BODY SLAM

...I think he's being polite—he hasn't smacked me yet...

...After being fined for libeling a political opponent, Dearborn's late mayor, the 360-lb...

...Ordering a plate of potato skins in a hotel restaurant booth, we sip Pepsi through bendy straws until Phil and Donna start going at it like two ferrets in a pillow case...

...We have people who read Robert's Rules of Order every night before they go to bed," says Donna Donovan, the Reform party's self-effacing press secretary...

...Such chaos could make the party ripe for a hostile takeover, especially since nearly one-fifth of the Reform party's districts have no delegates at the convention...

...In an unmiked conference room, where delegates keep shouting down speakers with, "Louder...

...Lots of it...

...Ventura has nixed Pat Buchanan as a presidential candidate for his emphasis on social issues...

...As befits one whose campaign literature boasts that he has given over five gallons of blood, Gargan has his share of enemies—namely Donna Donovan, the Reform party's (and the Perot camp's) spokeswoman...

...In fact, there are whole rooms set up expressly for that purpose...

...He joined up with the Perotistas back in 1992, and has been agitating against them ever since—criticizing the leadership, pushing for a more open, democratic party, and ingratiating himself with Ventura, who has made Phil his Webmaster, one of his spokesmen, and a salesman of Jesse Ventura action figures (a $25 bargain...

...They vote on how to count the votes...

...Neither principal makes a strong showing in person...

...Perot breezes through to fire up the volunteers with his folksy anti-elitist boilerplate, but he flees the premises before Shar can even serve him a piece of cake...

...Consequently, the convention concourse feels like The Third Man bar in post-World War II Vienna—nobody's quite sure who the other guy is working for...

...Trump," says Stone, adding, "Mr...

...Here, men travel the halls wearing plastic cheese heads not because they are from Wisconsin, but because they want their kids to recognize them on C-Span...

...According to several sources, William von Raab, U.S...

...Paranoia seems to run rampant [in the Reform Party]," says Stone...

...And in what has become the nineties version of Richard J. Daley's Chicago, the Reform party will again use its Internet/call-in voting system, where anybody can request a ballot, and some people get two or three...

...Next door is a monitoring room, where spectators can observe the arguments and argue about them...

...That's an outright lie...

...But the biggest mystery of the convention is the candidacy of Donald Trump...

...He also met one of the draft Trump volunteers in the lobby...

...Orville Hubbard, once crossed the Detroit River to Ontario to install a "government in exile...

...But somebody in Dearborn isn't taking him at his word...

...It is a place for malcontents and disconnects, third-rate politicians and pamphleteers with bleeding ulcers...

...Though von Raab does not return calls seeking comment, I bump into Del Papa at the convention...

...Next time," he says, "leave the knife in the back...

...He's still not of age, but that doesn't mean he's shy of experience...

...Sure, Shar may do something quirky now and then: like the time congressman Jim Traficant made a late-night stop in Michigan to address the Reform party and ended up staying in Shar's guest bedroom...

...Next to the Rules Committee is the Credentials Committee, where splinter groups from four states press their claim to being the legitimate Reform party chapter in order to seat their delegates...

...Shar would be welcome at a major-party convention—in the protest pit, where the hoi polloi in their sandwich boards are kept cordoned a safe distance from anything that matters...

...When I call the Icon public relations firm where Stone works, the receptionist tells me that both von Raab and Del Papa have numbers at the firm...

...Party-building is not a pretty thing...

...In sports, you have to have athletic ability to compete and win...

...There are so many factions in the Reform party that, in keeping with its founder's paranoia, the entire convention seems fueled by mutual suspicion...

...We're building a non-ideological party," says Lenora Fulani, perennial black-radical candidate for president and a fierce party-builder for Reform...

...Everywhere you look in the hotel, you see The Donald's albino-caterpillar eyebrows and the hair that looks like an abandoned nest...

...when he left the Republicans to start his own party in Connecticut, he unimaginatively called it "A Connecticut Party...

...Jesse's man, the garrulous Jack Gargan, is a former chicken farmer who has publicly discussed his concern about a Y2K Armageddon...

...If Ross and Jesse won't openly spar with each othPEROT breezes through TO FiRE UP THE VOLUNTEERS With His Folksy ANTI-ELITIST BOILERPLATE, BUT FLEES before THE CHAOS SETS IN...

...I had him saying silly stuff during the Gulf War," Harvey confides, "just to ensure that I was still pulling the strings...

...It was Ross's," she says...

...Volunteer long enough in an anti-politics party, and it's only natural to want to assume a position of political prominence...

...Rebounding within an hour, he'll run for vice-chair...

...Trump is most litigious, so be very careful...

...In politics, there is no barrier to entry whatsoever...

...One would be wrong...

...And we have some that are worse...

...It isn't as though Shar doesn't deserve it...

...The real friction comes between the Ventura and Perot camps...

...Ventura, who teleconferences with the delegates after his flight is canceled because of inclement weather, gains the advantage when his candidate to replace Russ Verney as party chair beats the Perotistas' favorite...

...Luckily, her husband was thinking ahead...

...Take Tom McLaughlin...

...Farmers are the ones we should be representing...

...As Phil says, before sucking another hit of Pepsi through his straw, "In business, you have to demonstrate an ability to produce something that people agree is valuable...

...Ventura is the party's only elected star, unless one counts the city council member from Greer, South Carolina, or the school board member from Hunting-ton County, Pennsylvania...

...Later, when washing his bed linens, Shar plucked her dryer's lint trap for a keepsake...

...Trump, however, is a minor subplot at the convention...

...Phil doesn't remember, but feigns a stabbing motion, as he is not happy she brought this up in front of a reporter...

...Still, if Ventura could further wrest the party from Perot by playing kingmaker with Weicker, he'd neutralize one of the stock criticisms of Reform...

...Besides campaign finance reform and term lim-its—which address how candidates achieve office and when they leave, but not what they do while there—it's hard to find any issues that animate Reformers...

...It was crusty as hell...

...Technically, you're not permitted to...

...He'll lose...

...Shar has long been a volunteer, and Ross has always said the volunteers are what the party's all about (Perot would put money on that, and has several times, by hiring private investigators to keep tabs on them...

...Madsen has been called the "most despised man in the Reform party...

...I ask Del Papa where he can be reached, and he gives me a cellphone number with no company affiliation...

...THIS IS A PLACE FOR MALCONTENTS...

...ideology doesn't motivate the Reformer masses...

...Every couple of feet, there's another clipboard with some petitioner trying to draft Ralph Nader or David Boren or Colin Powell...

...Russ Verney, who is stepping down as chairman of the Reform party after choosing not to run for reelection, smells a rat, or, more precisely, a short-fingered Vulgarian, as Spy magazine used to call The Donald...

...But as an experiment in bottom-up democracy, I sit nonchalantly, my press pass out of sight, and vote my conscience...

...I think the guy is kind of flaky...

...We have those kind of people here," she says...

...In their midst, the forces of billionaire Reform party founder Ross Perot are pitted against the forces of Jesse Ventura, pro-wrestler-turned-Minnesota-governor, and they are squaring off in [insert obligatory wrestling metaphor here...

...I invite them to gouge each other's eyes out over lunch...

...He's the chairman of the Rules Committee, and with "over twenty-two years experience in Quality Assurance verifying compliance with codes, specifications and regulatory requirements," as his candidate bio tantalizes, he's ideally suited for the job...

...Not because she races Corvettes— with only one car on the track at a time...

...Weicker could transform what has been a cult of personality under Perot to a cult with no personality...

...THESE PEOPLE ARE UNITED NOT IN IDEOLOGY—THEY HAVE NONE—BUT IN DISDAIN FOR THE TwO-PARTY SYSTEM...

...There are official contenders for the presidential nomination, too, though you haven't heard of them—yet...

...Instead, he's endorsed everyone from Colin Powell (who has declined) to John McCain (who has declined) to former governor Lowell Weick-er (who has not declined, but who seems so disliked within the party that even party spokeswoman Donna Donovan, who once worked for Weicker before he flip-flopped on a no-new-taxes pledge, says if Weicker won, "I'd have to think about leaving...

...Neither he nor von Raab, with whom he works, is supporting Donald Trump...

...How can you say that...

...He calls her "my nemesis on the Internet...

...Take John from Nebraska, whose heaving torso taxes his shirt buttons as he barks, apropos of nothing, "How many people here ate breakfast this morning...

...There is bickering...

...Jeanne regains her composure, paging through her binder as if she's just shooed a fly...

...They vote on whether to allow delegates to move their luggage to the lobby for checkout...

...So she framed the whole kit and caboodle, as they say in Lansing: the picture, the plate, the fork, the napkin, even, she says, "one little piece of cake left on the plate with icing...

...Phil counters, saying Donna withheld the delegate lists to hamstring Gargan's campaign...

...And so it goes, for about half an hour...

...Tom is a volunteer from Pennsylvania who is running for party chair...

...An actual quote from the actual committee chair: "How many people want to vote on taking the vote...

...For the last seven years, it's hung in my foyer...

...Instead, many speak, in a sort of mind-numbing babble of passionate pronouncements and non-sequiturs...

...It's enough to make even the party architects recoil...

...Stone says the charges that he's behind the Trump groundswell are ridiculous...

...Clinton sucks...

...Despite all the quarrels, Jeanne Doogs, the Texas state party chair, sits stoically outside the credentials battlefield, putting a sunny face on all the strife...

...But besides that, this is a place that Shar Johnson calls home...

...almost anyone who enters the meeting can vote on the 40 proposed amendments to the party constitution...

...Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...But as she tries to explain how two New Jersey delegations' rival claims were settled in court, an eavesdropping Illinois delegate nearly lunges over the table at her: "Don't tell the press the case has been settled...

...He tells me the suggestion is ridiculous...

...The Perotistas don't trust the Venturans, as Jesse got elected governor of Minnesota without any help from Perot and has taken to saying publicly that it's time somebody else was Reform's candidate for president...

...But for the highest concentration of characters ever to congregate in Dearborn, consider the assemblage at the Hyatt Regency this late-July weekend...

...Donna says that Jesse's action figures are made in China...

...Donna says Gargan feels the same about her...

...People are fighting to get into our party," she says, though five states didn't bother sending delegates...

...Give us Barabbas...

...And then there are the votes...

...That would be Phil Madsen...

...I do it right up front," says Donna, "don't worry about your back...

...Donna hits Phil below the belt, suggesting that wrestling is fake...

...Auto magnate Henry Ford, who practically owned the Detroit suburb, was so fanatically opposed to Ford executives' smoking in his country club that he had his driver seize their cigars, which he roasted in a public bonfire...

...I'm not sure what that proves," says Stone...

...But that hasn't diminished her fitness to be Reform party secretary, as evidenced by the 15 or so endorsements from state-party-chair types advertised on her neon pink campaign flyers...

...As she cleared Perot's plate from the table, she says, "it looked just like any plate...

...He'll lose again...

...Harvey Powell, a 34-year-old Kentucky real-estate broker has declared for president...

...I do what anyone interested in the future of the Reform party would do...

...What Shar is worried about is the perceived intensity of her devotion, though "devotion" might not adequately convey the intensity...

...But there is somebody Donna dislikes more than Gargan...

...So intent are they on having it both ways—on calling Republicans and Democrats identical twins, while also claiming their ideological extremes control the parties' agendas—that issues for Reformers seem almost an afterthought...

...Its $12.5 million in matching funds in the next election cycle boosts its attractiveness to second-tier candidates contemplating a third-party run...

...Here, you've probably guessed, is the Reform Party National Convention...

...On a pamphlet shoved at me by one of the splinter delegations from New Jersey, there are 510 words on the page, of which 276 are underlined...

...In fact, rumors persist all weekend that covert forces are pushing the candidacy even though Trump himself says he's not running...

...In the Reform party, almost everyone does...

...Here, a sworn enemy of "the petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, military-industrial, transnational fascist assault on the American way of life," in the words of one attendee, can find a helpmate...

...As evidence, he hands me a draft Buchanan for president press release with von Raab's name on it (von Raab was a co-chair in Buchanan's '92 campaign...

...Donna tells me Phil's nickname is "Madman...

...A non-delegate can vote, a non-uniformed janitor can vote, even a journalist can vote...

...customs commissioner under Ronald Reagan, and Dominic Del Papa, a consultant, are pushing a Trump candidacy...

...But sources close to one of the Trump 2000 draft groups say that Roger Stone, the former political consultant who does consulting work for Trump on his business deals, is working behind the scenes with some associates to rally support for The Donald...

...Here, people adorn their T-shirts from the hotel gift-shop with enough clanking badges to earn them dinner shifts at Ruby Tuesday's...

...After a cryptic statement from Trump seeming to deny that he was running, the New York Times reported that Trump had pulled the plug on his potential candidacy...

...Donna reminds Phil that he made her cry by calling her "stupid" at the '97 Nashville convention...

...Trump is not here in person, but slick Trump 2000 posters were apparently put up by two different sets of Reformers who say they are acting of their own accord, though they both throw parties in posh hospitality suites featuring open bars...

...Do you know where your breakfast came from—it came from a farmer...

...Back in 1992, when Perot launched the candidacy that eventually launched the Reform party, he stumped in Michigan, where Shar served him some of her rainbow-chip cake...

...It's just myself," he says, though he says he's worked with Stone before...

...His outburst is a hit-and-run, and he disappears into the bowels of the hotel...

...Most political parties wouldn't entrust that responsibility to just anybody...

...They vote on whether to move the media to the back of the room...

...Trump run, no, this is not an effort orchestrated by me and certainly not by Mr...

...Three open mikes stand perpetually manned, by delegates still thrilled to be in Dearborn, directing our attention to the "the" in Paragraph 1, Section A, Subsection 2, Vivisection B. They alternately cheer and heckle each other, yelling out all manner of admonitions: "Buncha whores...

...But without a personality (or Perot's deep-pockets), it is hard to see what the Reform party is, besides a homely cousin to the Republicans and Democrats...

...So any idiot can get involved in politics, and most idiots do...

...Fulani loses in a squeaker for vice chair at the convention, perhaps because some consider her a Communist, though she finds labels "deadening...

...These are written as they would be spoken—with emphasis...

...We're not in a hurry to get back to the convention, which has turned into utter chaos...

...But it wasn't...

...But Tom's no loser...

...It's easy to dismiss Verney as paranoid since he works for Perot, a man convinced that Vietnamese-backed assassins showed up on his front lawn in Dallas...

...Maybe Verney is paranoid, but even Perotistas have enemies...

...In this, the most democratic of parties, they vote on everything...

...All of a sudden, it was like, TOUCH THAT STUFF AND YOU'RE DEAD MEAT...

...The Rules Committee isn't just stacked with Rules-Committee types like Tom, frustrated parliamentarians who, back home, wreak havoc on neighborhood-association charters and the bylaws of their church...

...Jeanne looks as a Texas delegate should look—silver hair, shiny pumps, Betsy Ross color-coordination...

...Harvey says he's done consulting work for Clinton, helped maintain a multinational coalition against Saddam Hussein, and, through a covert fax system he worked out with a Secret Service agent, controlled nearly everything George Bush said during his presidency...

...But the Reformers trust everybody...

...They not only argue, they bang out pamphlets...

...Process is a much higher priority, and at this convention, the delegates argue so long about credentials and intra-party squabbles that they never quite get around to debating and voting on their platform (or even electing two of their four officers—sorry, Shar...

...But she does seem afraid that I might think she's "one of those wackos," as she says in a sharp Michigan accent...

...It is a big teepee, with no flap—where Patriot party members smoke the peace pipe with neo-Marx-ist New Alliance loyalists...

...Or because she wears a red-white-and-blue sequined vest ($35 from a fruit market in Lansing) and baked a cake for the entire convention ("Shar's Michigan Cake" is listed on the schedule...

...The gentleman from Farm Aid takes his seat to confused applause, but few get off so easy...

...But the term Rules Committee is itself a misnomer...

...As Gargan is declared the winner, standing on his chair to wave Tricky Dick victory signs, he turned to her, according to Donovan, and said, "You're through...

...He said, 'Ya know, Shar, that may well belong to the next president of the United States,'" she recalls...

...It's understandable that tensions permeate this convocation...

...Russ Verney has lost control of his party...

...Such openness might lead one to expect an engaging debate...

...The people gathered here are united not in ideology—they have none—but in their disdain for the two-party system...

...For "committee" suggests a fixed number of decision-makers, be they elected or appointed, who conduct the tricky business of amending a party's constitution...

...At the Reform Party National Convention, however, Shar stands a good chance of becoming the party's national secretary— one of four officers to be elected by the 351 delegates who have flown in at their own expense...

...But Ventura has vowed to serve out his term as governor and not run for president in 2000...

...THE DELEGATES ARGUE SO LONG ABOUT CREDENTIALS AND INTRA-PARTY RIFTS THEY NEVER QUITE GET AROUND TO VOTING ON THEIR PLATFORM...

...er, Phil and Donna have no such compunction...

...But though Stone would "love to see Mr...

...Yes, Stone admits, he was in Detroit on Trump casino business, and, yes, he did swing by the Hyatt the day before the convention just to "see what it was like...

...Weicker is fairly weak tea by the Reformers' standards...

...Since cake decorating is her profession, and since she already had an autographed picture of Perot, Shar thought it would be appropriate to commemorate the encounter...