Behind Quiet Storefront, a Movement Gathers Steam : Politics: Sherman Oaks headquarters are swamped in volunteers’ rush to jump on the Ross Perot bandwagon.

Donna Soskin strode purposefully to the table outside the Ross Perot for President county campaign headquarters Thursday and asked the volunteers how she could jump on the bandwagon.

Soskin, a 30-year-old Granada Hills massage therapist, conceded sheepishly that she has never even voted before, let alone thought about joining a campaign.

“But I can’t stand Bush,” she said. “And Clinton’s a joke. I’m just fed up. I don’t know what else to say.”

The path Soskin took to the campaign table was well-trod last week. Grass-roots support for a Perot presidential candidacy has been gathering momentum by the minute. And nowhere, it seems, has the juggernaut been more evident than at the Perot campaign’s Los Angeles County headquarters, in an unobtrusive storefront office on Van Nuys Boulevard near the Ventura Freeway.

The usual hum of activity at the office has often been punctuated by periods of chaos. Even during midafternoon lulls, people have been crowding around two and three deep to sign petitions to put Perot on the November ballot. At least 350 people a day have signed up at the little campaign table, up from about 300 a day just last week.

They drive by and honk their support. They sit through hourlong seminars so they can go out and gather the 134,781 signatures needed to qualify Perot for the ballot, even though half a million people have already signed. And they scoop up every Perot campaign item they can get their hands on.

“I drove all the way from Fresno to get here,” waitress Judy Lewis said. “They don’t have any goodies up there. They can’t keep them on the shelves.”

As she spoke, Lewis loaded up on “Perot for President” T-shirts ($14 each), campaign hats ($7.50) and various buttons and other red, white and blue trinkets.

“We’re just common people,” Lewis said. “But common people are going to make the vote this time.”

Indeed, pundits say it is people like Soskin and Lewis, intent on dislodging the presidency from the two major political parties, who are behind the local groundswell of populist support for Perot.

A month ago, campaign workers in Sherman Oaks had collected 4,000 names of potential volunteers. Today, they have 15,000, county campaign spokesman Mike Ruppert said. In the past week alone, he added, there has been a 15% increase in people signing petitions or signing up to campaign.

The way Ruppert sees it, the surge in interest can be traced to last Tuesday’s primary election.

“People for the first time saw in black and white what their choices were--Bush and Clinton--and they started flocking to us that day,” Ruppert said. “A lot of fence-sitters got off the fence and came down here.”

Support for a Perot candidacy has reached across the political spectrum, tapping a huge reservoir of resentment against the Democratic and Republican parties. Indeed, media exit polls found that Perot would have won both parties’ primaries had he been on the ballot.

“One guy from the Green Party was in here talking to a guy from the John Birch Society,” Ruppert said with a chuckle. “They were both in here to volunteer. They were talking like they were old friends.”

Other events this past week also have catapulted the Perot campaign into center stage, including the Dallas billionaire’s dominance over Bush and Clinton in new polls and his hiring of two top Democratic and Republican political wizards to run his organization.

As Perot’s popularity soars, so does interest in the county campaign headquarters.

“It’s been a madhouse,” said volunteer Trudy Tash, 70, as she sat in a folding chair Thursday to steal a few minutes of rest.

Petition coordinator Patty Smith was kept busy, too. As she explained the petition process to a handful of potential volunteers, Smith swept her arm around the room, pointing out the dozen or so people working the phones or doing other chores.

“This is grass roots at its very finest,” she said. “What you see around you are people like me, people who dropped in for a look and stayed.”

Every campaign worker in the office, in fact, is a volunteer with no campaign experience--even county campaign co-chairman Mike Norris, a 49-year-old former retail executive from Studio City who plans to join the campaign full time.

At times, the lack of experience was obvious. One senior citizen rushed up to Ruppert, beaming because he had the results of a new poll showing Perot ahead. He had the percentage of voters favoring Perot. There was only one problem: He had forgotten to get the numbers for Bush and Clinton.

Ruppert shrugged. He said a sign outside the headquarters that reports the relative standing of the candidates would have to be updated to reflect Perot’s zooming popularity--as soon as the numbers for the other candidates were available.

As the campaign builds and the organization expands, the time will come when professional politicos will be brought in. But Ruppert said the volunteers in Sherman Oaks and elsewhere will always play a central role in the campaign.

“It’s a double-edged sword--we definitely need experience and structure,” he said, “but we also need to maintain this deep connection to grass-roots populist politics.”

For now, the volunteers are running the show. And despite their lack of political savvy, their dedication and excitement has been infectious.

Art Schertz, a Calabasas sales rep and staunch Republican, stopped by the office on Thursday “to see what it’s all about.”

But after Smith’s seminar on how to sign up campaign supporters, Schertz, 47, seemed hooked. Holding a stack of petitions, he smiled on his way out the door and said, “I think I’ll take it around the block and see how it goes.”

By late Friday, Norris was worried about a problem most campaign honchos would envy: The number of wishful callers--from celebrities and the rich to the unemployed and retired--had become overwhelming.

“It’s an avalanche,” he said. “How do you get them all in the loop? It’s use ‘em or lose ‘em. My biggest problem now is, how do you channel an avalanche?”