SCRAPBOOK
Scrapbook BUCHANAN GOES REFORM? Cliché has it that the Reform party is a car looking for a driver. But with over $12 million in federal campaign funds at its disposal for the 2000 election, the...
...interference in China's "internal affairs," but it apparently has no such compunctions itself...
...Choate estimates this will cost "two to three million bucks—a cheap entry fee...
...Bay Buchanan, Pat's sister and campaign manager, told Reuters, "He is seriously considering this, but he won't have a decision anytime soon...
...Buchanan has raised $2.4 million (about $2.1 million of which comes from the Buchanan Brigades, small donors who give less than $200...
...According to the account in the Denver Post, the Chinese consulate in Chicago faxed this protest to the governor: "It is the strong demand of the Chinese consulate general that meetings between governor Owens and high officials from Taiwan should not be arranged...
...For the past few months, Choate's been working over Reform state chairs, about half of whom he says already support a Buchanan candidacy...
...Thus the remarkable fax from the mainland Chinese government to governor Bill Owens of Colorado in mid-August...
...The Foreign Ministry just didn't have any idea, I don't think, of what was going on...
...Though one high-placed campaign source told The Scrapbook the chances of Buchanan's running for the Reform nomination "are 50/50 at best," an inordinate amount of trial-ballooning sure is going on...
...Can a candidate stuff it...
...HERO WORSHIP AT THE TIMES For a remarkable bit of puffery, check out the New York Times's August 30 profile of former Tennessee senator Jim Sasser, who has just wrapped up a three-and-a-half-year stint as Bill Clinton's ambassador to China...
...If the top leadership wants to use the American embassy as a target for the venting of popular anger, it is unlikely to consult the Foreign Ministry about it...
...In striking contrast to his Chinese hosts, who professed deep dissatisfaction with what they deemed the insufficient American apologies for the accidental NATO bombing of China's Belgrade embassy, Sasser seems to think it meaningful that, while not apologizing, Chinese President Jiang Zemin "said to me that 'things happened that we did not intend to happen.'" At least Sasser doesn't claim that Jiang was unaware of Clinton's apology, even though it never appeared on Chinese TV...
...Owens went ahead with his meeting as planned, saying he called Beijing's vice consul in Chicago to let him know that "if he worried about his calendar, I'll worry about mine...
...Other Buchanan partisans, like William von Raab, who co-chaired Buchanan's '92 campaign, managed to arm-twist AND NO DOUBT MANY FINE EATERIES IN BETWEEN Admittedly, it's not easy to describe the shape and extent of New York's eighth congressional district...
...courtly" ex-senator has to say...
...I want everybody in this party...
...From the first overheated line—"He faced down the rampaging mobs in the streets of Beijing last spring"—the Times seemingly suspends all critical assessment of what the (triteness alert...
...Verney may just get his wish...
...But with over $12 million in federal campaign funds at its disposal for the 2000 election, the party's more like an airplane looking for a hijacker...
...Verney, in fact, has a tough time hiding his enthusiasm for Buchanan...
...Meanwhile, former Reform party vice-presidential candidate Pat Choate, a Ross Perot spear-carrier and Buchanan-family intimate, has been preparing the way...
...Why is he so convinced...
...This explains a lot...
...And according to reports last week, Pat Buchanan might be fishing out his ski mask...
...We hope we have six candidates out there trying to stuff it...
...What's more, Sasser seems to think it's meaningful that when a "junior Foreign Ministry official" visited the embassy, "his jaw just sort of fell...
...Perot and Russ Verney, the party's soon-to-be-departing chairman, are maintaining their public neutrality (though tears would be scarce if Buchanan, whom Perot rival Jesse Ventura opposes, captured the nomination...
...To win the nomination, candidates must individually petition for ballot access as independents in the 30 states that don't have Reform party lines on their ballots...
...Sasser seems to believe that the Chinese leadership depends on its own propaganda organs for news of what is going on in its own capital...
...Sasser, for example, is "convinced that senior leaders of the Chinese Government did not encourage the violence and that they were unaware that police had lost control of the mob outside the embassy...
...BEIJING'S COLORADO POLICY The Chinese Communist government in Beijing is fond of beating its breast about supposed U.S...
...His office placed a want ad with that description in the Hill last week...
...Owens, who had welcomed Chinese premier Zhu Rongji to Denver during Zhu's spring 1999 American tour, was about to play host to Stephen Si-Fang Chen, the equivalent of Taiwan's ambassador to the United States...
...As for votes, the Reform party actually encourages candidates to put the fix in: Anybody can vote in a Reform party primary...
...In The Scrapbook's brand new edition of Michael Barone's Almanac of American Politics 2000, the district is characterized as being three-fifths in Manhattan, two-fifths in Brooklyn, comprising in its Manhattan parts "the Upper West Side from 59th Street north to Morningside Heights and Columbia University: the venerable apartments along nearly a third of the delegates at July's Reform party convention into signing a pledge for Buchanan...
...Of course, what appeared on Chinese TV was what the senior leadership wanted to have appear on TV...
...Of all the vanity candidates, from Warren Beatty to Donald Trump, who have been playing footsie with the Reformers, Verney says, "Buchanan is the only one I see who could say, with a straight face, 'I endorse what the Reform party stands for.'" Buchanan is also well suited to manipulate Reform's nomination process...
...They weren't seeing the rocks being thrown, the Molotov cocktails...
...But, while taking away nothing from Barone and his co-author Grant Ujifusa, The Scrapbook finds infinitely more charming this gastro-nomically oriented description— "from Nathan's to Zabar's"—offered by the Democratic member who represents the district, the shall-we-say roly-poly Jerrold Nadler...
...We do not want to see that such improper arrangements damage the friendly relationship between the State of Colorado and China...
...With his devout following and new Reform party support, Buchanan should have little problem capturing the prize of $12.6 million in federal general-election matching funds (thanks to Perot's better-than-5-percent showing in the 1996 race), not to mention primary matching funds, of which Buchanan is already entitled to a couple of million...
...With telephone, Internet, and mail-in ballots available on request, Buchanan organizers can simply convert his extensive mailing lists, which number in the tens of thousands, into a ballot drive, which could help Buchanan sew up the nomination...
...Sasser evidently thinks the Chinese government is organized such that a junior foreign ministry official has access to the top leadership's thoughts and actions...
...Central Park West and West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, and the brownstones on the cross streets which house some of America's most idealistic and dedicated liberal-to-radical voters...
...But right now, if Buchanan wants it, and it seems he does, he could be on 50 election ballots come next fall...
...embassy...
...Verney says, dizzily...
...Only slightly less ludicrously, he apparently thinks that the foreign ministry itself would be cut in on something like the siege of the U.S...
...Because, as Sasser tells the credulous Times reporter, "What they saw on television—Chinese television—were peaceful student demonstrations...
Vol. 4 • September 1999 • No. 48
