Once-Eager Perot Workers Now Cool About His Return

When Ross Perot stunned his supporters in July by bowing out of presidential politics, volunteer Mary Stuntz wept and described his campaign as “the last hope for my country.”

But as Perot declared his candidacy last week, Stuntz was far from elated. She is no longer sure she will vote for the Texas billionaire--much less work for him.

“Just an apology isn’t enough for me, right now,” said Stuntz of Rancho Palos Verdes. “If he comes out with a real solid campaign . . . then, maybe, things will change. . . . (But) all that work and all that hope, to have it dashed like that.”

Since Perot’s announcement Thursday that he will run for President after all, it appears he may not command the same enthusiasm that made the South Bay a bulwark of his California organization earlier this year.

Some local volunteers strongly applauded Perot’s announcement, vowing that they will work hard to get him elected. But others are lukewarm, recalling the painful jolt they felt July 16, when their candidate shocked them by declaring he would not run.

The South Bay once had two Perot campaign offices--in Lawndale and Lomita--and legions of volunteers who collected 55,000 petition signatures for Perot--more than one-third of the number needed to place him on the California ballot.

Now, both offices have closed. Remnants of the Lomita operation were moved to a single table in a nearby mobile home sales office run by Lee Lovegrove, one of Perot’s hard-core South Bay supporters.

There, Lovegrove has kept a corner table overflowing with Perot paraphernalia: newsletters, newspaper clippings, striped buttons and three styles of Perot bumper stickers. Red-white-and-blue Perot posters are plastered on the windows, which overlook Pacific Coast Highway.

“We never gave up. Never. We were continuing all the time,” said Lovegrove, a resident of Rancho Palos Verdes. “We are all ready to get him in the White House.”

Officials with the Perot volunteer organization, now called United We Stand, America, said Friday that they do not yet know if a South Bay headquarters will be reopened.

They may know more today, when officials from the campaign office in Dallas are scheduled to visit California, said Lana Crunelle, Los Angeles County fund-raising vice chairman for United We Stand.

The Clinton campaign has targeted the South Bay and is working out of four Democratic campaign offices in Torrance, Wilmington, Carson and Inglewood, said Jay Ziegler, California press secretary for Bill Clinton.

President Bush’s forces have located their Los Angeles County office in Redondo Beach, and other GOP offices are in Palos Verdes Estates, Manhattan Beach and Inglewood, said Bill Fahey, county director of the Bush and Quayle campaign.

Some local Perot supporters say they may not need an office.

“Most of what we can do, we can do from our homes, so why spend the money?” said Brad Veek of Rancho Palos Verdes, who oversaw the Perot campaign on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and in the harbor area.

“We have not disbanded. We are stronger than ever,” Veek said.

Such sentiment is shared by Mickie Hahn of Rolling Hills Estates.

“The day that he quit, I said to my husband, ‘He’s quit for a reason, for strategy reasons,’ ” a gleeful Hahn said Friday. “My husband bet me a new car he wouldn’t come back in. I’m out shopping.”

Hahn asserts that volunteers are flocking back.

“The phone has been ringing off the hook, and people are really up. And a lot of the people who were mad or disappointed, they seem to be coming back on board. So it looks like we’re on the road again.”

Still, there are signs that some of Perot’s original volunteers are not rushing to the fore. A familiar face from the spring Perot campaign, for instance, South Los Angeles County coordinator Nancy Morgan, said she did not become actively involved with United We Stand after closing the Lawndale office.

“I think I’ve done all I can do,” said Morgan, a Manhattan Beach real estate broker who had been a driving force at the Lawndale office. She says now that she will vote for Perot but does not know whether she wants to “jump back into the fray,” as she describes it.

“I’m so glad he’s gotten back into the race, just to bring the issues to the forefront,” Morgan said. And although she is not annoyed at his earlier decision not to run, “. . . just the way he’s always been about doing things his way, I’m wondering how suitable that would be to government. But I think it’s far, far preferable to what we’ve got in there now.”

The months she spent working for Perot changed her life, she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to find that’s going to equal what that gave me.”

Former volunteer David Cressman of El Segundo, who spent several months designing and producing bumper stickers, posters and T-shirts for the Perot cause, says he is undecided about whether he will vote for Perot.

Cressman says that although he likes Perot’s economic plan, he thinks there is a dearth of information on the Texan’s stand on social issues. “I wish him luck,” Cressman said. “I wish us all luck in this very strange world that’s changing very quickly.”