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This is clearly crunch time for the former Connecticut governor. Before he addressed the convention, he spent an hour with the ARP executive committee, reviewing the ballot access laws for all 50 states and weighing his options. In a handful of states, including California, the deadline for declaring any intentions is little more than a month away.

Dean Barkley, Ventura's campaign chairman, had flown in from Minnesota to try to move Weicker closer to getting in the race. After meeting with him in private, Barkley told me, "It was definitely worthwhile for me to be here," implying that Weicker was getting closer to a run. Tom D'Amore, Weicker's longtime lieutenant, seemed to concur. "You could call that speech he just gave a trial stump speech, even though it wasn't planned that way," he told me. "I've never seen him this interested."

Will Weicker give up the chance to relax, make good money, enjoy his seven children and seven grandchildren, all for what would be an uphill, if not quixotic, fight for the nomination of a party that can barely hold itself together? Will he risk his legacy of fighting the good fight -- Watergate, health-care research, opposing the religious right, getting jailed to protest apartheid? These are subjects, he told the ARPers, that weigh heavily on his mind.

Still, Weicker laid out a respectable agenda for any national candidate, calling for federal funding to smooth out inequality in educational opportunity, a ban on concealed weapons and automatic firearms, debt reduction before tax cuts, new investments in poor children and in community health care -- and specifically rejecting restrictions on choice, efforts to bring prayer into schools and gimmicks like term limits.

Personally, I wonder if there is enough edge to this package to attract the support of disaffected voters. Weicker is not a populist in most senses of the word, and while his commitment to using government to alleviate suffering and promote the general welfare is real, he makes no sweeping calls for change. Maybe, just maybe, his intense commitment to principle and to political independence per se would be enough to break through the political haze. That, plus an endorsement from the country's only Reform governor?

"This is a very complex puzzle with a lot of moving parts," says Weicker advisor D'Amore. "It needs some glue, and that's a candidate." He's right. If Weicker decided to jump in, a lot of pieces would fall into place, and the tattered crowd of political independents now searching for an address not marked with a cross would have a home.

The Reform Party race would then become one pitting an organized minority -- the Buchanan Brigades and their Perotbot allies -- against a far less organized majority -- the millions of political independents who are socially liberal. And while Buchanan would start with a big advantage, the election is still so fluid that anything could happen.

Which brings up the only funny political anecdote of the weekend, which came from Jack Gargan, the embattled chairman-elect of the Reform Party, who won the hearts of the press back in July with an acceptance speech that jokingly played on his fondness for pool, motorcycles and "the ladies."

As the top representative of the party, he said, "Every chance I get to spread the Reform name, I say yes. So when I was invited a few weeks ago to a naturists' meeting, I said yes, thinking that it had something to do with the environment.

"When I drove up, I saw it was a gated community, which should have told me something. Well, before I had driven in two blocks I knew: I was in a nudist colony!

"I was in a panic. As I parked my car at the meeting hall, right near the side entrance, I could hear the person at the mike already beginning my introduction. Well, I decided, when you're in Rome, you do as the Romans do. Backstage, I quickly pulled off my clothes, and, in deference to my audience, strode out there as naked as a jaybird.

"Imagine how I felt when I saw that, in deference to me, they were all fully dressed."

The conventioneers roared with laughter. Unlike Nader, Trump and Weicker, here's a guy who really knows how to spin a yarn.

Gargan had this crowd in the palm of his hand. Somehow, after rocking everyone back in their chairs with his story he turned serious, and insisted to the audience that he would rebuild the Reform Party on a more democratic, grass-roots foundation come Jan. 1, when his term actually begins. Promising big changes, he called on them to come back home to Reform.

With their clothes on.
salon.com | Oct. 4, 1999

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