Party Crasher Pat Buchanan’S Jump To The Reform Party Could Hurt George W. Bush.

The 2000 race for the White House turned livelier and more complicated Monday as conservative commentator Pat Buchanan announced he was bolting from the Republican Party to seek the Reform Party nomination.

Buchanan’s decision could spell trouble for Texas Gov. George W. Bush, giving conservatives another option in the presidential race.

Buchanan said he was abandoning a party in which he had been active since Barry Goldwater ran for president because it no longer was distinguishable from the Democratic Party on issues such as trade and foreign policy.

“Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation,” he told a crowd of enthusiastic supporters at a suburban Virginia hotel. “Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.”

The former CNN talk-show host and speechwriter for Richard Nixon portrayed himself as the political outsider leading the people against the establishment that has “rigged the game to protect the party favorites.”

“So let me say to the money boys and the Beltway elites who think that at long last they have pulled up their drawbridge and locked us out forever: You don’t know this peasant army. We haven’t begun to fight,” he said.

Buchanan still faces an uphill battle just to get his name on the 29 state ballots, where the Reform Party will not automatically be listed in the 2000 election. The task, which must be completed well before the party’s convention in August, is expected to be expensive and time consuming.

The Reform Party is still divided over whether Buchanan should be its standard bearer. Social issues comprise a significant chunk of Buchanan’s platform, but are absent from the party’s agenda, which has largely focused on political reform, economic issues and opposition to trade.

And though Buchanan is a household name, thanks to two feisty yet unsuccessful bids for president in 1992 and 1996, his drawing power at the ballot box is questionable. He has failed to gain much traction in this year’s GOP race, and many voters say they don’t like him.

Dallas billionaire Ross Perot, the party’s founder and former presidential candidate, has been silent on a Buchanan bid.

But the party’s most visible spokesman, Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, has actively opposed a Buchanan bid and has recruited New York developer Donald Trump to oppose him.

Trump, who announced this weekend he was defecting from the GOP to compete with Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination, has suggested that Buchanan harbors anti-Semitic views because Buchanan suggests in his latest book that Hitler did not pose enough of a threat after 1940 to warrant U.S. involvement in Europe in World War II.

If Buchanan is the Reform Party nominee, he could make life more difficult for the major-party candidates, particularly Bush, who not only had urged the commentator not to leave the party but also refused to join in the criticism of Buchanan’s view of World War II.

Most polls have shown that a Buchanan candidacy saps more votes from Bush than from Democratic contenders Al Gore or Bill Bradley in the general election. Buchanan attracts disgruntled conservatives who feel Bush is not communicating their views, polls have shown.

Buchanan has a history of making trouble for the Bush family. In 1992, Buchanan damaged President Bush when he ran an aggressive campaign against him in the New Hampshire primary.

As a Reform Party candidate Buchanan would become eligible for more than $12 million in federal matching funds, which would give him the resources to attack Democrats and Republicans in television ads.

In his address, Buchanan attempted to marry his own culturally conservative philosophies with the Reform Party platform.

In a nod to traditional Reform Party goals, he spoke about the need to “cut out the cancerous trade deficits,” and the evils of the trade pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Blending populist and isolationist strains, he said that “we must phase out foreign aid and start out for the forgotten Americans right here in the USA.”

He called for a new Supreme Court to “undo the damage done to this nation by judicial aggressions, beginning with that abomination they call Roe vs. Wade.”

He also renewed his controversial call for “a time-out on legal immigration” and added that “all of us must learn our English language.”

WHAT’S NEXT Time to organize Buchanan’s campaign officials said they would now begin the arduous task of gathering petitions in the 29 states where the Reform Party is not currently on the ballot. It is on the ballot in 21 states. By early summer, Reform Party members will begin voting for their candidate. The party will choose its nominee at its August convention in Long Beach, Calif. If he is listed as an independent party candidate - as Perot was in 1992 and 1996 - Buchanan would remain on the ballot even if he did not get the Reform Party nod.