Reform Party Faces Challenge of Building From Ground Up

While Reform Party godfather Ross Perot offers simple kick-the-tires fixes for the nation’s ills, his followers are learning that building a new political party from the ground up can be a messy, complicated, learn-as-you-go business.

“Can we run a raffle?” one delegate asked California Reform Party Secretary Jim Mangia during a political organizing workshop Sunday.

“How do we start a local chapter?” someone else asked.

“How do we get people to come to the meetings?” said another.

“How can I get a copy of the bylaws?”

“How do you keep somebody from saying they represent the Reform Party when they don’t?”

As he juggled the questions, Mangia, 35, of Los Angeles told delegates the idea was to have strong, growing local chapters rather than a top-down “administrative shell with no life to it.”

“Now, maybe we’re wrong,” he added. “Maybe we’ll have to rethink this.”

But the only way to find out is to try, he said, and adjust along the way.

In contrast to this trial-and-error approach, Perot had offered a no-question-about-it prescription for overhauling all of the nation’s social programs when he addressed about 1,000 loyalists Saturday at the California Reform Party’s first statewide conference.

“You design ‘em, engineer ‘em, power-test ‘em, debug ‘em, optimize ‘em [until] . . . we’ve proved to you they work,” he said.

Kick the tires, he said, and you’ll know.

Saturday was the fun part, for speechmaking and inspiring the ground troops.

On Sunday, with Perot back in Dallas, about 300 party members returned to the Los Angeles Convention Center for the work part. This final session of the two-day meeting was devoted to the nitty-gritty of party building.

There were workshops on political organization, getting access to the news media, and promoting Reform Party issues. During breaks, the delegates--mostly white, and largely 50 and older--networked, exchanged business cards, and signed petitions for proposed planks in the party platform.

In the process, the reformers are doing everything they can to be different from the Republicans and Democrats. They have “chapters” rather than central committees. This was a “conference,” not a convention.

But in one basic sense, they are very much like any political group formed since the early stirrings of democracy in ancient Athens: It’s invariably the dedicated hard-core activists who gather in windowless meeting rooms on a spring Sunday to deal with the dreary little details.

As the weekend progressed, two things became evident:

* As much as they abhor the rigidity of the old parties, and of government bureaucracies, the reformers are finding the need for their own set of rules and bureaucracy of sorts.

* They are determined to build an independent party out from under the long shadow of Ross Perot and Perot’s money, which was used to qualify the party for the ballot in California last fall.

During an issues workshop chaired by state Reform Party Chairman Michael Farris of Thousand Oaks, a delegate identifying himself as Bob Perry complained that the party bylaws allowed for the election of as many as seven of the 10 state board members from the two counties with the most party members: Los Angeles and San Diego.

*

In 1787, he noted, the drafters of the Constitution reached the “Great Compromise” providing for representation by population in the U.S. House and geographic area in the U.S. Senate. Perry suggested something of the same for the Reform Party in California.

Otherwise, Perry feared, disgruntled unsuccessful board candidates from smaller counties “will assume they have been snookered and go away mad.” He proposed changing Section 11 of the bylaws to prohibit the election of more than one board member from any county.

Farris quipped that Congress, as it operates now, is not the best model for the Reform Party to use in structuring its organization. But he added, “We should be looking at some geographic representation.”

Farris noted that the party is operating under a stark two-page set of bylaws that tries to give local chapters considerable autonomy and invests power in the individual members rather than creating a power elite at the top.

“We have to start someplace,” Farris added. “This is brand-new. It’s never been done before.”

All weekend long, Farris and others took pains to note that the conference was organized and financed entirely by California members of the Reform Party. National Reform Party officials were on hand from Perot headquarters in Dallas, but said they were there only as observers.

As popular as Perot still is with this group, a number of delegates said it is important for the party to develop its own identity.

“Yes, without a doubt,” said George R. Angell of San Diego, the party’s nominee for a state Senate seat. “And I think Mr. Perot wants us to do that.”

Party Secretary Mangia said it’s partly a matter of perception.

“We have successfully moved to a point where the media understand that we’re a broad-based inclusive political party” and not just a Perot party, he said.

“I think that all of us participating here have known that for a long time,” Mangia said.

Chairman Farris, a physicist, described the party-building process this way: “We have just designed and rolled out a new space shuttle. We didn’t know how to do that in September,” when Perot launched the new party.

Now, the job of Farris and colleagues is to make it fly.

And can they run a raffle? Yes.