Jack Gargan, Reform Party Man

...It's a Meet the Press producer, who takes several minutes to deliver the good news...

...They are both ruled by emotions rather than logic...

...fall into virulent disagreement over how to spell "speech...

...It is an arduous, labor-intensive process checking each voter against voter-registration lists (which many of the state Reform parties can't even afford to buy...

...But if there is an outpouring of genuine In the 1980s, Gargan became an accomplished handwriting analyst, doing $500-an-hour gigs on cruise ships and at "class hotels voter interest, or more cynical ballot drives by mischief-making non-Reformers, the party's paltry state organizations may well collapse trying to get the ballots sent out...

...Hurricanes have carried away his picnic table, washed his compressor into the front yard, and flooded his bottom floor, which explains the peeling wallpaper...

...Whatever you do," Gargan warns, giving directions, "don't cross the runway...

...A man who shrugs in death's wake may be ideally suited to head a party that has come to resemble a shipwreck...

...Gargan himself created a rush of good will when, after three days of somnolent speeches and pedantic points of order, he announced himself as a motorcycle-riding, pool-shooting poker player with "an eye for the ladies...

...I went down to the bar and got a kielbasa and a root beer for $4.15," says Gargan...

...But then, Donovan admits, one of her side taunted the dissidents with an e-mail that began "Hey loosers [sic...

...I just want everybody to know," he says, "that the Reform party is not made up of nuts...

...Gargan has had plenty of other jobs, from bowling alley pin-setter to horse-racing announcer to chicken farmer—a job his alcoholic stepfather made him perform as a teenager...

...He was so deemed because if a lapsed member failed to meet the association's annual requirements and didn't return the association's certificate after three warnings by mail, Gargan would drive hundreds of miles out of his way to visit their office and retrieve the parchment...

...They are passionate, engaged, and will fight to the finish...

...he says, comparing the Reformers' situation to a Y2K Armageddon...

...So we'd hold them over a fire, singe all the fur off of them, and let them go...

...Both bring tremendous enthusiasm...

...Finally, after careful study, he embarks on a deadly serious ten-minute prognosis of Who I Am...

...After a series of candid admonishments ("I'm nobody's yes man," Gargan says), his access dried up, and he hasn't spoken to Perot since 1992...

...Snatching the placemat from me, he ooohs and aaahs: "This is not easy y'know, it's like a giant computer in my head...

...But why take a chance...

...Across channel bridges that span osprey-populated marshes, one enters the sun-kissed isle of Cedar Key, home of the new head of the Reform party, chairman-elect Jack Gargan...

...Ventura, whom Gargan's only spoken to twice, let it be known that he'd likely leave the party if Reformers didn't select Gargan over the Perot faction's candidate...

...The Ven-turans, who claim to be democracy's best hope against heavy-handed Perotbots, tried to boot a Minnesota executive committee member who voted for the California site...

...I didn't want this job because [the Reform party] was, and maybe still is, a sinking ship," says Gargan...

...Sure, people may laugh...

...With his Irish eyes, jug-handle ears and slack wattle, he looks like he escaped from a group photo of James Michael Curley's ward heelers...

...It is a testament to Gargan's sense of duty that he endures such tumult...

...Though there are $2.5 million in federal funds allotted for the Reform convention, it's not clear these can be spent on primary costs...

...In Jesse, there is an obsession to succeed, more so than in Ross...

...He explains that the producer secured Gargan a solo segment on the show, even though Russ Verney had called up and tried to butt his way on the air...

...Matt Labash is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard...

...It was the kind of substantive speech Reformers find irresistible...

...He insists on "speach," I stick by Webster's...

...She hit her head while falling off her dock...

...Gargan's political awakening came in 1990, when he started a group called Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Out (THRO...

...BY MATT LABASH Cedar Key, Florida Descending into the Reform party's nerve center can be a bit unnerving...

...Sure, the Reform party could inflict real damage on the major-party candidates in next year's elections, but Reformers are a lot easier to take seriously when one is not in their midst...

...He speaks, rather, of the air mishaps, which sporadically turn up surprise cadavers, like the one he discovered bobbing in the water not far from his house...

...Gargan exclaims while hanging up the phone...

...Then there are the plane crashes...

...Last year, though Gargan didn't "need the job" or the "hassle," he ran as a Reform party candidate for Congress in Florida's fifth district (Gargan spends lots of time running for jobs he doesn't want...

...With Ventura-like candor, he huddled with a delegate describing in colorful terms—Gargan tends to curse like a clap-ridden sailor— how they needed to seize the party from the clutches of the Perotbots...

...Gargan, who has long advocated raucous bottom-up democracy, plans to start censoring the messages as soon as possible...

...A fight commenced when Gargan discovered that the establishment would not allow entry unless attendees kicked in $25 to hear speeches and enjoy the buffet...

...Since the Reform party has an anemic membership, and many congressional districts don't even have delegates, a well-funded, well-organized candidate could take over the state parties and control two-thirds or more of the delegates at the convention...

...Donovan's snipes—she calls Jack "befuddled" and worse—are no surprise to Gargan...

...Though the profession attracted a slippery breed, Gargan's bedrock sense of integrity manifested itself in his nickname: "Jack The Ripper...

...It was bad enough that the dissidents lost...

...The Venturans in turn called for Verney's resignation, though Verney is already set to resign at the end of the year...

...If a visitor makes a left onto the runway instead of Jack's driveway, he could become ground meat in the propeller of an incoming Cessna...

...Gargan is not one to take a chance on that either, and though he has drawn some fire for alarmist Y2K talk, I assure him there is nothing shameful about Y2K preparedness...

...As I sit in Gargan's study eyeing a thick stack of email printouts that he has marked "Potshots and Questionable Situations," he picks up the ringing phone before his gluttonous fax machine has a chance to gobble the incoming call...

...Who said what to whom is a constant source of party tension...

...But like many of the volunteers who became concerned with Perot's increasingly paranoid behavior, Gargan grew disillusioned...

...When his feathers unruffled, he came back to find the place crawling with recently Reformed Buchananites, who voted as Donovan instructed...

...Most party activists probably don't need to heat their homes owing to the sheer amount of flame in their e-mail accounts, as they accuse each other of everything from subterfuge to murder...

...Verney is stepping down...

...He advocated Singapore-style caning "of the young punks who are running amok" and the export of Florida felons to Mexican prisons, and he promised that he'd kill all 342 of Florida's death-row inmates on his first day in office...

...When Gargan says "we've had about ten deaths since I've been here," he's not counting his neighbor two doors down who turned up dead in the Gulf a few weeks ago...

...The Perotistas, who fancy themselves the open, democratic wing of the party—their dictatorial leader excepted—ensured that the site of the 2000 convention wasn't voted on at the last convention (delegates would likely have chosen Minnesota...

...There, is, in fact, no group that more regularly engages in intraparty squabbles, cheap hammer shots, and venal power grabs than the non-career politicians who run the Reform party...

...And the next highest elected official after Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura (who has just lent a noble air to the party by denouncing religion and expressing his wish to be reincarnated as a 38-Double-D bra) is the mayor of Watertown, New York...

...Many nice things can be said about Reformers...

...Gargan calls Fulani "a Communist," her followers he calls "disciples," and her bloc of voters he says "is for sale to the highest bidder" (as she proved when lunching recently with her ideological antonym, Pat Buchanan...

...We could be the laughingstock of the nation," Gargan warns...

...After a mid-career incarnation as an insurance salesman, Gargan finally settled in Tampa, began writing the first of five books on money management, and started one of the country's premier professional associations for financial planners...

...Let them...

...But it's a scenic ride...

...Gargan doesn't necessarily think this will happen...

...It was the kind of conversation rival political insiders usually have only in cloistered war rooms...

...But I learn while emptying Jack's wine as he prattles on that there was once a job Gargan relished, one he was pretty good at, too...

...Though it is intended only for emergencies (such as a primary winner committing a felony before the nominating convention), a loophole in the Reform constitution allows convention delegates to overturn the primary results with a two-thirds vote...

...Gargan was initially resistant to a visit in his natural habitat...

...Pine beetles eat Gargan's once majestic trees...

...It is hard to imagine most party chairmen insisting a reporter stay in their guest room (or for that matter being "up to their balls in work"), but Gargan is not most party chairmen and Reform is no ordinary party...

...Gargan raised $2.5 million for his term-limits effort by taking out hundreds of full-page newspaper ads that featured his surly mug shot next to the headline: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore...

...The Reform party has long been knocked for being little more than a PO...

...We had a class operation...

...Not only can the party be hijacked by its wide-open nomination process, which allows anyone, even Republicans and Democrats, to request a ballot in the Reform party primary...

...According to Gargan, I love bright colors, arrange all the tens together in my billfold, love the song "Old Time Rock'n'Roll," and am orderly, opinionated, and stubborn...

...Still, "it's my little piece of heaven," Jack says of his spread...

...Hot damn...

...Gargan is something better than Y2K-OK...

...I don't do that to him...

...He is honest and unvarnished, completely open and genetically incapable of political obfuscation...

...Consider what has transpired just since Gargan's July selection: Verney has called for Ventura's resignation over a Playboy interview that didn't represent the "values" of the party, though "values" are supposed to be the unmentionable third rail of Reform politics...

...I order a bottle of wine in an attempt to loosen Jack's tongue—a bit of overkill, as he is game to discuss anything from why he prefers using the f-word over profanity ("It's wrong to use the Lord's name in vain") to the virtues of an Oprah Winfrey candidacy ("Now don't call her ridiculous...

...He traveled across the country in a Dodge van, encouraging angry citizens to dispose of their elected officials...

...Gargan showed up with the "dissident" group (Reformers are up to their gills in dissident groups) to play peacemaker with that state's "establishment" group, now chaired by Donna Donovan...

...Such gaffes didn't cost Gargan, however...

...Like a tent-revivalist warning of hellfire, Gargan rings the alarm about his party's presidential-selection process...

...Gargan's is not the mug of a fresh-scrubbed idealist...

...She is through, so I would not have minded saying it," he says, "but I did not say it...

...Our membership is for people of integrity...

...Since he seems eager for another chance, I later ask him to examine the signatures of Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot, and he tells me they "have an amazing similarity of character traits...

...Since 1995 its chairman, Russ Verney, has been on Ross Perot's payroll working out of Perot's Dallas office building...

...Your average party chairman would not so readily compare himself to the skipper of a doomed vessel...

...And when I tell him so, he tells me that he's had cataract surgery and is rusty, though "even on a bad day, I'm 90 percent accurate...

...I first saw Gargan at last July's Reform party convention in Dearborn, Michigan...

...And I have no trouble believing him when he says "I didn't even want the damn job," as we adjourn to a shorefront restaurant...

...There's a forbidding side to the island...

...After depositing the bag, he conducts a tour of the premises, showcasing his homemade seawall, his mounted sailfish with windchimes hanging from its spearlike jaw, and his collection of laminated nametags worn at Reform party conventions (Reformers, more than most, love to convene...

...the guest host was Pat Buchanan...

...Though Gargan's alignment with Ventura puts him at odds with Perot, Gargan has been credited with first imploring Ross to run...

...And tension is the axis on which Reform turns...

...But they are not strong spellers, as I learn when Jack lets me watch him reply to his scores of daily e-mails, and we Gargan complains about the Reform party e-mails: "Saying Tm going to bury a hatchet in your head'—that's got to stop...

...Then there was the late September state party convention in Connecticut...

...So he shows me the extra ammo stash in his nightstand and his cabinets filled with canned goods (Libby's corned beef, Kash and Karry chunk pineapple, and Bush's Bavarian style sauerkraut...

...He is speaking of the public airstrip that sits 50 feet from his front yard...

...While debate rages over what Reform stands for, or whether it stands for anything, all Reformers seem to agree that they are the antidote to politics-as-usual, which couldn't be further from the truth...

...E-mail is the glue that holds the party together, or— if Gargan is correct in his assessment—tears the party apart...

...I'll take him on in a debate any time, anywhere," says Gargan, "but don't call up and get on my show...

...box in Dallas...

...Gargan also worries that a mercenary candidate could do an end-run around the Reformers, grabbing the nomination not by focusing on the primary, but by stacking delegates...

...But all this is changing now that Gargan is taking over from Verney...

...His steepest challenge while overseeing 500 chickens in a converted garage on the outskirts of Philadelphia was warding off rats...

...Buchanan, who squawks endlessly that George W. Bush has rigged the Republican nomination, is looking to infiltrate state parties so he can rig the Reform nomination...

...And Gargan further contends that a flood of requests could break the party...

...When Gargan takes the party's helm on January 1, headquarters will be transferred to his wood-paneled study on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico...

...And he does so because he is a man with a mission at once simple and Sisyphean...

...And while the ride into the new nerve center is picturesque, its terminus is fraught with peril...

...But after I wheel into his driveway, he gladly carries my bag to his guest room...

...Brief celebrity followed, even landing Gargan on Larry King Live (King was absent for a Jewish holiday...

...In 1994, though he claimed not to "give a damn about being governor of Florida," Gargan ran anyway—as a Democrat and a "ticked-off granddad" who lost in a landslide in the primary to Lawton Chiles...

...Instead, the Perot-controlled executive committee voted to hold the convention in Long Beach, far away from Ventura's turf...

...He is mostly wrong...

...But hitting the media trail, as he's done for the last two months, Gargan has proved a capable spokesman who may turn out to be the most lucid of all Reformers (which is probably like saying Squeaky Fromme was the most level-headed Manson-family member...

...And right before Gargan mounted his chair to wave Nixonian V-signs, Reform party spokeswoman and Perotista Donna Donovan says Gargan told her "you're through...

...In the early days, Gargan was patched right through to Perot whenever he called...

...If they gave me any crap," Gargan says, "I'd rip the damn thing off the wall...

...When I implore Gargan to do mine, he brushes the crab claws off my paper placemat and tells me to write out a paragraph...

...The party itself, says Gargan, breaks into four main factions: Perotistas, Venturans, the unaligned, and the Fulaniites, followers of the radical Lenora Fulani, one of Reform's strongest party-builders...

...Four weeks ago, a single-engine Catana crashed once while taxiing and a second time after winging a palm tree during takeoff...

...Both are extremely opinionated...

...If the FEC doesn't give its approval, the party might not even be able to mail its ballots...

...But it's better to save a sinking ship than it is to build a new one...

...Saying 'I'm going to bury a hatchet in your head'—that's got to stop," complains Gargan, who has lately been getting singed by e-mails from his own vice-chair...

...that's a lady with a lot of class...

...I don't know that it worked—we still had to shoot the bastards...

...Pushing down a two-lane highway that dead ends an hour-and-a-half west of Gainesville, one passes thick-ribbed oaks laced in Spanish moss, smoked mullet stands, and "lawn critter" kiosks...

...We heard that if you roasted a rat but didn't kill him, it'd drive the other rats away," says Gargan...

...But the Reform party is starved for faces: Perot is inaccessible...

...He's been enduring these sorts of calumnies from what he calls "the same yappy little people who've been nipping at my heels," and he says this one "is a total lie...

...In the 1980s, he became an accomplished handwriting analyst, doing $500-an-hour gigs on cruise ships and at "class hotels," deciphering the personalities of conventioneers from their scrib-blings...

...But Gargan was having it on the convention floor, with a television boom-mike hanging inches above his head...

...Both have a huge ego...

...Ver-ney regularly insists it's not Perot's party, though he usually does so on a phone paid for by Perot, as the anemic party coffers (estimates range from $10,000 to $80,000) don't cover luxuries such as long-distance bills...

...I'm up to my balls in work," he protested...

...He lost to incumbent Democrat Karen Thurman by 32 points, despite innovative campaign tactics like promising to raffle off $50,000 of his congressional salary to supporters...

...But its pilot was lucky...

...Gargan's sinking-ship metaphor is beginning to sink in...

...They're both opinionated...

...But in this, too, the 68-year-old former insurance salesman may be the ideal face of the Reform party, where the prevailing orthodoxy is to be unorthodox...

...Though he could be "out there, doing my handwriting gig for $500 an hour," he works for free...

...Consequently, as outsiders like Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump circle the party, eyeing Reform's presidential nomination, Gargan's is a face that will proliferate on Sunday morning gas-fests for months to come...

...With stunts like this, it's small wonder detractors in his party imply Gargan is batty...

...While Gargan had a habit of weeping in front of reporters when contemplating the debt that was being piled on his grandchildren—a practice he continues to this day—he was no softie...