Passionate Defender of DEMOCRACY?

"I hope to get enough votes so that major candidates and voters say 'Holy shit how did this happen?''' Fulani said at the Kennedy School Tuesday night.

Fulani says she would use the results as "leverage to pass...[progressive programs] such as a national health care bill."

When she looks at the major Democratic candidates for president, the New Alliance Party (NAP) candidate says she sees "The Big White Five"--politicians who are entangled in a system which kills its underprivileged by ignoring their needs.

So the 41-year-old psychotherapist from New York City entered the Democratic primaries, partly at the urging of members of the Democratic Party, says Madelyn Chapman, Fulani's press secretary.

"[They] were concerned that the views of the disenfranchised would be left out, especially with the Reverend Jesse Jackson not running," Chapman says.

But Fulani was largely ignored by Democratic Party organizers in New Hampshire who refused to invite her to party debates.

Though 36 candidates ran in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, only five were officially recognized by the party and invited to all the official debates.

Fulani alleges that only rich, white males are recognized as legitimate candidates.

"The Democratic Party is a closed, PAC-controlled, men's club," she says.

Fulani says that her campaign is about gaining greater political access for average Americans.

"Ordinary people of America have to get control to make policy decisions [that affect] their own lives and those of their children," she says.

"She's for democracy and freedom. She's always been a populist in that she believes the country should be ruled by the people," says Alvin M. Foster, a Fulani supporter from Mattapan who calls himself an anarchist.

After receiving 402 votes in last month's New Hampshire Democratic primary, Fulani decided to withdraw from the remaining Democratic primaries in order to concentrate on running as an independent candidate in the fall, says Chapman.

Fulani supporters compare her short-lived

Democratic candidacy to that of Pat Buchanan--each candidate accuses a major party of ignoring a sector of its membership.

"[The Republicans] are voting for Buchanan to send a message," Chapman says, "We need to use our vote as muscle as well."

For now, the NAP is using their muscle in another way.

Officials from the New Alliance Party have challenged presidential candidate Paul E. Tsongas' petition to participate in the New York primary by citing several technical violations. The New York election law is considered one of the most exclusionary in the country.

Sniping at the political establishment and running upstart political campaigns are not new to Fulani. Fulani, whose political allies have included the Reverend Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of New York, mayor of New York City, and governor of New York, mayor in the last decade.

In 1988, she ran for president and was the only candidate besides George Bush and Michael Dukakis to be on the ballot in all 50 states.

Fulani's message incorporates many familiar liberal themes. President Fulani would establish national health care insurance, maintain abortion rights and raise the minimum wage.

She talks about developing a "truly populist economic recovery" which would redistribute the nation's wealth through a restructured tax code that would include an increase in taxes on the rich.

Fulani is severely critical of the major Democratic candidates, whom she has called "professional murderes" for their "complicity" in building an economy that is based on military production at the expense of social programs.

"The government has become the permanent sugar daddy of the defense industry," she says.

The lack of action on such issues as health care is a further indication that the government does not represent ordinary people, Fulani says.

"If you sat down a Black woman from Harlem and a guy who works in a shoe store in Cambridge, we'd have national health insurance," says Chapman.

Fulani's message has enabled her to garner significant financial support. With the efforts of a staff of 200 and ten offices across the country, the Fulani campaign has raised $1 million in campaign dollars, thus making her eligible for federal matching funds.

Those funds have been raised by canvassing door-to-door and soliciting donations on street corners in New York City neighborhoods.

"We knock, knock, knock on people's door's" says Chapman. She adds that their average donation is $21.

Many Fulani critics say, however, that raising money, not the consciousness of American voters, is the main motive behind her campaign.

"[The Fulani campaign] is a political hoax," says Chip Berlet, who published a study on Fulani's New Alliance Party in 1987. "They're running to make money through federal matching funds and attract recruits."

Berlet charges that the NAP is a "totalitarian cult organization" with ties to such political extremists as Lyndon LaRouche.

Fulani dismisses Berlet's accusations, however, as based and uninformed.

"Why is he so into me? He has never spoken to me," she says, adding that Berlet works for a major Democratic Party contributor.

Critics also challenge the Fulani campaign's Characterization of the New Alliance Party as a "grouping of progressive, multi-racial, pro-gay, pro-women" elements.

"She's an opportunist riding on gay, lesbian activism," says Robert Bray, spokesperson for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF).

"Our experience with the NAP is that they try to..obfuscate information and appear to be pro-gay and once they infiltrate [a gay rights demonstration] they'll try to disrupt it," Bray says.

Bray says that the self-styled "passionately pro-gay" party's application for membership in the International Lesbian and Gay Association was rejected in 1989.

"We believe they have little to offer the gay community," says Bray. "We believe they have little to offer the gay community," says Bray.

But Fulani says that the NGLTF's refusal to support her candidacy also seems from Democratic party politics.

She says that leaders of the NGLTF hold "partisan jobs in the Democratic Party," and therefore must attempt to discredit the NAP, which threatens to draw voters from Democratic candidates.

Criticism of Fulani and the NAP comes from Black activists as well.

Dennis L. Serrette, the NAP's presidential candidate in 1984 and currently a Black activist in Maryland, writes in a 1988 Radical America article that the NAP is "not black-led" and "not even a progressive organization as it also pretends."

Serrette also accuses the NAP of being a front for the "psychological control" experiments of Fred Newman, a co-founder of the party and Fulani's Campaign manager.

Fulani, who is chair of the NAP, responds that it is "racism and sexism" to suggest that a Black woman is being controlled by a white man.

"Fred Newman of wind me up every morning...and send me off to work 18-hour days," Fulani says.

Fulani adds that Serrette is a "disgruntled man" who had a "three-year relationship" with her in the early 1980s.

Fulani does have supporters in the African-American community, however.

"She's very attractive and intelligent and says more good things about poor people than any of the five white males who are running," Foster says.

But Berlet counters that "if [Fulani and the NAP] are really who they say they are they'd get broad political support...instead, they're ostracized by people they purport to represent."