Perot, Lamm Vie for Votes at Reform Party Gathering

Just in case he had any illusions, former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm was reminded Saturday of how stiff a challenge he faces in unseating Ross Perot for the presidential nomination of the Reform Party founded by the Texas billionaire.

When Perot entered an auditorium here Saturday morning, several hundred local Reform Party activists erupted in whoops and applause--a sharp contrast to the respectful silence that greeted much of Lamm’s speech earlier in the day.

“Perot is the initiator of the entire movement,” Sarkis Pagoyan, a businessman from Alexandria, Va., said after listening to Perot. “We should be giving him the first opportunity.”

Lamm, a former three-term Democratic governor of Colorado, announced earlier this month that he would seek the nomination of the Reform Party, which will choose its presidential candidate in August. One day after Lamm’s announcement, Perot said he would run if party activists wanted him as their standard-bearer, even though the mercurial Texan had declared for months that he would prefer the party choose another candidate.

Saturday’s Virginia Reform Party convention marked the two men’s first appearance on the same stage since they declared their candidacies; they also appeared Saturday afternoon at a Reform Party gathering in Maine--an event Lamm, who is operating on a shoestring budget, was able to reach only by hitching a ride on Perot’s private plane.

In his 90-minute speech, Perot never mentioned Lamm. Lamm praised Perot for founding the movement but gently suggested that the party would be better served by moving beyond the billionaire for its 1996 nominee. “I am asking you for a gift of great honor,” Lamm said. “I am asking you to pass me the torch.”

The two men didn’t debate at either of their appearances. But after his speech, Lamm disclosed that his campaign last week invited Perot to a series of three debates before an Aug. 11 convention in Long Beach, when the party will begin the final stage of selecting its nominee.

Lamm said he had proposed that the two men meet at the University of Texas, the University of Denver and on Perot’s favorite television forum: CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

“I’d love a debate,” Lamm said. “I think it would benefit the party.”

Perot bolted from the Virginia convention without taking questions from reporters. But Tom D’Amore Jr., senior advisor to Lamm’s nascent campaign, said Saturday that they had not yet received a response from Perot to their debate request.

Lamm puts his odds of unseating Perot for the nomination at 50-50. But almost all observers inside and outside the party agree that he faces long odds in supplanting the man who bankrolled the party’s formation and remains the rallying point for many of its activists.

“It would be a long, uphill climb,” said Ralph Copeland, a district coordinator for the Virginia Reform Party who is sympathetic to Lamm.

Still, there were some clear signs of support for Lamm at the Virginia gathering. Supporters carried Lamm signs and collected names of volunteers. And several of those attending the meeting said they believed that the party had a better chance of increasing its influence if it moved beyond Perot for its nominee.

“I just feel Perot does not have the credibility,” said Richard McBride, a retail manager from Chesapeake, Va. “We’re grateful that he started the party. But I think Lamm is the person to carry it forward and grow it further.”

In their speeches Saturday, Lamm and Perot struck largely similar themes, though with contrasting emphases--and markedly different styles. Lamm was professorial, low-key and discursive; Perot offered his usual staccato torrent of anecdotes, statistics and folksy aphorisms. While Lamm was interrupted only a few times by applause--particularly during remarks calling for a reduction in legal immigration--Perot’s speech was regularly punctuated by cheers and laughs.

In his remarks, Lamm argued for significant reforms to reduce the cost of entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, before they face the exploding cost pressures of retiring the baby boom generation early in the next century. And he firmly called for major reductions in the number of legal immigrants.

“What’s the difference between importing a worker and exporting a job?” Lamm asked. “I don’t think there is any. . . . I don’t think this party should be anti-immigrant, but there is no public-policy reason we shouldn’t start concentrating on our own huddled masses.”

Lamm also lashed the two existing major parties--and predicted their eventual demise. “There is no divine right of parties. . . . There is no franchise that we gave them,” he said. “It is nostalgia, not any kind of performance, that makes them so formidable. But like the Berlin Wall, their days are numbered.”

Perot offered a more scattershot approach, calling for campaign-finance reform, lobbying reform, a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, tax reform and tougher trade deals. He said all future tax increases should require approval in a national voter referendum. Without pointing toward any specific offenders, he criticized former presidents for taking large speaking fees, particularly from foreign interests. And he again accused Mexico of tolerating the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States in an effort to stabilize its economy.

“It’s chemical warfare against our children, and we cannot tolerate it,” Perot said.

Rejecting the traditional primary and caucus model, the Reform Party is choosing its nominee through a two-step process. In the first stage, now underway, nominating ballots are being mailed to about 1 million activists who signed petitions to place the party on state ballots.

Only Perot and Lamm appear on the ballots, many of which have been delayed in delivery, according to local activists. Either candidate--or any write-in effort--needs support from 10% of the respondents to make it to the final stage of the balloting.

That process will begin Aug. 11, when the qualifying candidates--presumably Lamm and Perot--will address party activists at the convention in Long Beach. During the next week, Reform Party members will vote by mail or e-mail, and the winner will be announced Aug. 18 at a second convention in Valley Forge, Pa. The party nominee will then select his running mate.