| Howard Phillips | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 6, 1941 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Residence | Fairfax County, Virginia |
| Occupation | Political activist |
| Political party | Constitution |
| Religion | Protestant Christian |
| Spouse | Peggy Blanchard Phillips |
| Children | Douglas Phillips Amanda Brad Phillips Jennifer Alexandra Samuel Joshua Phillips |
| Website | |
| howardphillips.com | |
Howard Phillips (born February 6, 1941) is a three-time United States presidential candidate who has served as the chairman of The Conservative Caucus, a conservative public policy advocacy group founded in 1974.
A 1962 graduate of Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was twice elected chairman of the Student Council, Phillips is president of Policy Analysis, Inc., a public policy research organization which publishes the bimonthly Issues and Strategy Bulletin.
Jewish by birth and a native of Boston, Massachusetts, Phillips converted to evangelical Christianity in adulthood[1] and has been associated with Christian Reconstructionism.
Phillips and his wife, the former Peggy Blanchard, reside in Fairfax County, Virginia in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Contents |
During the Nixon Administration, Phillips headed two federal agencies, ending his Executive Branch career as director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in the Executive Office of the President for five months in 1973, a position from which he resigned when U.S. President Richard M. Nixon reneged on his commitment to veto further funding for Great Society programs begun in the administration of Nixon's predecessor, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson.
Nixon's appointment of Phillips as Director of OEO in January 1973 touched off a national controversy culminating in a court case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Williams v. Phillips, 482 F.2d 669) [2] challenging the legality of Phillips' appointment.
Phillips left the United States Republican Party in 1974 after some two decades of service to the GOP as precinct worker, election warden, campaign manager, congressional aide, Boston municipal Republican chairman, and assistant to the Chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1978, Phillips finished fourth in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Paul Tsongas won the primary and defeated the incumbent, a liberal African-American Republican, Edward Brooke, in the November general election, who had been first elected in 1966.
The Conservative Caucus, a nonpartisan, nationwide, grass-roots public policy advocacy group, has been in the thick of battles, in opposition to the Panama Canal treaties and the Jimmy Carter-Leonid Brezhnev SALT II treaties in the 1970s, in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative and major tax reductions during the 1980s, and in the vanguard of efforts to terminate Federal subsidies to activist groups under the banner of "defunding the Left."
In 1982, Phillips joined the Houston, Texas, political activist Clymer Wright in an unsuccessful effort to convince U.S. President Ronald W. Reagan to dismiss Houston attorney James A. Baker, III, from the position of presidential chief of staff. Phillips and Wright claimed that Baker, a former Democrat and a political intimate of then Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, was undercutting conservative initiatives in the Reagan administration. Not only did Reagan reject the Wright-Phillips request, but in 1985, he named Baker as United States Secretary of the Treasury, at Baker's request in a job-swap with then Secretary Donald T. Regan, a former Merrill Lynch officer who became chief of staff. Reagan also rebuked Phillips and Wright for waging a "campaign of sabotage" against Baker.[3]
Other Conservative Caucus campaigns have involved opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization, support for a national version of California's Proposition 187 (to end mandated subsidies for illegal aliens), as well as continuing efforts to oppose publicly-funded health care, abortion, and gay rights. Phillips is the host of Conservative Roundtable, a weekly public affairs television program.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Phillips coordinated efforts to build private sector support for anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Central America and Southern Africa. He played an instrumental role in the leadership of the New Right, as well as in the founding of the religious right in 1977. Phillips has led fact-finding missions to Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, South America, Central America, Western Europe, and the Far East.
He is one of the founders of the U.S. Taxpayers Party (which changed its name to the Constitution Party in 1999), a third party associated with conservative, pro-life issues, and constitutional government ideas on both social and fiscal issues. He was that party's presidential candidate in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 elections for President of the United States. Phillips first campaign for president in 1992 ended in a seventh place finish. The campaign received 43,369 votes for 0.04% of the total vote. In 1996 the Phillips campaign finished sixth with 184,656 votes for 0.19% of the total vote. In the 2000 election he received 98,020 votes for 0.1% of the total vote and a sixth place finish. In the 1996 campaign, Phillips also endorsed the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, Woody Jenkins in Louisiana, defeated by the Democrat Mary Landrieu, in a close outcome which Jenkins unsuccessfully disputed before the senators.
Phillips was chosen by an overwhelming majority of delegates at the National Convention of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, in San Diego, California, on August 17, 1996 to serve as its presidential candidate.
| Party political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by No one (Party not yet commissioned) |
Constitution Party Presidential candidate 1992 (lost), 1996 (lost), 2000 (lost) |
Succeeded by Michael Peroutka |
|
|||||
|
|||||