Bay Buchanan

Angela "Bay" Buchanan, the younger sister of conservative pundit and occasional Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, is a member of the board of directors of Open Debates.

Buchanan "is the President of The American Cause, an educational foundation dedicated to advancing traditional conservative issues. In 1996, George magazine recognized her as one of the top 20 political women in the nation. Bay is also a political analyst for CNBC, MSNBC, Good Morning America and CNN's Inside Politics."

Buchanan is also chairman of Team America PAC, founded by Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo. She served as an adviser to Tancredo's 2008 presidential campaign.

After earning a master's degree in mathematics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Bay joined Richard Nixon's "1972 re-election campaign as a bookkeeper,... [where] she grew close to the big brother who called her Bay--toddler talk for 'baby'--and a remarkable political partnership was hatched. After a post-Watergate sojourn in Australia, Bay went to work for Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign."

"For the next four years, she served as understudy to political mechanic Lyn Nofziger. Bay became controller of a nonprofit organization called Citizens for the Republic, created with money and mailing lists left over from Reagan's '76 campaign. Though aspects of CFTR were later determined to be illegal, the notion of using nonprofits between election cycles to pave the way for presidential campaigns has since become commonplace. Bay went on to become national treasurer of Reagan's victorious 1980 campaign."

Reagan appointed Bay Buchanan as Treasurer of the United States and, "[a]t 32, she was the youngest person ever to hold the post. (Her signature can still be found on older greenbacks.) Brother Pat followed his younger sister into the Reagan Administration during its second term--he served two years as White House communications director--before returning to his career as a pundit."

She is the author of the book The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton (Regnery Publishing, May 2007, ISBN 1596985070).

Buchanan Inc.
Pat Buchanan and Bay "have built a semipermanent organization that has promoted conservative causes while at the same time making them rich. They've become experts at the lucrative game of direct-mail fundraising and masters at qualifying for federal matching funds. In between presidential elections, they continue their issue-advocacy and fundraising operations through a tightly controlled nonprofit organization. In this fashion, Buchanan Inc. has been promoting Pat's television and publishing careers--and employing Bay full time--since 1992," Monte Paulsen wrote in the November 22, 1999, issue of The Nation.

Bay Buchanan "tends the nest" of her brother's campaigns. "As compulsively organized as her brother is freewheeling, she keeps the campaign running with an attention to detail that aides describe as obsessive. She 'runs it like a general,' Pat's wife, Shelley, told the Christian Science Monitor [in November 1999]. 'There wouldn't be a campaign if it weren't for Bay.'"

External articles

 * "Bay Buchanan provided an 'extreme makeover' of Hillary and Chelsea Clinton's 9-11 accounts", Media Matters for America, May 29, 2007.