Listening to Howard Phillips - US Taxpayers Party presidential candidate

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by Karina Rollins

HAS there ever been a better time to be a third party? Liberals feel let down by Clinton, libertarians and traditionalist conservatives unenthusiastic about Dole. "Don't vote: it only encourages them," urges Chronicles magazine, and it is likely that many Americans won't. Nor is there any shortage of third parties. There's the Green Party and Ralph Nader, committed to saving the environment; the Libertarians and Harry Browne, committed to restoring liberty; the Reform Party and Ross Perot, committed to reforming government; the Natural Law Party and John Hagelin, committed to, ah, transcendental meditation and levitation; and the U.S. Taxpayers Party, committed to something really ambitious -- returning our country to its original constitutional and Biblical principles.

Tough stuff, and in Plan A Patrick Buchanan was to have been the party's candidate. The night before the Republican convention in August, his supporters waited breathlessly in Escondido (to which he had been exiled from San Diego by the GOP organizers) to hear him announce he would leave the GOP and run on the Taxpayers ticket. Instead, Buchanan reaffirmed his commitment to the Republicans. Enter Howard Phillips.

Phillips is a burly, amiable man in his fifties, Harvard-educated. Born and raised a Jew, he became a devout Christian roughly twenty years ago. He was director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) under Nixon, an experience that he says helped prepare him for his conversion.

"At OEO I was confronted with evil, pure and simple. . . . I was not there very long when I discovered that OEO was the warroom for those that were trying to overturn what had once been America. . . . I had a moral obligation to fight these things [the funding of extreme-left causes]," he remembers.

He eventually left OEO. Since 1974 he has been chairman of the Conservative Caucus, a grass-roots group fighting the Left. He is the author of several books -- and now the U.S. Taxpayers Party's presidential candidate.

Asked about the future of Pat Buchanan, he says regretfully, merely giving a clinical diagnosis: "I think it's behind him. . . . I do think he could have become President had he established a base outside the [Republican] party and run as an independent."

Does, then, the USTP provide the new rallying ground for tried and true paleo-cons? As yet, it seems not. Most of them remained, if grudgingly, in the GOP with Pat, leaving the USTP without a solid base or any real name recognition.

But Howard Phillips is not downcast. He believes the USTP fills a real need. "We are the only party this century in America that believes what the Framers believed." Why, then, hasn't it had a larger appeal? To this he gives an answer with a poignancy worthy of Bob Dole: "Nobody knows that we exist. That is really the whole reason."

It may not be the whole reason. Michael Lewis of The New Republic described the USTP convention as an odoriferous circus. (Phillips wrote a letter to the editor denouncing Lewis's account, which had been admiring of Phillips personally.) But all third parties attract eccentrics and oddballs, and overheard at the convention were the usual conspiracy theories about fluoridated water (espoused by delegates politically opposed to bathing) and black UN helicopters. Conservative K. B. Forbes, the communications director, resigned in despair, lamenting that "the fringe of the fringe" had smuggled itself in.

The USTP's National Committee meeting in Reston is considerably tamer. Denunciations of the "New World Order" decorate the party's speeches, pamphlets, and platform, but Phillips downplays attacks on the IMF, WTO, World Bank, and big corporations. "What I'm talking about is the breakdown of accountability . . . the same kind of problem that was addressed in the American War for Independence." And there is a Revolutionary flavor to the gathering. Herb Titus, Phillips's congenial running-mate and a good speaker popular with the committee members, delivered a speech that might have come from Patrick Henry or Sam Adams, denouncing unaccountable power and drenched with invocations of the Almighty. It was greeted with evangelical fervor.

Phillips is addressing real concerns on the Right. And for those who are dismayed at Bob Dole's tentativeness on conservative issues and who are listening, he might seem like the answer. He is unabashedly pro-family, pro-life, and anti-tax; he supports measures against judicial excess; and he wants a moratorium on immigration until federal subsidies for immigrants are abolished. But the USTP is also protectionist and isolationist -- a Buchananite party without the Prince of Denmark.

It is hard to assess its strength. Like all third (or fourth, or fifth) party leaders, Phillips is convinced that his will become the next major party. But that would require a collapse of the two-party system, or a mass exodus from the GOP. And if either occurred, it would probably raise Pat Buchanan from his resting-place in the media. And Buchanan would then be calling the shots.