 million in federal matching funds. The Dole campaign — which stayed on the road more than twice as long as Buchanan — got only $13.5 million. Clinton got only $13.4 million. Altogether, Buchanan, Inc., has been the beneficiary of more than $16 million in federal funds.

Buchanan’s success at the matching-fund game stems from how the money is raised. Only the first $250 from each donor qualifies for federal matching funds. As a result, candidates such as Clinton or Dole — each of whom received many contributions at the $1,000 limit — qualify for a lower percentage of matching funds than do candidates such as Buchanan, whose direct-mail solicitations produced greater numbers of smaller donations.

With so much money coming in through the front door, Bay Buchanan found a way to take some out through the back door. In addition to her $85,000-a-year salary as campaign chairman, she made an undisclosed sum from a media-buying company that she’d set up on the side. The company — named WTS, after her sons, William, Tommy, and Stuart — collected an 8 percent commission on the roughly $4 million worth of broadcast advertising bought by the campaign, netting Bay some $320,000. WTS had no office — the checks were mailed to the home address of Carolyn Melby, Bay’s friend and former campaign office manager — and no clients other than the Buchanan campaign. Shortly before the current campaign, Bay Buchanan changed the name of WTS to “Carmel Consultants” — as in Carolyn Melby. (Asked whether the firm would buy the Buchanan campaign’s ads this time around, Bay Buchanan told the Center “I don’t expect them to — they could put in a proposal.")

Shortly after the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, Buchanan, Inc., metamorphosed back into not-for-profit mode. The American Cause was revived. The Coalition for the American Cause gamely sent out a fundraising letter calling for abolition of the “rogue regime” at the IRS. And the red-hot Buchanan for President mailing lists sold for a quick $360,000.

Pat Buchanan’s punditry — on and off the stump — has made him a wealthy man. He makes more than a million dollars a year, and is worth at least $4.4 million, according to financial disclosure documents filed in August 1999. Recent adjustments to his personal portfolio suggest that he’s taken his own predictions of economic gloom-and-doom to heart: Since filing his 1996 disclosure statement, he has sold most of his foreign stocks and many of his shares of large U.S. companies — and moved the money into bonds and bank shares. He lives in a white-columned mansion in McLean, Virginia, directly across the street from CIA headquarters. General Colin Powell and Sun Myung Moon (the Korean evangelist who founded the conservative Washington Times) live down the street.

At the beginning of 1999, when it was time to switch back to presidential-campaign mode, Buchanan, Inc., was ready. This year’s campaign includes an 800 number where callers are asked for their name and address before the receptionist even takes the call, and a website where an e-mail-based “Buchanan Brigade” is slowly supplanting direct-mail as a fundraising tool.

And where the other Republican primary campaigns offer yard signs that proclaim “Bush 2000” or “Dole 2000,” this one’s yard signs are ready-made to be reused. They read: “Buchanan for President.”

Most big presidential campaigns are financed mostly with big contributions. Many of these are raised at huge $1,000-a-plate dinners, or are solicited by fat cats who deliver checks in “bundles” to their candidate of choice. To become one of Texas Governor George Bush’s “Pioneers,” for example, a fundraiser must bring in at least $100,000. As this book makes painfully clear, most such individuals are looking to buy something other than good government.

The Buchanan, Inc., donors are different. The average contribution is a mere $27, according to Bay Buchanan. Perhaps more important than the small size of the typical Buchanan donation is the intent behind it: Other than a small cadre of textile-industry executives who hoped to benefit from Buchanan’s crusade against free trade, most of the donors to his 1996 campaign didn’t expect anything in return.

Take Paul Zignego, for example, the owner of Zignego Ready Mix in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Zignego and members of his family were among the top donors to Buchanan’s 1996 campaign. He told the Center for Public Integrity that he supported Buchanan’s stand against abortion, as well as his advocacy of strict constitutional government.

Even more unusual is an elderly woman who lives just outside Houston. The woman, who asked that her name not be used, lives on Social Security and gave Buchanan, Inc., a series of small contributions totaling more than $7,000 in 1995 and 1996, though much of that money was eventually returned. She told the Center that she supported Buchanan because he is a “fine Christian man” who “knows the difference between right and wrong, and would never do anything wrong.” Other than her desire to see the government returned to the way it was when she was young, she said, she expects nothing in return.

There is, however, a downside to the relentless grinding of the Buchanan money mill. To reap the harvest of disillusioned individuals such as Zignego and the woman in Texas, Buchanan, Inc., must sow discontent. Donors like these don’t respond to junk mail that says “All is well.” Rather, they whip out their checkbooks in response to crises, preferably ones that require immediate action in the form of a small contribution. Thus, to keep the money rolling in, Buchanan, Inc., must continually frame every complex and continuing issue in terms of a simple and urgent problem.

Which creates a simple and urgent problem for Buchanan. As soon as his rhetorical crises fade from the limelight, the ordinary Americans who give money to his campaigns disappear. Of the four textile companies that gave heavily to Buchanan in 1996, only one gave early money to his 2000 campaign. (Several Milliken employees are supporting Bush this time around.) Zignego told the Center that he’s sitting out the presidential race this time around; recognizing that he can’t make a dent against the big-money interests behind Bush and Gore, he’s backing conservative candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives instead. And the Texas retiree is making smaller contributions now.

The supporters who stand by Buchanan fight after fight tend to be from the fringes of American politics. Among them is Larry Pratt, the president of Gun Owners of America. Pratt, a co-chairman of Buchanan’s 1996 campaign, was forced to step down after the Center for Public Integrity reported that he had attended rallies sponsored by white-supremacist groups and had also advocated the creation of “civilian militias.” Also dropped from the 1996 campaign for similar reasons were William Carter of South Carolina and Susan Lamb of Florida, both of whom had ties to former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. (An investigation by USA Today found that the 1996 Buchanan campaign accepted nearly $12,000 from at least 18 donors with ties to Duke.)

Likewise, Buchanan’s rigid stand against abortion — he would outlaw it in all instances, including in cases of rape or incest — has attracted such fanatics as Michael Bray, who spent nearly four years in federal prison for his role in a series of abortion-clinic bombings. Michael Farris, another co-chairman of Buchanan’s 1996 campaign, participated in events honoring Bray and Paul Hill, who was convicted of murdering a Pensacola, Florida, abortion doctor and his bodyguard.

Buchanan’s top operatives are quick to point out that such extremists undoubtedly account for far less than 1 percent of their supporters and argue that they simply don’t have the resources to screen every donor. (This point was proven for them by TV satirist Michael Moore, who mailed the ‘96 campaign $100 from “Abortionists for Buchanan.” The check was promptly cashed.) But Pratt and Farris weren’t mere donors; they were two of only four campaign co-chairs. Not coincidentally, both are also recognized experts in direct-mail fundraisers.

Throughout the 1990s, Buchanan has become defined and redefined by the many contradictions between his career as a Washington insider and the zealots his direct-mail-driven campaigns attract. He paints himself as an outsider running against Washington, yet he’s lived inside the Capital Beltway for all but four of his 61 years. He appeals to evangelical Christians whose lives revolve around their families, though he himself is a devout Catholic who has never had children. And he speaks against immigration and affirmative action, while casting himself as the champion of America’s working class, whose ranks in fact are being swelled by immigrants and racial minorities.

Such disenfranchised supporters pulled Buchanan slowly but steadily away from the Republican Party, and the party likewise moved away from Buchanan. Although he was a star of the GOP’s 1992 convention, by the time of the 1996 convention Buchanan had become persona non grata — a rather remarkable turn of events for a man who served in both the Nixon and Reagan White Houses.

After the 1996 primaries, Buchanan openly floated the idea of bolting the GOP. And in the fall of 1999, he acted. “Both parties are addicted to soft money,” he said. “Both write laws with lobbyists looking over their shoulders. Both embrace the unprincipled politics of triangulation. And neither fights today with conviction and courage to rescue God’s country from the cultural and moral pit into which she has fallen.”

Betraying the GOP undoubtedly was not easy for Buchanan, whose Republican roots ran deep and who valued loyalty over nearly everything else. This, after all, was the man who stood by Nixon, the man who defended Reagan, and a man who has defended a veritable parade of right-wing extremists associated with his campaign. And while the Reform Party welcomed his zeal for smaller government and his working-class message of “economic nationalism,” the libertarian-leaning party — led by an ex-wrestler who once wore feather boas in the ring — merely tolerates his fierce stand against abortion rights.

But joining the Reform Party was a brilliant move for Buchanan, Inc. The party is sitting on $12.6 million in federal money that will flow to the nominee, and it gets another $2 million to spend on its August convention. An extended campaign will raise the public profiles of both Buchanans, bringing them even more lucrative media deals and speaking fees — whether or not Buchanan wins the party’s nomination.

The reach of Buchanan, Inc., was dramatically illustrated in the wake of President Clinton’s 1998 testimony before Kenneth Starr’s grand jury. At one point, the Buchanans appeared on two TV networks at the same time, Pat on MSNBC and Bay on CNN. As they dug into Clinton, their hands struck the air in the exact same manner: pointing and poking in staccato spasms. And the theme they hammered away at was the same, too: America had once again been betrayed.

Top Ten Career Patrons

1.  Vopnford family, Blair, Nebraska
$19,000

2.  Milliken & Company, Inc., Spartanburg, South Carolina/Milliken family ***
$18,500

3.  Duro Industries, Fall River, Massachusetts
$18,000

4.  Zignego family, Waukesha, Wisconsin
$17,000

5.  Hubner family, Goshen, New York
$12,350

6.  National Right to Life PAC, Washington
$10,400

7.  Buchanan family, Northern Virginia
$9,500

8.  Knight family, Boston
$9,000

9.  Leigh Fibers, Wellford, South Carolina
$8,000

10.  Uihlein family, Northbrook, Illinois
$7,500

This list is based on individual and PAC contributions to Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns; all contributions to Buchanan’s federal PACs (America First PAC and PATPAC) from 1991-1998; and all individual and PAC contributions to the 2000 presidential campaign through June 30, 1999. Independent expenditures are also included, where appropriate.
Sources: Federal Election Commission; Center for Responsive Politics.
2. Includes contributions from employees of Milliken & Company. Also includes contributions from Milliken family members, some of whom live in New York City.
3. Includes contributions from the families of Edward Ricci, Robert F. Fischer, and Stanley B. Goldberg, who are all executives of Duro Industries. Many of the contributors live in Rhode Island.
6. This money consists entirely of independent expenditures for the 1996 presidential campaign.
7. Contributions are from Pat Buchanan, wife Shelley, since-deceased mother Catherine, sister Angela, brothers Thomas and Brian, and sister-in-law Phyllis Ann.

***NOTE: The Center for Public Integrity has learned that Roger Milliken donated $250,000 to Buchanan’s not-for-profit organization, The American Cause, and another $1.9 million to an affiliated organization, the Coalition for the American Cause. Since complete donor lists for these groups are not available, these figures are not included in the above list.