What Makes Sonny Run? Not Much

Sonny Bono has brought his campaign for the United States Senate to a small hotel near the Beverly Center. He stands at a banquet room podium and addresses a respectful crowd of two dozen Republican regulars.

“I’m just a guy,” he says.

“Someone has to stick their chin out,” he says.

“Your issues are my issues,” he says.

This does not appear to be a gag. There’s no sign anywhere of Allen Funt or his hidden cameras. Nobody cues a laugh track as Bono declares his intention to replace Alan Cranston “as your next senator from California.”

Personally, I don’t want to be here. I avoided the Bono candidacy for weeks. To write about it struck me as being too easy, unfair even, the journalistic equivalent of drowning puppies. He seems like a nice enough man, and it wasn’t his fault about Cher and the guitar player, so why not leave him to the David Letterman gag writers?

The problem is that Bono simply won’t be ignored. Already, he has attracted a well-respected campaign team, shown surprising strength in polls and generally behaved like someone who believes he is going all the way.

“I won’t let you down,” he says, smiling that familiar smarmy smile.

Bono’s appearance has changed from his Sonny and Cher days. Then, he had a sort of moneyed hippie look, feathered jackets, Nehrus and the like. Now, he could pass for deputy city clerk. He speaks in a soft, nasal voice and with a casual style reminiscent of the prattle served up by Vegas lounge acts. You almost expect him to break into “The Girl from Ipanema,” but instead he chatters on about pork-barreling and capital gains--”I’m no Johnny Come Lately on that issue”--and his opponents in the GOP primary.

He is apparently on a first-name basis with both. “Bruce,” he says, “has those wonderful eyes.” But Tom, well, “Tom worries me.” Anyway, Sonny plans to beat them both and take on a Democrat in the general election. “I think,” he says, “it will be Leo.”

The subject of Cher is avoided. “Those days were a lot of fun, but I’m busy doing this now,” Bono says. He suggests anyone curious should buy his new autobiography, “The Beat Goes On.” The book won’t be confused with “Profiles in Courage,” but it does appear to coincide happily with his candidacy--or is it the other way around?

Cher or no Cher, Bono hasn’t lost his talent for playing the role of matrimonial straight man. He describes for the audience how he asked his current wife for permission to run.

“I said, ‘Honey, is it OK if I run for U.S. Senate?’

“She said, ‘Are you crazy?’

“No, I’m serious.

“She said, ‘Why?’

“Honey, I can do it better.”

Excuse me, folks, but you just can’t get that kind of stuff from Strom Thurmond.

Bono traces his campaign to some trouble he had obtaining a sign permit for his Palm Springs restaurant. Again, we’re not talking comedy skit here. It’s what the man said: “On the issue of why I’m running for Senate, it is the same reason I ran for mayor of Palm Springs.” And the reason he ran for mayor, he explains in a long and tangled story, was his anger over the city’s sign permit bureaucracy.

He takes credit for bringing to Palm Springs a vintage car race, a wind farm and a big hotel. Of course, he goes on, the wind farm and hotel are not actually in place. Bureaucrats. They’re everywhere, Bono’s discovered, ruining the nation. And so he fights on, pressing the cause of the common man to Washington.

“I saw Jimmy Stewart do it in a movie,” he says, “and thought, what the heck.”

His strategy is simple. He is running as the non-politician, the outsider. Again and again, he informs the audience he doesn’t know much about issues. Ignorance is his trump card, marking him as something other than a career politician. Bono figures he can get the hang of things once he’s elected. And anyway, he says, it can’t be any more difficult than cooking pasta or writing a pop hit. All it takes is common sense.

The last politician to pull off this act, of course, was Ronald Reagan. Forget that Sonny makes Ron look like a Rhodes scholar. The electorate’s frustration with politics-as-usual cannot be overestimated. The outsider message is too powerful to discount--even if the messenger is “just a guy” who enjoys his 90% name-recognition rating largely because he happened to know Cher before the plastic surgeons got to her.

The question isn’t whether Sonny Bono is for real. He’s real enough. The question is, what have we all been smoking?