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The godfather from Dallas ends the party
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Feb. 14, 2000 | NASHVILLE -- The assembled delegates voted to recall elected party chair Jack Gargan; threw out the party treasurer, a loyal Gargan lieutenant; resolved to hold the party's convention in Long Beach, Calif., instead of Jesse Ventura's Minnesota; and seated several new state delegations tilted toward Patrick Buchanan, who is seeking the party's presidential nomination. Topping off the proceedings, they elected Pat Choate, Perot's 1996 running mate and the national co-chair of the Buchanan campaign, as the party's new chairman. The delegates seemed to be willfully ignoring political reality. Just a day after Ventura announced his disaffiliation from the national Reform Party, not a word was spoken from the meeting floor about the party's loss of its most charismatic -- and only successful -- candidate for high elected office.
Nor did the assembled delegates devote any time to exploring the party's underlying problems -- its loss of ballot status in about a dozen states since 1996; the difficulties most state chapters have had in holding onto registered members, attracting strong candidates and building any kind of institutional base; and the negative image of party founder Perot. These issues, after all, were behind Gargan's upset election at the party's last national convention, in Dearborn, Mich., in July 1999, which signaled a clear break with the Verney-Perot regime. Instead, the majority of national committee members who came to Nashville Saturday spent most of the day helping the old guard ram through its victory, though it was clear from the first hour which way things would go. After Gargan started the morning by refusing to gavel the meeting to order, insisting that it was improperly called, a well-orchestrated protest from the floor blew him away. Gargan had tried to keep his cool against the rising clamor of voices calling for his scalp, but finally his anguish broke through. "This is the same group of people who, after six weeks of my being in office, haven't turned the records of the party over to me. Since the day I was elected chair, I have been the target of unceasing harassment. But I will keep taking it on behalf of the grass roots of the party." A few Gargan stalwarts stood to cheer as he shouted, "We will not have mob rule in this party." But mob rule is what it was, complete with pushing, shouting and the threat of police action. While a number of delegates held out hope that some kind of compromise might be brokered, the old guard was committed to tossing Gargan out. A telling moment came midday, when the body got bogged down in a confusing debate over precisely how to define the two-thirds vote needed to recall a party officer. Wanting to keep the threshold as low as possible, Verney held the floor mike and, like a good machine boss, whipped his troops into line. "If I want to overturn the chair's ruling and keep the vote to two-thirds of the delegates present, then I should vote 'no,' is that correct?" he repeatedly asked the parliamentarian running the meeting. Everyone knew exactly what he was doing. When the time came for the final vote on Gargan's fate, the crowd grew uncharacteristically still. But the outcome was anticlimactic: a whopping 109-31 for Gargan's removal, with one abstention. And the mood of the moment was cold-blooded and harsh. David Goldman, chairman of the Florida Reform Party, had tried to put forward a compromise resolution that would have made Gargan the honorary chair of the party, while stripping him of real power, and called for balancing roles for each faction of the party in the distribution of the other top offices. But as the anti-Gargan juggernaut rolled on, he barely got a hearing. "I feel like a peacenik at a Veterans of Foreign Wars event," he told this reporter.
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