Not Politics as Usual : Profile: With an upbeat, homespun approach and the support of her fellow teachers, Betty Karnette scored an election upset that surprised almost everyone--except herself.

She had no money, was 60 years old, and figured the rest of her years would be spent the way the last 30 had been, teaching math.

So it was with some surprise that Betty Karnette found herself in a meeting one winter afternoon with a few Democrats who wanted her to run for office.

Not only did they want her, a lifelong Democrat, to run in an Assembly district any Republican would be proud to call home, they wanted her to run against a man who had been in office 14 years and had more in his campaign war chest than she earned in one year.

“Well now, this is interesting,” Karnette recalled thinking. “But why not? It’s a challenge and it will give me something new to do. . . . Someone opens a door and you walk through it.”

Nine months later, when Karnette beat Republican Assemblyman Gerald N. Felando by more than 12,000 votes, it wasn’t clear who was more shocked--the Republican or the Democratic parties.

“It was assumed that whoever ran against Felando would be a sacrificial lamb,” said Joanne Paine, one of Karnette’s friends and a campaign volunteer. “It seemed like he would just walk away with it, but no one wanted him to run unopposed.”

But the pundits, the press and the parties didn’t know what Karnette’s friends did: There’s nothing meek about Betty Karnette.

Short and stout, Karnette is a woman who can’t sit still. She walks fast and talks faster, every sentence punctuated with dramatic sweeps of her hands and arms. Her easy laugh, Southern accent and folksy enthusiasm can lead strangers to think she is naive and easily manipulated. They rarely make that mistake twice. She is apt to look a person straight in the eye, smile and say exactly what’s on her mind--like it or not. Some call her stubborn, even pushy. She prefers tenacious and determined.

“She is folksy. She’s homey. She’s honest and forthright, but she is not naive,” said Wayne Johnson, past president of United Teachers-Los Angeles. “She’s been around the political wars for years. She went through a teachers’ strike. She handled a $5-million, $6-million budget for UTLA for six years. She’s been intimately involved with California politics for at least 20 years. No, Betty is a lot of things, but she is not naive.”

Karnette, who teaches at year-round South Gate Junior High in the Los Angeles Unified School District, used her fall break to walk precincts--every day in September and October.

“She just went out and tried to talk to anybody and everybody,” said Julie Lie, who managed Karnette’s campaign. “We would go to these kaffeeklatsches just to get $50, and only eight people would show up. And she didn’t think that was bad. Most candidates would think it was a waste of time. She would talk with them, tell them to tell their friends about her. She did as much as she could in a 24-hour day.”

Karnette said she surprises a lot of people.

“I am very determined,” she said. “I am so determined I will spend hours working on a computer until I learn how to use that database, even if I have to stay up until 4 a.m. You see, I grew up in Kentucky. My ancestors were poor, but they always took care of their own problems. They didn’t blame anybody. They didn’t cry. Oh, they might complain a little about the rich having it easy, but they did what they had to do.”

Karnette grew up Betty Petty--much to the delight of her classmates--in Paducah as the Depression was ending. She attended Heath High School. (“There were 19 boys and 19 girls in my graduating class. Only one is dead. And no one is in jail as far as I know,” she says.) She was class president, president of the Future Homemakers of America and one of four white members of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

She studied pre-med and was student body president at a nearby junior college, but left when she ran out of money, Karnette said. During a stint as a typist in Chicago, she met her future husband, Richard, an academic researcher. Karnette moved to Long Beach in 1952.

She worked as a secretary until she received her elementary education teaching credential from Cal State Long Beach in 1961. Nine years later, she received a master’s degree in education and wrote her thesis on the history of education for black Americans before the Civil War.

Though warm and talkative, Karnette prefers to keep her private life private. She said she and her husband married in 1955, and had a daughter, Mary, now 36, who is mentally handicapped but who lives successfully on her own. She describes her husband as a peaceful man who is “the last great philosopher.” She will say that she turned 61 in September, loves mystery novels and classical music and is comforted by the country tunes of Glen Campbell.

Karnette said she joined the teachers union as soon as she became a teacher in 1961. She has been treasurer of United Teachers-Los Angeles as well as a member of the board of directors. She also was elected to the state council of the California Teachers Assn. and has been one of the California representatives at the National Education Assn. since 1971.

In the early 1970s, Karnette plunged into local politics as a campaign worker. Over the years, she has been the chairwoman of her Assembly district committee and a longtime member of the executive board of the state Democratic Party and the Long Beach Democratic Club.

It was Steven Alari, president of the Long Beach club, and Lie, a fellow member, who called Karnette in February to ask her to run against Felando. Lie said that only three days remained for candidates to declare that they were running for office, and no Democrat had filed. State party leaders had asked them to find someone, and Karnette, as a woman who supports abortion rights and had lived in Long Beach for more than 30 years, seemed a natural choice.

Despite that, Alari and Lie said recently, like party leaders, they figured her chances of winning were slim to none.

But, said Nancy Krusbee, one of Karnette’s fellow teachers: “What people forget about teachers, is that, if they are good teachers, they have the ability to set goals and get organized to achieve those goals. And that is one of Betty’s strongest qualities.”

During the primary, Karnette had no opponent. She spent her time calling friends to solicit contributions and endorsements.

“She got a lot of polite conversation but not much money,” Lie recalled. “Everyone was writing the race off. The Democratic party paid for her filing fee, and then we never heard from them again. I could just see the more skepticism she got from people, the more energized she became. You could see that she was going to show everybody, including her friends and family and people who were willing to write her off based on the numbers.”

Karnette said that a little bit of “I’ll show you” was driving her, but she said: “I didn’t want to be too serious. You gotta be willing to laugh about it. You gotta make it a game. When you are in a good game there is stress, there is challenge. It wasn’t going to kill me to lose, you know what I mean?”

After the primary, Karnette began work in earnest, asking her friends and teachers union contacts for contributions, appearing at every Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce meeting and back-yard barbecue and breakfast she could wangle an invitation to.

Karnette talked about creating more jobs and improving the economy, but her basic message was simple. She said she would sit down with people from both parties, listen to everyone’s ideas, work out a plan and things would get better.

Like Ross Perot, she has an upbeat, homespun, let’s-all-work-together approach that began paying off. According to campaign disclosure statements, Karnette’s fellow teachers proved crucial to her success. The California Teachers Assn., gave Karnette nearly $30,000 between April 26 and Oct. 27. United Teachers-Los Angeles kicked in another $10,000 and paid for another $4,000 worth of printing. Teachers Assn. of Long Beach gave her about $4,600. At least 85% of her other contributions came from teachers. By Oct. 17, she had raised $62,000.

In the meantime, a transformation had taken place in the district as the result of a voter-registration drive by the Democratic Party. When Karnette first announced she was running, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5,102. By October, there were 4,603 more Democrats than Republicans--an encouraging sign, though still not considered enough to win because, traditionally, more Republicans vote than Democrats.

Karnette hired Jeff Adler, a respected local campaign consultant, and with volunteers, they began laying out a game plan.

“Look,” Karnette said, “I’m a math teacher. I know a little bit about statistics. We figured what we could do with a $50,000 budget, how many votes it would take to win. We were very analytical about this. We looked at the anti-incumbency factor, the woman factor, the senior factor, the pro-choice factor, that I lived in Long Beach. We took all of that into consideration. We analyzed it, and we thought it could be won.”

Her door-to-door campaigning finally caught the eye of state Democratic party officials, who apparently realized that she could, indeed, pull off an upset. According to campaign disclosure statements, the weekend before the election the Democratic State Central Committee paid for $91,000 worth of Karnette campaign mail, spending more in one shot than Karnette was able to raise in 10 months.

Phil Angelides, the chairman of the California Democratic Party, said the state central committee decided not to target the 54th Assembly District--which represents Long Beach, Signal Hill, San Pedro and the Palos Verdes Peninsula--because by “all objective standards” Karnette was in for a tough haul. But, he said, it became clear later that she had established herself as a credible candidate.

“It’s nice to be surprised,” he said. “When all is said and done, it’s the candidate that has to make him or herself competitive, and to her credit Karnette did that. . . . She represents someone fresh and new and energetic, and she was able to take advantage of the opportunity.”

Republican party analysts, who also had figured Felando’s victory as a safe bet, said that as the general election approached, events began to overtake Felando. Anti-incumbent sentiment was increasing every day. Clinton’s coattails were growing, while President Bush’s were not. Most of Felando’s district was new territory and he had been unable to woo Long Beach, where he was a stranger. Republican women were abandoning the party, turned off by its right-wing platform and refusal to support abortion rights.

Karnette, some said, benefited from being in the right place and the right time--and by Election Day, just about anybody could have done well.

“No,” Karnette said firmly. “No, they couldn’t have. I disagree with that, absolutely, unequivocally, I disagree with that. Anybody could not have done it. Now, all those things helped, and I’m not trying to brag now, but I think I have that kind of character that just won’t take no for an answer, and the people that work with me are the same because I chose people like that. My friends are strong people, and we don’t give up.”

Hours after her victory, Karnette was besieged by phone calls from the press, well-wishers and Democratic Party officials. By morning, she was on a plane to Sacramento to meet Assembly Speaker Wille Brown, a man who until then thought her name was Betty Kanit.

“I’ve never had so much attention in my life,” a breathless Karnette said as she prepared to leave for another meeting. “People magazine called, can you believe it? My family will drop dead when they see that.”