Pat Makes Friends The Strangest Bedfellow of All by Ethan Jacobs She’s black, female, socialist, pro-choice, and pro-gay rights. In 1988 she became both the first African American and the first woman to succeed in placing herself on the ballots of all fifty states as a presidential candidate. Her name is Lenora Fulani. So why is she one of Pat Buchanan’s new best friends? On November 11, 1999 Lenora Fulani and Pat Buchanan announced their bizarre and unexpected alliance to a stunned press corp. Buchanan, who had earlier left the Republicans to join the Reform Party, explained that Fulani would serve alongside Buchanan’s sister Bay and Ross Perot’s former running mate Pat Choate as one of the directors of his presidential campaign. This left many to wonder how Pat Buchanan, a staunch conservative who worked for both the Nixon and Reagan administrations and who has often been accused of bigotry towards African Americans, immigrants, and gays, could align himself with someone at complete opposite ends of the political spectrum. Buchanan and Fulani were quick to explain the motives behind their seemingly absurd partnership. Acknowledging the stark differences between the two politicians, Fulani said, “In traditional political terms, Pat Buchanan stands for all the things that black progressives such as myself revile…. So how did we get to be standing here together, with me endorsing his candidacy? Because we have a common interest in overthrowing the traditional political terms.” While the common ground between Fulani and Buchanan may seem minimal, the thread that binds them is a professed dedication to reforming American politics by challenging the supremacy of the Democratic and Republican parties and by working to unite diverse groups of disenfranchised voters to form a coalition of independent voters from the left and right. Pat Buchanan commands a sizable following among blue-collar white Americans, and Fulani hopes to use her position to bring blue-collar and unemployed black Americans into the ranks of Buchanan’s Reform candidacy. Additionally, both Fulani and Buchanan strongly oppose the power of special interests in the American political process and what they see as America’s increasing role as a global empire. At the core of Fulani’s discontent with the political process is what she perceives as the Democratic Party’s unchallenged monopolization of the votes of black Americans. Fulani believes that the Democrats have taken the votes of blacks for granted but have shown little commitment to fighting for policies important to the black community. During an appearance on FOX News Sunday Fulani articulated her dissatisfaction with the Democrats and the political establishment, saying that “black leadership like Reverend [Jesse] Jackson and also Reverend Al Sharpton… have literally sold out the black community relative to over-identifying with the Democratic Party.” To reclaim the black establishment from the Democrats, Fulani believes that the black progressives must align themselves with other independent voters, regardless of conflicting ideologies. She sees her new position as Buchanan’s campaign co-director less as an alliance between Fulani and Buchanan and more as a chance to build a coalition of voters from the left and right who challenge the supremacy of the Democrats and Republicans. Regrettably, Fulani has entered this coalition not as Buchanan’s equal but as his underling, so her coalition is noticeably lopsided. But lest anyone think that Fulani is an angel cutting a deal with the right wing devil, one should note that Fulani’s political past is nearly as controversial as Buchanan’s. Fulani counts among her past and present associates several people who have been accused of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism including Minister Louis Farrakhan and Dr. Fred Newman, a Jew himself who argues that Jews are responsible for oppressing people of color. When Qadafi denounced the US prior to military attacks on Libya by the Reagan administration, Fulani was in Libya supporting Qadafi. She describes herself as a “persona non grata” among both the American left and the black establishment. Fulani has been called a dangerous extremist and a left-wing counterpart to Pat Buchanan. As a result the coalition between she and Buchanan has been greeted with skepticism and uneasiness. While Fulani’s motives for reform may be genuine, her alliance with Buchanan is a poor way to go about stealing thunder from the Democrats and Republicans. For one thing, a coalition between Fulani and Buchanan seems more likely to alienate independent voters than to unite them. Pat Buchanan is seen by many Americans, especially those on the left, as a bigot and an extremist- an accurate assessment if one judges him by his past comments from his tenure as a staff member under the Nixon and Reagan administrations. For example, in a memo to Nixon published in the Boston Globe, Buchanan had said “There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system.” And Pat’s switch to the Reform Party only serves to enhance its reputation as a freakish collection of political misfits. Counting among its ranks Pat Buchanan, Lenora Fulani, Ross Perot, Donald Trump, and, until recently, Jesse “the Body” Ventura, the Reform Party will be hard pressed to convince mainstream American voters that this volatile assemblage of candidates is best equipped to run the country. But most importantly, the alliance between Pat Buchanan and Lenora Fulani will fail because while Fulani and Buchanan separately may seem threatening to mainstream voters, together they seem dangerous. The chairman of the New York Independence Reform Party articulated how many Americans will feel should Buchanan and Fulani publicize their partnership during the proper presidential race, saying, “I think Buchanan has belittled himself by becoming aligned with Lenora Fulani. Buchanan is pretty far to the right. Some people have compared him to the Nazis. Fulani’s way to the left. In her own speeches, she said she considers herself to be a Communist and a Marxist. Of course, there’s a precedent for such an alliance. At one time, Hitler and Stalin got together in an accord.” Ultimately there is no way for Fulani to support Buchanan without compromising her own ideals and those of her supporters. By supporting Buchanan, she backs one of the most adamantly pro-life candidates in the race, one who vows to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that protects the right to have an abortion. Buchanan has stated that he would not accept aid in his campaign from anyone who plans to fight for gay and lesbian civil rights. And while both Fulani and Buchanan favor limiting US involvement in global conflicts, Buchanan nevertheless advocates building up the US military while Fulani hopes to downsize the military establishment. In her zeal to unite the political factions, Fulani risks electing a president who will work to set back the progressive movement far more than the Democrats and Republicans ever did. In her speech to the press upon announcing her new position, Fulani described Pat Buchanan’s supporters as a “peasant army” set to take back the reigns of government from the special interests and the bloated political establishment. Fulani embraced the idea of that army, saying “So we are going to integrate that peasant army of his. We are going to bring black folks, Latino folks, gay folks, and liberal folks into that army.” Yet Fulani’s vision for a diverse coalition of American voters united to overturn the political stranglehold of the two major parties on government is doomed to fail. Perhaps a union between left and right is necessary to open up the political process to more Americans. But Pat Buchanan has far too much baggage, too great an association with the far right, and too great a reputation for bigotry to lead this coalition. Fulani’s own controversial past will only serve to alienate more independent voters, and in the end Fulani’s message, arguably an important one, will be lost in the campaign. The majority of the sources used to write this piece came from articles on Pat Buchanan’s own website, www.buchananreform.com, which has a searchable archive of articles from a variety of news sources relating to Buchanan’s campaign and a substantial collection of his past speeches. Other information was obtained from Lenora Fulani’s website, www.fulani.org, which contains many of her syndicated newspaper columns. And the bigoted quote from the Nixon memo comes from www.buchanan2000.com, a fun site that catalogues memorable Pat Buchanan quotes based on the groups that they offend. Pat-isms On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours." (Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131) On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS)." (Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86) Later that year, he demanded that New York City Ed Koch and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or else "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague." "With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990 (syndicated column, 10/17/90). In the 1992 campaign, he declared: "AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times, 7/31/93) "The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p. 149) Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92)