Good Vibrations

Despite both defeats, Hagelin claims he leads the "true Reformers." He has certainly proved himself a foil to Buchanan by confounding his campaign in vote-rich Michigan, where officials refused to allow either candidate on the ballot. Texas may count as one of Buchanan's few solaces: Hagelin cannot contest Buchanan for the Reform Party ballot line in Texas because it won't appear there, since Buchanan qualified as an independent candidate. (Hagelin may not appear on the Texas ballot at all. Election authorities disqualified the Natural Law Party after a statistical sampling found a plethora of invalid addresses on their ballot-access petitions.)

Meanwhile, Hagelin's emergence and support from Reform Party dissidents have baffled his critics. "This is strange," said Robert Park of the American Physical Society, which represents the nation's physicists. "I wonder if they quite understand what Hagelin has stood for." Others speculated that the anti-Pats didn't care at all about Hagelin, but needed a "stalking horse" to taunt Buchanan. Anyone would do. "The old-time Perot people, I'm sure they're privately embarrassed by this stuff," said David Gillespie, a political scientist and third-party expert at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina.

Some Perot stalwarts openly admit their lack of knowledge about Hagelin, scratching their head over issues such as genetically modified food (Hagelin's staunchly against it); others say they had no clue Natural Law parties had been established in 85 nations under the watch of the Maharishi. Nevertheless, supporters insist they have much in common with their new candidate. "It's a free country," says Jim Mangia, a founding national secretary of the Reform Party who is leading the Buchanan backlash. "Some of us believe in the Virgin Mary, some of us believe in meditation."

What about Hagelin's overtures to head off warfare in Kosovo and the Persian Gulf by dispatching legions of levitators? Interestingly, Mangia wasn't skeptical of the notion, but said it represented one of many credible ideas suppressed by deep-pocketed special interests. "Given that everything else over there has failed, I don't know why they shouldn't try that," Mangia said. "I'm not into meditation personally, but there has to be more on the table to how we solve the problems of the world."

In The American Prospect, a left-of-center political magazine, one observer connected the party's future chances to Reform leaders' willingness to embrace such ideas: "As I watched the week's goings-on," says Alexander Nguyen, "I thought I could hear in the background a giant sucking sound--the Reform Party's once formidable influence yogically flying into the atmosphere."

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All through the summer, candidate Hagelin said he is primed for victory. He claims he's harnessed an "emerging vibrant independent political movement in America," and even predicts a come-from-behind, Jesse Ventura-like win in November. "In every single area we have winning ideas that are long overdue," he told the Dallas Observer in a brief telephone interview. "We have a foundation for a grassroots insurrection at the ballot box more than Perot did."

For now, at least, the anti-Buchanan faction of the Reform Party isn't perturbed by Hagelin's cosmological rants on so-called "universal fields of intelligence," or the possibility their new leader is a grade-A kook. As long as Hagelin is "moderate" on issues such as gay rights and abortion, they're willing not to look so deeply into his background. "TM is certainly not a danger to our liberty like right-to-life is," says Reform Party veteran Beverly Kennedy of Dallas.

Why put their weight behind such a strange bird, or even bother to continue with Reform Party politics after the party has gone a different direction? Why not throw in the cards for this election and try again next time from scratch?

Vindictiveness against the Buchanan campaign, which has taken over the party and steered it in a new direction, seems the obvious answer. Nevertheless, Reform Party dissenters insist that they too have come to embrace Hagelin's agenda after getting to know him better. "He's a very impressive person, and everybody likes him," says Kennedy, who cites Hagelin's stands on genetically modified food and renewable energy as dynamic issues she believes the Reform Party should adopt.

Meanwhile, Hagelin the scientist-turned-TM evangelist has tapped a new audience. Indeed, for Linda Curtis, a Reform Party veteran from Austin who also attended the Long Beach convention, Hagelin's TM affiliation is actually a plus, because his unflappable nature has impressed her. "He seems like a really calm guy," she says. "I've seen him in confrontations, and he doesn't get angry at all."

Admiring Hagelin's unruffled nature, she adds one more comment after a moment of reflection: "Maybe I should try TM."

Perhaps that's the idea.