The blubbery leer of Bubba Clinton, the ghoulish rictus of Ronald Reagan, the axe-man's glint of Richard Nixon, all loom out of the dim, cobwebbed light in the Abracadabra store in downtown New York. The 37th, 40th and 42nd presidents are rubber masks of unsettling conviction. Perhaps it says something about American attitudes to their politicians that such caricatures are selling briskly.
Halloween, thank heaven, has come and gone but the phantasmagoria of characters now declared in the race to be the 43rd president ensures a ready supply of frighteners for next year. The Reform party, created by the paranoid business gnome Ross Perot, is the belfry for most of the bats. Perot may be a fruitcake but he won a whopping 19% in the 1992 presidential race and did well enough in 1996 (7% ) to give the party the right to $13m in federal election funds for the race in 2000.
Pat Buchanan, the xenophobic ex-pugilist with a pitchfork and tail, has quit the Republican party in the hope of capturing these dollars as the Reform candidate. He sees himself leading "a peasant army", meaning the blue-collar working class whose wages and jobs have not followed the trajectory of the Dow-Jones index. He indicts free trade and foreigners for missing the gravy train, but also hyphenated Americans - Hispanics, Greeks, Armenians, Russians, Indians, Jews and blacks - whose further offence is to menace Anglo-Saxon culture. Whites will be in a minority in California early in the next century and Buchananites were among the voters who recently ended bilingual education in the state.
Buchanan is a genuine populist. He echoes Ignatius Donnelly a century ago. "From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice", cried Donnelly, "we breed two great classes - tramps and millionaires." It is only fitting that in the rush for the Reform party loot he is hotly pursued by the most flamboyant of the fat cats, hotel and casino owner, Donald Trump, another new refugee from the Grand Old party.
What Trump stands for, with utter sincerity, is Donald Trump. In neon lights. If Trump did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him for the survival of tabloid journalism. On a slow news day, there is always a new Trump bimbo. He has had two gossip-fest divorces and an awkward bankruptcy. Now he is exulting in headlines about his latest Trump tower, on its way to cutting off light from the UN building.
As an embryonic vote-getter, Trump has the piquant disadvantage that he will not kiss babies or shake hands. Like Howard Hughes, he fears that if he does microbes will get into his precious bodily fluids. But Trump is a doer. He wrote a runaway bestseller called The Art Of The Deal - followed, after his fall, by The Art Of The Comeback. He got New York's Central Park ice-rink opened when all the mayor's men couldn't get it together again. He may yet steal the Reform party from Buchanan and Perot because he has in his corner the elected leader of the party - Jesse Ventura.
At least he does for now. Jesse the Belly, the profane governor of Minnesota, has only half-promised he will not run himself with three years left to serve in the governor's mansion. But he despises Buchanan and Perot and is betting that Trump can see them off. And he fits in a supposedly centre party as well as a halo fits Trump. He is a Goliath of a social libertarian - pro-marijuana, pro-abortion, pro-guns, pro-gay rights, anti-school vouchers, pro-tax cuts (while the party platform supposedly favours using the federal surplus to pay down the national debt). He is also the possessor of the loosest mouth in politics. Where others tread in fear of the religious right, Jesse kicks butt. And no other politician would dare to ruffle the petticoats of political correctness as he does.
The system that gives prominence to the Venturas, Trumps and Buchanans, and some of the parlour spooks contending for the Republican nomination, may seem weird. But there is virtue in the long run of party and open primaries before the presidential candidates are chosen. The system tests the appeal of the apparently extreme in policy and the eccentric in personality. It gives a vast and diverse nation opportunity to vent its feelings.
And the two main parties can more readily resist the temptation to give in to extremes. That is the story of the 1948 presidential election. Dire results were forecast when the Ku Klux Klan, disguised as the States Rights party, walked out of the Democratic party. Their 2% of the total vote gave a precise measure of how fringe they were; and it was the same story with the challenge from the left by Henry Wallace's Progressives. Harry Truman, having braved the goblins, was back in the White House, no longer hostage to his own extremes.