The reclusive billionaire and two-time presidential candidate on Friday spent hours huddled in his Dallas office tower with his top political adviser, Russell Verney. Perot had until tomorrow to allow himself to be drafted for the Reform Party ballot.With Pat Buchanan on the verge of controlling the party and molding it in his image, longtime-Reform members had been begging Perot to jump in and try to take the nomination away. But early Friday night, Verney emerged with a message for Perot’s backers: it wasn’t going to happen. “There’s enormous pressure on him,” Verney said in a telephone call shortly after the decision was made. But while Perot could have challenged Buchanan for the nomination, it would have been too late for him to get on the ballot in most states. In the end, Verney said, “he would have been leading the public to believe he was a competitive candidate in the fall. And that wasn’t true.”

For those of you who’ve had better things to do than follow the internal struggles of the Reform party–“Survivor”, after all, is much better than expected–there is some irony in the current state of affairs. It was Perot’s faction of the party that first made overtures to Buchanan last winter, when Pitchfork Pat was losing badly in the Republican primaries. They were afraid that Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura was trying to take over the party, and they wanted a foil. The plan worked; Ventura refused to be in the same party as Buchanan and quit. But now Buchanan has begun purging the party of those who don’t like his more controversial stands. “He said he wasn’t going to take over the party, and he wasn’t going to talk about social issues,” says Jim Mangia, national secretary and chief Perot drafter. “And he’s done both.” Buchanan hardly disputes it. In an interview at his white-columned mansion on the Potomac River a few weeks ago, he said his main goal was to emerge from the election with a “Buchananite party” intact.

Now the Perot forces, having failed to entice Ralph Nader or the party’s founder into a fight with Buchanan, are pinning their hopes on John Hagelin, a Harvard-educated quantam physicist who is the standard-bearer of the Natural Law Party. (They’re into meditation and banning genetically altered food, among other things.) Anything can happen. The convention itself, in Long Beach this August, could well turn violent; Mangia says he’s been physically threatened by Perot backers and accuses them of using “brownshirt bully tactics.” Either way, the Reform Party as we know it is imploding. And as Perot himself might say…that’s just sad.