Minor candidates travel a hard road from anonymity to obscurity

Reporting from Fair Oaks, Calif. — 

Cutlery clatters against china as Bill Chambers rises to give his spiel. He has five minutes to persuade 120 or so Republicans that they should entrust him with their precious votes.

But first, he has to convince the audience at the Sacramento Republican Women Federated Whistle Stop Candidate Forum that Bill Chambers exists at all. On this Wednesday afternoon in May, it is a tough sell.

“There are eight Republican candidates running for governor,” begins the railroad switchman, Little League manager and three-time gubernatorial candidate. “Most people seem confused by the facts that I throw out, because all you hear in the media is there are two people running in the Republican Party.”

The audience chews. Chats. The luncheon hum threatens to drown out Chambers’ soft, deep voice.

“There are also, for your information, a grand total of 23 candidates for governor representing six different parties,” he continues, affable, unfazed. “And luckily, Jerry Brown has six opponents, so maybe we have a chance of not getting him.”

Finally, a chuckle.

This is what it’s like to be not Steve Poizner, not Meg Whitman, not Carly Fiorina, not Barbara Boxer and run for office against front-runners with money, name recognition and the backing of a major political party. Democracy depends on people like Bill Chambers, but it doesn’t always treat them well.

At best, they are ignored. At worst, humiliated. But while tens of millions of Americans can’t be bothered even to cast a ballot, these brave/foolhardy/masochistic/idealistic/crazy/ (circle one) citizens open up their checkbooks and private lives and ask for your vote.

The question, of course, is why?

Allan Hoffenblum, whose California Target Book handicaps and analyzes races, chalks it up to some combination of vanity, deep belief and “no conception of how hard it is to contact a sufficient number of voters” to get elected in a state this big. Then there is ITTYTWIT, shorthand for a state of mind, a world view: “I think that you think what I think.”

ITTYTWIT-ers, Hoffenblum says, are “highly concerned about what’s going on, and they truly feel they have some answers, and if they just get out there and talk to the voters, they’ll be able to convince them, because, obviously [the voters] agree with the candidate.”

Threads of idealism and ITTYTWIT run through Chambers’ bids for office. “If the media would expose all of us as being candidates,” he says of himself and his fellow unknowns, “and the electorate actually went out there and read up on us, I think I would appeal to more people than most.”

Chambers ran for governor the first time in 2003, when a disgruntled electorate tossed Gray Davis out on his ear. He got 609 votes. ( Arnold Schwarzenegger got more than 4 million.) He ran again in the 2006 Republican primary against Schwarzenegger. That time, 65,487 people voted for him.

This time, he laughs, “if I can increase at the same percentage, I’ll have a landslide victory.”

The 54-year-old Chambers, who lives in Auburn northeast of Sacramento, describes himself as a blue-collar Republican and a proud native Californian. His 29-word statement in the official voter information guide leans heavily on traditional GOP values: “less taxes, less spending, and less government.”

He runs, he says, because he is angry — at the vitriol marring politics, at a system that robs voters of true choice, at “people coming from out of state, living a few years in California and saying, ‘Oh, this is what California needs to do.’”

Each race has cost him less than $10,000—a minute fraction of the tens of millions of dollars that Meg Whitman has reported spending just from her own vast fortune. If he hadn’t been bitten by the political bug, he says, he might have bought a Harley-Davidson. His greatest joy is talking to voters. His greatest pain is “the lack of acknowledgement.”

Like the time in February when he called the state Republican Party office and asked who was running for governor.

“Whitman and Poizner,” a voice replied.

“ Well, what about the others?” Chambers asked.

“They aren’t credible candidates.”

When Lowell Darling, 67, took on then-Gov. Jerry Brown in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1978, credible was the last thing he wanted to be. His motive at the time was performance art.

“I was going to take the entire state budget and divide it equally among all voters; I figured it would create a gold rush,” he recalled. “I was going to hire Jerry Brown to run the state for me….Everyone was going to get Wednesday off. I was going to pay children as much as their teachers.”

Now facing the attorney general for the same office yet again, Darling is a bit more serious. A self-described “Bush exile,” the artist said he returned from Europe about a year ago and found himself “in the same boat as the state. We were both broke.” He is bunking with a friend in San Rafael, although his suits remain in Berlin.

Darling believes the Legislature should be able to raise taxes and pass budgets with a simple majority instead of the two-thirds now required. Although he plans to endorse Brown in the general election, “I want people to vote for me in the primary because it’s a vote for this issue.

“A vote for me,” he said, “is a vote against the one-third minority running the state.”

And then there is Marcel Weiland, who thinks this is a good year to pick off Darrell Steinberg, president pro-tem of the state Senate.

Weiland is a deep believer in throw-the-bums-out accountability. A Republican who is unopposed in the June 8 primary, Weiland hopes dissatisfaction with the status quo will power him into Steinberg’s 6th District Senate seat come November.

He’s out campaigning already — that is, when he’s not studying for finals. Then he sends his 17-year-old brother in his stead.

“Imagine if the politically invincible establishment poster child Darrell Steinberg is ousted by a 20-year-old college student,” Chad Weiland told a cheering crowd at the Sacramento women’s event. “I don’t think anyone’s going to continue business as usual if that were to happen.”

Weiland, who is actually 19 but will be 20 in November, got involved in the Republican central committee through a friend at American River College, a two-year school in Sacramento. He lives with his parents in Citrus Heights. The kitchen table is his campaign headquarters, at least for now. His parents help organize his volunteers.

Not every long-shot perseveres to election day.

Edwin Stegman, 89, first ran for office in 1957, in an Assembly race that he did not win. This year, as Brown stayed coy about running for governor, the practicing Santa Monica attorney did what any civic-minded Democrat would.

“Since there is no announced candidate for the nomination, I will fill the vacuum,” he wrote in a news release distributed via U.S. mail. “If Attorney General Jerry Brown decides not to run, I may be it.”

The fedora-wearing Stegman also had a raft of ideas: a “$2 a gallon highway user fee” on gasoline (ever the politician, he hates the word “tax”) to break Californians’ addiction to foreign oil. Free bus service to ease traffic gridlock. Free tuition for the University of California and all state and community colleges.

At the end of March, he headed to Sacramento, “fired up” about the chance to “sell my ideas.” He even had a slogan, now that Brown had finally entered the fray: “A solution provider or a Moon Beam.” Or “something like that,” he recalled.

But as he sat in a taxi en route home from Los Angeles International Airport, he said, he “had an epiphany” that saved him the $3,500 filing fee: “I don’t want to be governor for the next four years and fight with knuckleheads. I don’t want to campaign 24-7 for the next seven months. I love my lifestyle.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com