28 July 1999 Use this version to print The Reform Party, which arose as a byproduct of billionaire H. Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign, held its fifth national convention at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan, July 23-25.
Reform has some of the outward trappings of a third-party movement.
It has ballot status in 19 states, and will likely gain ballot status in most of the remaining 31 states and the District of Columbia in time for the 2000 elections, as it did in 1996. It has activists and local organizations in many parts of the country, and it won statewide office for the first time last November, when Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler, was elected governor of Minnesota. Nonetheless the Reform Party does not have a mass political base and remains largely a political shell. On the decisive issue of political program, the Reform Party offers no challenge to the right-wing consensus of the Democrats and Republicans. It embraces the profit system just as fervently as the two major capitalist parties, criticizing corporate America from the standpoint, not of the working class, but of sections of small business who feel squeezed by domestic and foreign competition.