Losing Candidate Still Searches for an Office--Any Office

Sure, 30,000 people voted for him. But no one is willing to give him a job.

Howard Cohen finds that almost impossible to believe.

“I won a primary, I managed my own campaign and I came within 3,000 votes of winning office,” said Cohen, who in November lost his challenge to incumbent state assemblywoman and former real estate saleswoman Paula Boland.

“Everybody said, ‘Even if you don’t win, you’re going to get some great job with that experience.’ ”

Well, they lied.

Cohen, like many these days, is out hustling for work. Over lunch recently he laid out his dilemma: He’s a 30-year-old guy who earned two degrees from USC, watches his weight and doesn’t smoke or cuss, but after pounding the pavement since the November election can’t get a nibble.

The closest he’s gotten to a paycheck is being one in a chorus of applicants for a government relations job at an insurance company.

He didn’t get an interview.

One problem, concedes Cohen, is that he has had only one real job, and that lasted only six months.

Like President Clinton and other political lifers, Cohen has been mostly supported through the institutional kindness of family and government.

While in grad school during the 1980s, Cohen worked as an unpaid intern for Assemblyman Richard Katz and, later, for Mayor Tom Bradley.

He worked four months as an intern in the Washington office of Times Mirror--the corporation that owns The Times.

He still passes out the 1985 letter of recommendation he got there, describing him as “very bright, personable and industrious.”

His political opponents had a field day during the election last year, pointing out the guy’s never had a real job. That, of course, begged the question: Why were they running?

Cohen managed last June to trounce his Democratic primary opponent, well-known defense attorney James Blatt, despite being outspent about 4 to 1. But he didn’t get any Democratic Party money for his general election bid against the well-financed Boland.

“For the general election I raised about $14,000 and spent all but $100,” Cohen said. “I typed all my thank-you letters because I don’t have a computer.”

It was during the campaign, waged largely by Cohen walking door to door, that he heard that he would easily find work after the election, after meeting so many people, getting his name in the paper and so on.

Based on his previous experiences, he should have been a little more skeptical. Like others in the same boat, Cohen’s troubles have come partly from a streak of bad luck and lousy timing.

After meeting former presidential contender Gary Hart in 1983, Cohen began doing volunteer work for his campaign, certain this was going to be his big break. Turns out, it was Donna Rice’s big break. But notoriety only works for some. Rice had the fun of rejecting six-figure overtures from Playboy, but the big bunny had no interest in offering big bucks for a nude photo layout of a penniless policy wonk.

Then there was the Zev Yaroslavsky mayoral campaign of 1989. All two weeks of it.

Cohen had started work on a lavish fund-raiser before learning on TV news that the Los Angeles city councilman was pulling out of the race.

“I thought Zev was going to put me on the map,” Cohen said. “I was really bummed.”

Then there was John Van de Kamp’s failed gubernatorial race. And the next year, it was Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein’s doomed City Council bid.

You get the idea.

He sent $50 to U.S. Rep. Mel Levine during the Democratic Senate primary last year, but ended up asking the eventual winner, Barbara Boxer, for a job anyway. He didn’t get one.

His one real job was in 1990 at Los Angeles City Hall, where he helped coordinate the employee car pool program. He quit after six months to start his own political consulting business, but it turned out nobody wanted advice from a guy so adroit at stepping on political land mines.

With time on his hands, Cohen helped lead the charge on City Hall that changed his neighborhood’s name from Sepulveda to North Hills. Although the move has so far done little for property values, as had been hoped, the locals’ self-esteem has apparently been lifted a notch.

Still, no offers.

These days, Cohen says he has taken to selling off his L.A. Kings season tickets to pay bills. He’s not even eligible for unemployment. (How do you list your profession as “VIP Wannabe”?)

He lives with his parents, still driving the 25-year-old Camaro that he bought with his bar mitzvah money.

Besides scanning the want ads, Cohen tries to keep busy around the house.

“I make my 95-year old grandmother breakfast each morning,” he said. “If it wasn’t for my parents, I don’t know what I’d do.”

Like Job, however, the tough times have not broken his faith. He is now eyeing City Councilman Hal Bernson’s job, should the longtime incumbent retire at the expiration of his current term. After all, the pay is good, there’s no heavy lifting and it might qualify him for unemployment, or at least campaign consulting.

One hitch, he says, worrying about appealing to the working class: “I can’t run again if I’m unemployed.”

Actually, it seems as good a reason as any.