Sylvana Foa, the U.N. spokeswoman, was clearly puzzled.

Not only did the Republican Party platform, unveiled last week at San Diego, California, oppose U.N. peacekeeping, but it also spoke out against any U.N. or international interference with national parks — a charge that left Foa mystified.

“The United Nations is not trying to take over U.S. parks,” Foa said. “We simply give medals to parks. …There’s been a lot of misinformation.”

The spokeswoman added that she did not understand why the platform seemed so concerned with the spectre of U.N. command, to the point where the Republicans affirmed, “We oppose the commitment of American troops to U.N. ‘peacekeeping’,” if the commander is not a U.S. officer..

Yet the Republican platform is just the latest example of how the concerns of the U.S. far right, from racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to the growing militia movement, is finding an echo among the mainstream political parties.

Robert Crawford, a research analyst at the Seattle-based Coalition for Human Dignity, says that, although most U.S. voters would never consider the United Nations a threat to the sanctity of U.S. parks, that issue strikes a chord with the militias.

In western Washington, a state that borders Canada, state officials recently considered an offer to monitor parks jointly with the Canadians, Crawford notes. But that effort, he says, quickly ran afoul of the rightist militias.

“A number of speakers said (joint monitoring) would be part of an effort by the United Nations to take over much of the land in Washington state,” Crawford says.

That campaign, which stalled the joint monitoring drive, is simply part of the militias’ focus on “attacking the United Nations as a threat to U.S. sovereignty,” he adds.

With election campaigns heating up, both the Republican and Democratic Parties are eager to attract the support of the alienated white voters who form the bulk of the militias’ support. As a result, analysts say, many of the extreme right’s concerns are showing up, often in coded form, in mainstream political discourse.

“The militias have been successful at influencing more mainstream sorts of politics,” says Noah Chandler, a research associate at the Centre for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based group which monitors the militias.

Chandler estimates that there are no more than 75,000 militia members in the United States, and perhaps another 25,000 people involved in racist hate groups. But he says that the militias’ media savvy and grass-roots links make them a key voting bloc.

Certainly the politicians think so.

Robert Dole, the Republican presidential candidate, brought up several issues near and dear to the militias during his party’s convention last week, from restrictions on immigration to a promise to “end the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as we know it.”

More important, from the IRS to the United Nations, Dole voiced a pessimism of government institutions more in tune with militia rhetoric than with the former U.S. senator’s own career.

“Dole has been mimicking some of the issues of (Pat) Buchanan’s campaign,” Crawford says, referring of the political commentator who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican candidacy with strong militia support this year. (One of Buchanan’s top advisers earlier this year, Larry Pratt, is himself active with several fringe groups on the right, he notes.)

But President Bill Clinton’s Democrats have not slouched in their efforts to win over white voters angry over racially charged issues such as immigration and welfare.

Clinton last month had to tone down one campaign ad, boasting his government’s success at deporting illegal aliens, after federal Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros objected to images of officials seizing dark-skinned immigrants as racist.

The incumbent President has also angered his own supporters by vowing to sign a bill that would abolish federal welfare programmes and send the money back to the states.

“I think ‘welfare reform’ is itself a code word for racial politics,” says Chester Hartman of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. He says that the proposal to send welfare back to the state level hearkens back to the era of “states’ rights,” when Southerners rebelled against any federal efforts to guarantee civil rights for African Americans.

‘State’s rights’ rhetoric is popular with many militia leaders, including Ray Southwell, former chief of staff of the Michigan Militia that was linked to the two suspects arrested in last year’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

“There is one last hope to avoid armed confrontation, and that’s if our state governments rise up and tell our federal government to back off,” Southwell said last year. “If the state does not rise up…the American people will.”

“State’s rights in the 1940s and 1950s was a code word for racial discrimination,” Hartman argues. But now, he notes, Clinton intends to embrace such a platform as a solution to the problems of federally-funded welfare.

Ironically, some politicians who garnered the most militia approval in the 1994 elections, such as Republican Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho, have struggled to put those links behind them. But the major political leaders have smoothed the rough edges off some militia concerns to bring them into the mainstream agenda.

The secret to the militia’s political success, Chandler says, is that they have effectively split themselves into two groups: an above-ground populist movement with an angry, anti-government appeal and an underground linked to attacks on federal facilities.

But these two wings, he argues, are “really one and the same.”

Chandler contends that, while the above-ground groups spread the message to new listeners, mainly through talk radio, the underground helps to spark interest by proving that the groups offer action, not merely words.

“Militia membership actually increased after the Oklahoma bombing,” in which 170 people were killed, he notes. But that startling rise has only made politicians more eager to listen to their angry message.

From the early success of the Buchanan campaign to the current debate on immigration and welfare, this election year is shedding new light on the words of Tom Metzger, leader of the racist White Aryan Resistance.

Following the Oklahoma bombing, Metzger predicted, “The government of this country — what we call the criminals — had better start listening to the dispossessed white people, the dispossessed majority.”

They seem to be listening.