CAMPAIGN JOURNAL : Third-Party Candidates Trying to Get to First Base With Voters

When Jerome McCready walks into a restaurant and proclaims that he will be the next governor of California--as he is inclined to do these days--dinner service doesn’t exactly come to a halt.

“Some people think at first that it is a joke,” said McCready, a deep-voiced licensed Baptist minister who works as a maintenance supervisor for an apartment company. “But I wear a button with my picture on it, and it is a rather expensive button. It costs two bucks apiece. So after about a half a second, they realize I am not joking.”

The McCready for Governor campaign operates out of a three-bedroom house in Castroville that the 41-year-old former truck driver built with his wife, Betty, four years ago. McCready drives to Salinas when he needs to use a fax machine, and his wife answers the campaign phone--which doubles as the household phone--while he is at work.

If Betty McCready is not home? “They have to call back,” her husband of 21 years said unapologetically.

McCready is running as an American Independent, one of three so-called third-party candidates competing for the state’s top job against Republican Sen. Pete Wilson and Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Also on the ballot are Libertarian Dennis Thompson and Peace and Freedom Party candidate Maria Elizabeth Munoz.

Taken together, the three parties represent just under 250,000 Californians--almost 2% of the state’s registered voters.

The three underdogs won party primaries, collected 150 signatures to qualify for the ballot and have 200-word statements published in the official ballot pamphlet along with those of their Republican and Democratic rivals. The pamphlet listed the wrong phone number for McCready. But otherwise, all five candidates--from Wilson at the top of the Nov. 6 ballot to Munoz at the bottom--have been officially treated the same.

Equity in the gubernatorial contest, however, ends there.

McCready, Thompson and Munoz together have been able to raise less money than it costs Feinstein or Wilson to broadcast a single 30-second television ad. They have been excluded from the Wilson-Feinstein debates, and this week, when public television stations across the state air interviews with each of the gubernatorial candidates, the third-party segments will be broadcast two days later than the Wilson and Feinstein interviews.

The three underdogs rarely appear on television news shows or in the newspaper--a sore point with each of them--even though they have been stumping faithfully in the distant shadows of their mainstream counterparts. The dearth of media coverage, they complain, is just one of many ways the system conspires against them.

“Quite frankly, I am surprised you even called me,” Thompson said in a recent telephone interview.

Munoz, a third-grade bilingual teacher near downtown Los Angeles, got some of the best visibility of her candidacy last week by forsaking the campaign trail for the classroom. Munoz caught the attention of reporters when she wore a green armband during a visit to her school by Princess Alexandra of Great Britain. Munoz was protesting the repression of Catholics in Northern Ireland.

“As a Chicana, I know what it is like to be treated as a second-class citizen in your own country,” said Munoz, an Ivy League graduate and a former counselor at a shelter for battered women in the Bronx. “I wanted to teach my children something about protesting and their right to do that.”

Typically, electioneering for Munoz does not begin until school lets out at 3 p.m., and then far from the media spotlight. She spends weekends and evenings in front of supermarkets, walking door-to-door in her native East Los Angeles and at party rallies setting forth the only socialist alternative on the ballot.

As such, the 33-year-old Munoz doesn’t mind standing out. She recently hired a handful of former gang members to register voters in some of Los Angeles’ toughest neighborhoods, and she promises that her first act as governor would be to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for improved social services for the poor and sick.

“I would like to be able to cost Dianne Feinstein the election,” said Munoz, who runs her campaign from a corner desk and filing cabinet in a friend’s Los Feliz apartment. “That would send a very clear message to both parties that there is a third party here, and if they don’t start supporting some of the issues that people in California need and want, the people are going to start voting for progressive independent candidates.”

Libertarian Thompson also professes that the time for a third-party governor has arrived, although, predictably, he doesn’t see a “progressive independent” as the alternative. Thompson has been parading up and down the state, dropping in on candidate forums and radio talk shows espousing the evils of taxation and the virtues of individual liberty.

His pitch for donations is simple: “Help fund me now, or pay them later, and pay them later, and pay them later. . . . “ It has earned him about $20,000, far more than either McCready or Munoz, but still a tiny fraction of the millions in the Wilson and Feinstein treasuries.

“The chances of winning are obviously infinitesimally small,” confessed Thompson, 51, whose computer software development company in San Diego serves as campaign central. “But the more I campaign, and the more the politicians do what they normally do--which is buy and sell government--I wouldn’t be surprised if I got elected.”

McCready is off to work each morning at 6:30, but he took a day off last week to eat breakfast with the Salinas Rotary Club and lunch with a group of Christian businessmen in Santa Cruz. On Sunday, he and his wife were to pile their campaign gear into the family Thunderbird and head down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, where McCready was scheduled to address students at USC.

“I believe the majority of people in this state are morally stable, and that is the group that is going to elect me,” said McCready, who saves money on such trips by spending the night with fellow party members who can spare a bedroom.

Betty McCready says imposing on strangers has been one of the toughest parts of the campaign. “I would rather stay in motels, but since they don’t have the money, that is the way it has to be,” she said.

Lumped together as the “non-brand-name” candidates, as one state official described them, McCready, Thompson and Munoz actually have very little in common. Their differences span the political spectrum. Munoz proudly describes herself as “pro-gay” and talks emotionally about her brother with AIDS. McCready complains about the “pro-homosexual” tendencies in society and pledges to keep California on the straight and narrow path. Munoz says we need more taxes, Thompson and McCready say we have too many.

Politics being politics, though, their interests have converged. All three candidates showed up two weeks ago outside the Burbank studios of KNBC-TV to protest the first gubernatorial debate, which they complained was a misnomer since it featured just Wilson and Feinstein.

“Any time Dianne or Pete are mentioned, Jerome, Dennis and Maria should be mentioned,” McCready insisted.

Thompson arrived in a yellow convertible escorted by a dozen or so motorcyclists who like his stand against helmet laws.

He had expected closer to 100 bikers, but his modest contingent managed to turn a few heads anyway. That was about all he could hope for because calls to KNBC, Wilson and Feinstein went unanswered.

Munoz showed up with a cadre of supporters who picketed on the sidewalk, and shouted and chanted slogans. “They should include all of us in the debate,” she said. “That is probably the only point we would all agree on.” Munoz said she will organize a march through the streets of San Francisco when the next debate is scheduled there on Thursday.

She and Thompson are veterans of long-shot politics and know the value of a good media event. Munoz ran for governor in 1986, collecting less than 1% of the vote, and has also run for the U.S. Senate and, most recently, for mayor of Los Angeles.

Thompson was twice the Libertarian candidate for Congress in the 44th District. He says he was drafted to run for governor this time because he more than tripled the Libertarian vote in 1988 during his second bid for Congress--an impressive enough statistic except that he still won less than 4% of the vote that year.

McCready is different. He is a true political novice. He has been running for governor since last October, when he joined the American Independent Party because it was the only one he could find that would let him run. He was not registered with a party at the time, and he still has trouble explaining why he decided to jump into the political arena.

“I just want to do it and felt this was the time,” he said. “The governor is the place where you can change things. It is like being the President of the United States, only in California.”