Buchanan: Let Me In!

When the fall presidential debates offer candidates a chance to hock their wares for wavering voters, Pat Buchanan intends to be one of the salesmen. The constant candidate, who is campaigning for the Reform Party nomination this time around, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Monday, arguing that the Commission on Presidential Debates is conspiring to keep him out of their quadrennial rites of autumn.

"We think the criteria have been deliberately designed and crafted to keep the Reform Party in general, and me in particular, out of these presidential debates," said Buchanan. And those criteria are "unfair, unjust, undemocratic and un-American."

In a written statement, the commission responded, "We believe the criteria are fair and clear." And Executive Director Janet Brown adds that the commission's goal is to include candidates who have a good chance of being elected president. "The debate is not meant to be the gate to the election," she says, "nor the commission the gatekeeper."

The commission says participants need to average at least 15 percent in five national polls going into the debates. Buchanan assures us he'll hit that mark, but just on the odd chance he doesn't, he's complaining to the FEC.

The FEC has 90 days to respond. If Buchanan doesn't like what he hears, the Reform Party will file a suit in federal court and try to make the debates an issue for the two major presidential candidates. "We will go ballistic this fall," Buchanan promised.

Buchanan says a 5 percent threshold is more reasonable. That's the percentage of the actual vote that Congress says a candidate or party must win to qualify for public campaign funding. Since Reform Party founder Ross Perot pulled 9 percent of the vote in 1996, the party is entitled to $12.5 million in federal funds - a fact cynics believe is helping drive Buchanan into the arms of a party which, in some respects, is far from a perfect fit for him. That same 9 percent, Buchanan says, entitles him to a debate podium.

Darrell West, a professor of political science at Brown University, disagrees. He says Buchanan barely musters 5 percent in polls now, and that 15 percent is reasonable. The debate criterion, he says, should be about electoral seriousness, not federal funding.

Buchanan, in a sort of Luke Skywalker mood, has detected an array of forces working against him. There are no Reform Party members on the commission, which is chaired by former heads of the Republican and Democratic parties. The group is not nonpartisan, it's bipartisan, or, as Buchanan puts it, "Republicrat."

Brown notes that she doesn't even know the political affiliation of several of the commission's directors, and says the goal is to include "thoughtful, responsible people who don't necessarily represent any given party."

Buchanan say the polling groups the commission would rely on - the major broadcasand cable news organizations and major national newspapers - are "not hotbeds of Buchananism," and thus are "perhaps not objective institutions to decide whether or not I should be in a presidential debate."

The question pollsters should be asking, Buchanan helpfully told them, is "Should the Reform Party candidate be included in the presidential debates?"

"We'd be closer to 50 percent," if that were the issue, Buchanan insists.

But Brown says there's a big difference between wanting to see someone in a debate "because they make for livelier television or because you find them interesting on one issue or more." The debates "are not about good television," she says, "they're about presenting people in the last six weeks of the campaign to the American public that are likely to be elected president."

Buchanan also says debates are the most effective way for a third party candidate to make his case; and the end result of the commission's criteria is that the two major parties "keep a hammerlock on the presidency of the United States, the most powerful office in the world."

Pretty heady stuff. Brown says there are other debates out there and plenty of other ways to get yourself heard. It's not the commission's job, she says, to "jumpstart" a candidate's campaign.

The commission has faced complaints and lawsuits over their debate criteria before, and each time, Brown says, "our criteria have been upheld."