The Leftists in the Center Reform Party's Fulani, Newman Rise to Prominence By Supporting Buchanan's Bid

The Washington Post/March 15, 2000
By Thomas B. Edsall

New York --Once-marginal Marxist-Leninist group has become a major force in the Reform Party, aligning itself with Patrick J. Buchanan in what many members say is an effort to take control of the party.

After lying low for several months, Buchanan emerged this week with a flurry of campaign stops and media appearances aimed at gathering attention for his bid for the Reform Party's presidential nomination. The conservative commentator was immediately pressed to defend his new alliance with perennial presidential candidate Lenora Fulani and her mentor Fred Newman.

After acknowledging some major disagreements, Buchanan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that they share a reform agenda that would empower blacks not to be "victims."

The Fulani-Newman faction, a cadre of committed leftists, has become a powerful wing of an organization founded as a centrist alternative for disaffected Republicans and Democrats. Members of the faction provided crucial support for Ross Perot's unsuccessful presidential bid in 1996 and helped install an ally of Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura as party chairman last summer.

Now, their decision to back Buchanan for the party nomination, and the $12.6 million in federal campaign funds that goes with it, has catapulted Fulani and Newman to a level of prominence that had escaped them through two decades of radical third-party organizing.

The two are especially influential in Reform Party politics because, unlike others in the chaotic organization, members of their faction are uniquely willing to vote and bargain as a bloc, eschewing emotional tirades to gain influence in the party's parliamentary maneuvering.

Russell Verney, former party chairman and a Perot ally, said he believes the Fulani-Newman strategy is to mask "their ideology and [promote] empowerment until they have collected enough power to implement their ideology."

In separate interviews, Fulani and Newman denied that their goal is to take over the Reform Party. Instead, they said, their purpose is to build a new political coalition of "the left, center and right" to challenge the political dominance of the Republican and Democratic parties.

In theory, Newman said he would like Buchanan to win if the vote was a mandate "for political reform." But he said "if he [Buchanan] got elected president as a vote for his social conservative positions, I would pack my bags and go to Canada."

Fulani and Newman have carefully stayed out of the recent feuding between Perot supporters and Ventura loyalists that almost degenerated into violence at the party's meeting last month in Nashville--and that led to the replacement of Reform Party Chairman Jack Gargan by Buchanan ally Pat Choate. But they seem likely to benefit, at least in the short term, as the Buchanan campaign has taken command of the fight for the party's nomination. In the view of most Reformers, only a last-minute entry by Perot can stop Buchanan now.

Whatever happens, the Buchanan candidacy has helped catapult Fulani and Newman from the periphery of American politics to a potential position of influence in the coming national election.

Fulani, a 49-year-old African American, has run for national and local office, campaigning for president in 1988 and 1992. Although Fulani has never enjoyed broad support nationally, in 1988 she was on the ballot in all 50 states, an extraordinary organizational achievement that required collecting thousands of signatures.

Newman managed her 1988 and 1992 campaigns and has been described by Fulani as her adviser, mentor and personal savior. A 64-year-old self-styled "social therapist" and political strategist, Newman has founded two political parties, the International Workers Party and the New Alliance Party.

As a Marxist-socialist, an advocate of gay rights and a psychotherapist who says he sees nothing morally wrong in sleeping with patients, Newman is at the opposite end of the cultural and ideological spectrum from Buchanan. Newman is a sharp critic of traditional marriage and lives with two women.

Fulani and Newman have spent three decades navigating the byways of minor-party politics, building a network of "social therapy" centers in major cities, charitable organizations and a fund-raising arm with a cash flow of at least $5 million annually.

Since 1994, the Fulani-Newman wing has steadily gained leverage in the Reform Party. The cadre participated in the founding of the Patriot Party, the precursor to the Reform Party, and in 1996 was crucial to getting enough signatures to put Perot on the California ballot.

Newman said his support of Buchanan is independent of Buchanan's prospects of winning. What Newman wants is to maintain the flow of federal money; once it gets above 5 percent of the popular vote, the Reform Party would get an increasing amount of public campaign dollars; at 25 percent or more, the party would qualify for the same amount as Democrats and Republicans, more than $60 million.

While the Buchanan alliance with Fulani and Newman bridges a vast ideological divide, Buchanan supporters said that winning the endorsement of the Fulani-Newman faction sharply increases the conservative commentator's chances of winning the party nomination and gives him an ally with experience in getting on ballots, a hurdle Buchanan faces in the 29 states that do not automatically include the Reform Party.

"She [Fulani] has about 30 percent of the vote in the party," said Choate, who was Perot's 1996 running mate and a Buchanan ally who orchestrated the Fulani-Newman endorsement. "To get the nomination, she is a key figure," he said. "Politics is about people forming coalitions," Choate said. "If she has other designs after this election, that is totally legitimate in politics." A bid to take over the Reform Party "would be a natural thing, and what's wrong with it?"

Fulani and Newman dismiss complaints against them by liberals and leftists, including critical articles in the Nation, the New Republic and on Salon's Web site. "These kinds of nasty critiques are the bread and butter of left polemics," Newman said in an interview. Fulani said: "The work Fred and I and others have done is to focus more on a critique of ultra-leftism and the orthodox left, which is one of the reasons they have so much of a difficult time with us."

Traditional terms of mainstream politics do not apply to the Fulani-Newman organization. For one thing, they are involved in a network of charities, for-profit companies, political parties, collectives and therapeutic programs that operate under unique rules and guidelines. These include the Committee for a Unified Independent Party, the New Alliance Party, the International Workers Party, the 71-seat Castillo Theater featuring Newman's plays, the All-Star Talent Show, the Rainbow Lobby and the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, which has subsidiaries in Boston, Atlanta and other cities.

Fulani and Newman are practitioners of "social therapy," using an approach to psychotherapy that Newman once described as seeking a "personal proletarian revolution." Until joining with the Reform Party, Fulani and Newman had stressed their commitment to Marxist-Leninist goals. They now focus on the importance of achieving political reform before substantive policy issues are addressed, but they remain committed to socialism.

When Fulani endorsed Buchanan on Nov. 11, she said that "in traditional political terms, Pat Buchanan stands for all the things that black progressives such as myself revile." Nevertheless, she said, "Buchanan and the Reform Party offer the black community the opportunity to join in new alliances."

Fulani provided a revealing glimpse into the workings of the various Fulani-Newman groups in a sworn statement she submitted to the Federal Election Commission in 1995. The FEC was seeking to collect a fine of more than $600,000 from her and her New Alliance Party (later reduced to $100,000), alleging that she and Newman made false claims to get federal matching funds. Fulani countered by saying the FEC did not understand the rules and guidelines governing the use of money in the "ideological collective."

Participation in this collective "requires an intense and serious commitment," she said, "to certain socialist principles of collectivism. Among these is the principle that all money in the possession of or accruing to those at the core belongs to the collective and is used at the discretion of members of the collective to pursue shared political goals."

One point of convergence for Buchanan, Fulani and Newman is that each has been accused of anti-Semitism. Newman, who is Jewish, denies the charge and stands by past comments, which he said are critical only of certain elements of Zionism. In 1985, he said some Jews agreed to "function as the storm troopers of decadent capitalism against people of color the world over . . . in the forefront in the war against the empowerment of black people, of Puerto Rican people." Noting that the Anti-Defamation League "was aghast at this remark," Newman said, "Frankly, I've never understood why it's anti-Semitic."

Newman alleged that in response to the Holocaust, "some of the leadership of the Jewish community" entered into "arrangements with international capital so as to make sure that it would never happen to them again. . . . It puts Jews, unfortunately and tragically, in the position of supporting American oil interests and other interests in the Middle East. And [thus]. . . in the position of making war on oppressed people . . . not unlike what happened to them."

In her book "The Making of a Fringe Candidate," Fulani wrote that many other white liberal and black politicians and officials dismissed her and treated her badly, although she found campaigning exhilarating. "The experience of strangers falling in love with me," she wrote, "was so intimate. . . . I felt turned on all the time."

Now that she, Newman and other loyalists are supporting the Buchanan campaign, the rest of the left is in danger of becoming irrelevant, she said in an interview: "They haven't caught up with the fact that what's happening in this country is a left-center-right coalition. The traditional left has been behind the eight ball. They don't get it."