Follow the Money

by Jason Vest

As an exercise in irony, the event did not disappoint: that Buchanan would address his business-suit-clad, Wall Street Journal-reading audience as a "peasant army" was worth the trip to Falls Church alone. But what of the leadership of this army? Largely unreported in the wake of this conclave of whooping yahoos was news that the Buchanan campaign has either purged or been deserted by some of its most loyal soldiers, that some in the upper echelons of the campaign have historically used the Buchanan apparatus to do anything but take vows of poverty, and that because of his switch Buchanan's campaign could be on shaky financial ground.

To take the second item first: In 1996, for example, Pat's sister and once- and- future aide-de-camp Bay was working as Brother Pat's campaign manager, making over $100,000. The Buchanan '96 campaign's main purchaser of media time was a company called WTS Media. Incorporated in 1994, WTS had a Maryland address -- not an office building, in fact, but the residential apartment of one Carolyn Melby, an ex-Buchanan campaign staffer employed by ... Bay Buchanan, who, filings with the Federal Election Commission reveal, was proprietor of WTS. Registered with the Virginia corporation commission by the future general counsel of the Buchanan campaign and including as an officer campaign treasurer Scott Mackenzie, WTS did $4 million dollars worth of business during the 1996 cycle, and took an 8 percent commission, netting a $320,000 profit.

When queried on his association with WTS in 1996, Mackenzie said he had no idea his name was on the company papers, and Michael George, the campaign counsel, indicated he'd had no role in WTS since he filed the papers at Bay's behest, and that it was Bay's baby. Bay, for her part, has explained that outside media buyers usually take a 15 percent commission, that her 8 percent was a savings for the campaign, and that a substantial portion of the commission money went to pay for production costs. In 1997, according to Virginia state records, WTS changed its name to Carmel Consultants, and lists Melby as "president/ secretary/treasurer." When asked last week about the name change and any role Carmel might play in the upcoming campaign, Bay claimed she was "unaware" the company she owned had changed names and management, but added that using Carmel in the 2000 campaign was a possibility.

A group Bay has been speaking with, however, is the Federal Election Commission. Earlier this year, the FEC released it's audit of the Buchanan for President '96 campaign. Among it's findings were that the campaign "did not exercise best efforts to obtain and report" the occupations or employer names of contributors who gave a total of $2,422,604 to the campaign. The audit also found that nearly $60,000 in disbursements couldn't be accounted for, and that another $51,343 in expenses either had nothing to do with the campaign or were redundant.

But perhaps the most intriguing item dealt with a company called Matching Funds, Inc., which the campaign hired to prepare and file applications to the government for matching funds. "MFI did not make commercially reasonable attempts to collect $183,009 for services rendered," the FEC found, "thereby making an apparent prohibited contribution" to Buchanan's campaign. (The campaign is appealing the findings.)

Also on my agenda was querying press aide Bob Adams about the Marks article, but I learned that Adams, too, has been replaced, and is no longer with the campaign. Neither, I discovered, is longtime Buchanan webmistress Linda Muller. According to a copy of an Oct 19 email sent by Muller to Buchanan supporters, Muller was abruptly fired by Bay Buchanan. "She explained that the campaign was going in a different direction and that I no longer fit in with her plans," Muller wrote, saying she was "in a state of shock and disbelief" since "for the last five years my whole life has been dedicated to Pat and our cause." When asked last Monday if all recent staff departures were voluntary, Bay Buchanan said Adams left because he didn't want to leave the GOP, while "the others were just, you know, internal decisions."

According to renegade ex-operative Marks, the departures of Muller and Mackenzie are "surprising," but the rough handling of employees isn't exactly unprecedented. "One of the ironies of the Buchanan campaign was that Pat was promoting himself as sticking up for the little guy, yet the campaign violated federal labor law by not paying its hourly employees time and a half when they went over 40 hours," says Marks. After filing a complaint with the Department of Labor that eventually went to court, one worker even got a $5000 settlement.

Yet there are those who work for the Buchanan campaign who don't have to go to court to collect $5,000. Though Pat fulminates against "the money men" of the "political establishment" and "Beltway parties," while the Buchanan 2000 campaign isn't top-heavy with consultants, it isn't bereft of any of the above. Take, for example, the firm of Alexander & MacGregor, which usually gets its money from the Buchanan campaign in $8500 disbursements and is currently owed $25,000 by the campaign.

Longtime fundraising consultants, Phil Alexander and Lee MacGregor counted among their direct mail fundraising clients the quintessential establishment devils GOPAC and Monday Morning PAC -- partisan Republican groups created by Newt Gingrich, a politician who essentially invited lobbyists to do what Buchanan railed against in his speech: "write laws ... looking over [legislators'] shoulders." Too, a December 1992 article the duo wrote doesn't exactly reinforce their image of pitchfork-wielding populists ready to stick it to the Brigadefuhrer's now-hated hometown of Washington, DC. Entitled "Conservative Direct Mail Fundraising In The Clinton Era -- The Challenge: We Need To Mail 'Smarter'" -- Republican failures in 1992 are characterized as having less to do with the substance of politics and ideas but "the problem" of "how do you reach [Republican voters] economically".

Suffice to say, a proposed answer to the articulated dilemma illustrates the importance for all politicians of not listening to voters, but figuring out how to manipulate them. One way to go, say Alexander and MacGregor, is "psychographic predictive modeling." "Enough mail appeals must be mailed to a pure 'nth' of a large broad-based or compiled list with appended data to assure a statistically viable response group -- most often 100,000 pieces," they write. "Respondents are compared to the file at large by their appended data -- information on lifestyle, spending, giving choices and any other data available ... [this data gives] far more detailed information than any kind of geographic prediction based on census data." Whether the Buchanan campaign is "psychographically predictively modeling" is unknown, but one assumes that Alexander and MacGregor are not being retained to advise the candidate on the art of burnishing his allegedly-populist elocution.

Money, as we all know, is the lifeblood of any campaign. And the high command of the Buchanan campaign can see the Holy Grail brimming with sanguine salvation off in the distance: over $12 million in matching funds from the federal government if Buchanan wins the Reform nomination. However, it's not entirely clear what the Buchanan finances are going to look like in the coming months. After Buchanan's announcement, his sister noted several times that, despite his change of parties, "it's still the same campaign." Buchanan's switch of allegiance raises an interesting question: Now that he's a Reform Party candidate, can he use the money he raised as a Republican candidate to get federal matching funds? According to the FEC's Sharon Snyder, the agency has "indicated we thought the question was ripe for an advisory request" from the Buchanan campaign. No request, she says, has been received; if another candidate or citizen filed a complaint, however, the FEC would be obliged to investigate, or the FEC could launch a compliance investigation of its own.

Which, perhaps, makes something musician Warren Zevon said last Friday night at the State Theater in Falls Church potentially prophetic. Amending the lyrics to "Werewolves of London," he sang, "you better stay away from him, he'll rip your lungs out, Jim, and he's coming for Pat Buchanan."