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Sunday, August 27, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In a campaign stop yesterday in the Pittsburgh area, vice presidential candidate Ezola Foster reassured supporters that, despite suggestions to the contrary, she and Pat Buchanan would be the Reform Party's nominees on the November ballot.
She also blasted as smear attacks the recent news reports that she had received disability payments for a mental disorder, and she scoffed at notions that she had too little experience to hold such a high office.
"We are making history and don't let anyone deter us from that goal," she said, alluding perhaps in part to her status as the first black woman to run for vice president.
Foster addressed a meeting of the Reform Party of Pennsylvania at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Coraopolis. The party's candidates for state senate, Robert Domske, and the U.S. Congress, James O'Neil, also spoke to the audience of about 40 people.
Buchanan's choice of Foster, 62, as his running mate, has been viewed by some as a move to counter accusations of racism.
"I have been a black person all my life, I was born and raised in the South, went to all-Negro schools," Foster told reporters before her speech. "I have gone to the white-only, colored-only drinking fountains, the back of the bus. I think I know a racist when I see one and Pat Buchanan is not a racist."
In recent days, a spotlight has shone on the Reform Party's split into two factions -- one supporting Buchanan's nomination and the other supporting John Hagelin, a Pittsburgh-born nuclear physicist who now lives in Iowa. Both sides contend the other is not entitled to $12.6 million of federal matching funds for campaign efforts.
The dissension in the party's ranks has thrown election officials in several states into a quandary.
On Thursday, the secretary of state's staff in California, Foster's home, announced that she and Buchanan would not be on the November ballot after the state Reform Party leadership narrowly voted to withdraw their names. The Buchanan campaign intends to challenge that decision.
Buchanan's ticket will run in Iowa, where election officials picked his name instead of Hagelin's out of a salad bowl.
The random draw went the other way in Montana, where Hagelin will be listed as the Reform nominee. Foster told Pennsylvania party members that a judge there has issued a restraining order to prevent the ballots from being printed.
Officials in Kansas and Connecticut have decided neither candidate will be on the ballot unless the party makes a decision.
Buchanan and Foster are on the Pennsylvania ballot, said Christopher Hollenden, chairman of this state's Reform Party. He added that there is no organized effort from the Hagelin camp threatening that ballot here.
Foster told the Coraopolis audience that the Federal Elections Commission is expected to make a decision about whose names will be on the November ballot -- and therefore who gets the $12.6 million -- by Sept. 6.
She then addressed reports in the Los Angeles Times that she collected a year's worth of worker's compensation payments for a mental disorder. She denies ever having such a problem.
"Of course, you know the media are strongly pro-abortion and I might add, pro-homosexual, which is why they play up the smears against Pat Buchanan and, more recently, against Ezola Foster," she said.
In 1996, Foster refused to return to her work at a predominantly Latino high school, where she was a typing teacher. She said that the school's environment had grown threatening to her because of her vocal opposition to illegal immigration.
Foster said the Los Angeles Unified School District was retaliating against her for accusing its officials of misusing money for the education of minority children, which prompted one listener to call out, "You go, girl!"