Eight Vying in State Primary : Minor Candidates Seeking Podium, Not Presidency

The message left on Willa Kenoyer’s answering machine in her half-finished cabin in Michigan’s Manistee Forest said in respectful tones: “Madame President, somebody taped the sewer meeting and you can pick up the tape any time you want to.”

Jim Griffin was trucking freight through Barstow recently when someone asked for his autograph and, when he signed a picture for her, “she was tickled as a bird in a bush.”

Herb Lewin, who rarely fails to mention the book “Labor’s Untold Story” (“That’s me on the cover, getting beaten up by the cops”) often campaigns at universities, where sometimes people show up to listen--and sometimes they don’t.

Is this any way to run for President?

For most candidates for minor party presidential nominations in next week’s California primary, there isn’t any other way.

Basically, the eight low-budget and low-profile candidates--six on the Peace and Freedom Party slate and two contending in the American Independent Party--are running not so much for Pennsylvania Avenue as for a podium for their messages.

Both parties have attracted enough votes in California elections to have maintained ballot status for the last 20 years.

And both agree on at least this: The two major parties have scarcely a Roosevelt dime’s worth of difference between them, they serve the interests of no one but party leaders and their likely nominees are bloodless, colorless products of a corrupt system.

From there, their politics scatter across the horizon like fireworks, from Manhattan psychologist and Peace and Freedom candidate Lenora Fulani, who marched in Libya to protest U.S. bombings, to American Independent Party candidate James (Bo) Gritz, the decorated, controversial ex-Green Beret who once trained Afghan guerrillas on his land in Nevada and now leads a troop of Boy Scouts twice a week.

Neither party’s primary vote is binding. The real nominations are decided at their August conventions in Northern California.

Party Pioneer

Next Tuesday, the American Independent Party’s 140,802 registered California voters can choose between two. Griffin, of Mira Loma, is a party pioneer, a personable Tennessee-born trucker who is as proud of his 2 million accident-free miles as he is of his candidacy, to the extent that he includes in his portfolio a photocopy of a congratulatory note from Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston.

After its January organizing convention, the party impulsively drafted the keynote speaker--Gritz, who, although he might run for Congress in Nevada as a Republican, says he would “vote for a bag lady” before he’d vote for George Bush.

Embraces Diversity

The Peace and Freedom Party has prided itself on embracing diversity. This election year, diversity has hugged back:

The state’s 43,632 registered Peace and Freedomers have six candidates who are members of five different leftist parties, ranging from Al Hamburg, representing his own War Veterans Against Nuclear Weapons party from his self-built town of Hell, Wyo., to Fulani, a New Alliance Party leader who has run for New York governor and mayor.

Hamburg is a Korean War veteran who enlisted for Vietnam under his brother’s name and sent back dispatches for the American Painting Contractor newsletter. In 1984, he ran his dog, Woofer Coyote, for President until he was run over--the dog, not Hamburg.

Receives Matching Funds

Fulani has run the best-financed, most visible and sophisticated third-party campaign, becoming the second minor-party candidate ever to receive federal matching funds and earning darts from some leftists for supporting the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to whom she has donated $1,000. Jackson’s candidacy has already cost Peace and Freedom registrations that party members say would otherwise be theirs.

The convention, Peace and Freedom pioneer Lew McCammon said, “will be great theater if nothing else.”

On much, Peace and Freedom presidential candidates tend to agree vehemently.

The socialist-based agenda calls for free health care, education, abortion and child care, a 30-hour week for 40 hours’ pay, progressive taxes, gay rights, worker ownership of industry and resources, disarmament, withdrawal of U.S. troops worldwide, environmental protection, abolishing the CIA and ending discrimination by race, sex, religion, disability, age and immigration status.

The party’s candidates are, in brief:

Lenora Fulani, 38, a black psychologist who has challenged several states’ election laws. She links her candidacy to a “fair election” campaign against rules that weigh against minor parties in some states by requiring high numbers of petition signatures or charging 5 or 10 cents to have each one verified. So far, she says, she is on the ballot in 26 states.

She wants a black-led “rainbow” party embracing “communities of color,” and her “Two Roads Are Better Than One” program calls for supporting Jackson if he is nominated but herself if he is not. She says the “Fulani factor” could cost Democrats the election--and seed a third party so Jackson perhaps “could run for the presidency in 1992 as an independent. And win.”

Willa Kenoyer, 54, the Socialist Party USA nominee, is a free-lance reporter in Michigan and the winner of Vermont’s Liberty Union party primary. She has waged an “educational campaign” in relaxed but shoestring fashion on less than $30,000 in 29 states. “It’s one thing to do it for principle . . . but do it for the power is just beyond me.” The word socialist does put people off, she agrees, but once she enumerates her socialist agenda, “I hear so often: ‘You make so much sense--why don’t we hear more of this?’ ”

Herb Lewin, 74, of Philadelphia, a 50-year veteran of union, peace and civil rights demonstrations, is the candidate of the Internationalist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group whose strength, he says, is in Latin America. He is seen as the most doctrinaire, farthest left candidate. He urges Third World countries to renege on foreign debts. He is also concerned about the candidate jumble: “How attractive can it be when you have all this confusion of all these groups going in so many directions?”

Larry Holmes, 35, of New York--not the boxing champ, although some voters probably will think so--ran for President in 1984. He wants a $10 minimum wage and rents and mortgages cut to 10% of household income, no evictions or foreclosures. He, too, supports Jackson.

Shirley Isaacson, 57, a Los Angeles school psychologist and charter member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, says she was politicized at the age of 1, after being arrested when standing with her mother in a Depression bread line. Isaacson, who plans to run for Congress too, is unaffiliated with any other party. “We have to have a decent life for everybody, and that would be socialism.”

Al Hamburg, 56, is a Wyoming painting contractor and salvager-scavenger who once tried to slip the name of his 5-foot-long bull snake, Sandra, on the ballot. He wants “social and economic justice for little people at the bottom of the ladder.” With jobs hard to come by, he does not want the country “flooded with immigrants,” and he endorses giving 5 acres of public land and a solar- and wind-powered home to each needy family.

With so much agreement, the only thing approaching controversy has been Fulani’s campaign.

Fulani believes a functioning third party gives Jackson “an ace up his sleeve,” something to “broker” with at the Democratic convention--to tell party bosses that people will abandon the Democrats if Jackson is not nominated. Indeed, Fulani says, she will have people waiting outside the convention to sign up the disgruntled as they stalk out, as she expects them to do.

Peace and Freedom contends that the major parties are corrupted by capitalism, whoever the nominee. A May newsletter notes that Jackson, perceived to be “a radical alternative,” still “falls well within the pro-imperialist spectrum.”

Called a Stalking Horse

Some see Fulani as a stalking horse for Jackson, and her “two roads” as fence-straddling and opportunistic. “People are upset,” one Peace and Freedom leader said. “It’s wrong to even suggest to people that Jackson has a chance, and you’re misleading them” to think Democrats can deliver.

The social agenda is what is important, Fulani contends, and “we can’t pretend (that) the Republican and Democratic party is not the arena most of the voting electorate is in.”

She could bring Peace and Freedom toward the mainstream: “It can’t just continue to exist as this sort of haven for white leftists without (being) a real haven for Chicanos and blacks” as well.

In addition, Fulani brings something the party hasn’t seen much of: money. With a nationwide constituency of 15,000 to 20,000, Fulani has raised an impressive $400,000, and about $400,000 more in matching funds.

“In all 20 years together, Peace and Freedom hasn’t seen that much money,” state party Chairman Maureen Smith said.

Fulani’s campaign, called Lenora B. Fulani’s Committee for Fair Elections, trained volunteers and “developed a model” for door-to-door fund raising in 40 states, she said. “We’ve raised money on the streets.”

McCammon, who was solicited at home by Fulani fund-raisers, says the words rainbow and fair elections might lead some people to believe they were contributing to Jackson, who advocates a Rainbow Coalition, or to nonpartisan election reform, not to her campaign. “It’s not something I would seriously fault them on, but I think there’s a lot of gray areas,” he said.

In a May debate, Lewin launched into a critique, which the moderator tried to stop. He decried a “little bit of the political schizophrenia . . . . We didn’t represent ourselves as anything going on the coattails of Jackson or the rainbow. The end of the rainbow is the Democratic Party.”

Most Americans like the “rainbow” and fair-election ideas, Fulani argues. “Democrats, Republicans, independents--all walks of life, people who’ve said: ‘Gosh, this is great.’ ”

In 1982, when he was running for governor, Jim Griffin and his wife, Rhea Lee, put 20,000 miles on the family LTD, driving across California, giving interviews and snacking on Corn Nuts and Dr Pepper.

This time, the likable, easy-going 50-year-old trucker finds himself ranged against Bo Gritz, a .44-caliber dynamo, a story-spinning warrior living in Nevada.

The American Independent Party platform, in sum, calls free enterprise “the greatest economic system ever devised by man” and advocates repeal of the income tax, ending foreign aid (“If we had some of it here, it’d probably be foreign to us because we haven’t had any of it,” Griffin drawls), full tariffs, no illegal immigration, a strong defense, protection of family farms, dismantling the Federal Reserve system, an end to abortion and withdrawal from the “communist-dominated and -controlled” United Nations.

‘Workingman’s Viewpoint’

Griffin believed in that agenda long before 1967, when he was the first person to register at the party’s Norwalk office. “It represents the workingman’s viewpoint of what’s happening today that’s not being solved by the two major parties.”

He has put in a lot of time for the party. “I’m a team player,” he said. But, as for Gritz, he continues, “he seems like a nice enough fellow but he jumped right in, and he’s a Republican, so I think (voters) ought to vote for me to keep the loyalty to the party intact.”

Gritz, a grandiloquently spoken retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel who led several futile free-lance searches into Southeast Asia for MIAs and POWs, has been jumping right in for years. He faces trial in Nevada for allegedly violating passport laws on the way back from one Southeast Asian trip.

Now on speaking tours and teaching part-time, Gritz wowed ‘em at the party convention, and the members asked him to run for President--to throw his beret in, as he says.

A Chance for a Forum

“After thinking about it, I thought it’d maybe give me a forum someday where I can bring up some questions to the real would-be presidents of the U.S. and cause them to face some of what I consider to be major issues.”

What is major to Gritz is a “parallel government” that he says is importing drugs, crime and corruption into the country. He alleges that it has contributed to every major political assassination since John F. Kennedy’s and tarred major political figures, including George Bush. “Either he knew about the drugs or he’s incompetent,” Gritz says.

His thinking, in short: Since 1960, a liberal Congress has kept intelligence and military men from “doing what was necessary” to win in Southeast Asia, Iran and elsewhere. To circumvent the restrictions, “we had to resort to parallel government, we had to use the Golden Triangle, opium and heroin, embrace the same Mafia personalities we used at the Bay of Pigs. We began to think the ends justified the means: If we could win the war in Vietnam, then it would be OK if we used heroin.”

‘It’s a Cancer’

The fighting men have been “a political pawn” to it all. Parallel government, he says, pointing to the Iran-Contra scandal and Panamanian Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, has only enriched arms and drug dealers. “We’ve got to come to grips with this parallel government, it’s a cancer. Changing doctors, presidents, won’t make any difference . . . . The parallel government has done nothing but get us dirty.”

On that, he finds himself in uneasy alliance with groups on the opposite side of the spectrum, such as the Christic Institute--”an unlikely ally in my case because they are left wing. I am kind of like Attila the Hun to them.”