Buchanan Edges Closer to Saying He Will Leave GOP

GOP presidential contender Patrick J. Buchanan came closer Sunday to saying he would quit the Republican race and campaign for the Reform Party’s nomination.

“The door really is wide open,” Buchanan said. “We are very close to making that decision.”

For weeks, Reform Party leader Jesse Ventura, the Minnesota governor, has discounted suggestions the party should nominate Buchanan for president.

Ventura has said the party is based on conservative economic principles, not Buchanan’s social conservatism on abortion and other issues.

As recently as Friday, the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill published an interview in which the governor ruled out “a retread from another campaign or another party” as the Reform Party’s candidate.

But Buchanan, appearing on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” said his sister and campaign advisor, Bay Buchanan, is “talking . . . to people in the Reform Party” for him.

“We are taking a hard look at leaving the Republican nomination run and running for the Reform Party nomination,” Buchanan said. “The decision has not been made yet . . . but I tell you honestly we are leaning in that direction right now.”

A telephone call to the party chairman-elect, Jack Gargan of Cedar Key, Fla., went unanswered Sunday. But Reform Party spokeswoman Donna Donovan said Sunday that the party would welcome Buchanan as long as he pledges to support its platform.

Pat Choate, the running mate of Reform Party founder Ross Perot in 1996, said he has had several conversations with Buchanan and his sister, adding, “I think he’s going to do it.”

Choate said he believes some Reform Party members would bolt if Buchanan were nominated. But he said the party would pick up more than enough social conservatives from the GOP, as well as blue-collar and labor Democrats, to make up for it.

Buchanan said he believes “my party at the national level has become a Xerox copy basically of the Democratic Party. . . . I think what we have is a one-party system in Washington that is masquerading as a two-party system, and I think what we need is a real opposition party.”

Buchanan’s third-party candidacy concerns Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Time magazine reported in its issue on newsstands today.

It said a poll conducted by GOP consultant Frank Luntz showed Buchanan would win 6% of the vote in a three-way contest with Bush and Vice President Al Gore, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. Two-thirds of the Buchanan vote, the poll showed, would come from Bush supporters.

Bush aides last week discussed “how to make Buchanan feel wanted in the GOP,” and a senior Bush advisor told Time: “We’re surrounding him with love.”

Another GOP candidate, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said on CNN’s “Late Edition” that, even though he disagrees with Buchanan’s views, he hopes he decides to stay a Republican.