Keeping It Simple: ‘Lenin or Levis’

As export commodities, they don’t rank with cars, crops and chips. But there is a growing foreign market for American-style sound bites, photo ops, fieldwork and flyers.

U.S. expertise in electoral politics is unexcelled anywhere on Earth and sharing this know-how with emerging democracies is an expanding industry.

President Clinton blows his sax in a Prague jazz club and the world listens, but at any given moment countless other American politicos are quietly spreading democracy overseas unnoticed. Many are Californians who return with inspirational tales of courage and violence.

Some are political pros earning a living. Others are political aides or academics on leave to foundations trying to educate the people of former authoritarian regimes in the intricate, subtle ways of democracy.

All are lured by adventure. And they invariably return saying, “It sounds corny, but . . .”--and then talk about being reminded of how fortunate they are to be American.

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Sean Garrett, 26, was born to a Lithuanian immigrant who had gotten pregnant shortly after arriving in San Francisco. She gave him up for adoption. He grew up comfortably in the Bay Area, became a political junkie and wound up working for Gov. Pete Wilson. But he always had been curious about his roots. So in 1992, he wangled a job advising a pro-capitalist political party in Lithuania’s second free election since breaking from the Soviet Union.

Garrett was an instant celebrity. “Not only was I from America, I was from California,” he says. “For them, California meant the ultimate dream--Hollywood, beaches. . . . The easiest way to get a laugh was to tell them that California now had problems, and that Californians didn’t like California so much anymore. They’d just start laughing. They couldn’t grasp it. They were cold, hungry, out of work, out of gasoline.”

Garrett constantly urged his clients to keep their message simple. “They’d take out a full-page ad and fill it with small print. You could hardly read it,” he says. “They’d tell me: ‘We paid for a full page.’ ”

One day Garrett illustrated what he meant. While at a rock concert, he suddenly was asked to address the 5,000 young people there. “I walked out,” he recalls, “and said: ‘I’ve got one question for the future of Lithuania: Do you want Lenin or do you want Levi’s?’ I just thought it up standing there.

“They went nuts. ‘Levi’s. Levi’s.’ It was bizarre.”

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“Not everybody has an opportunity to be in on the birth of a democracy,” notes Rachael Richman, 41, a legislative staffer who recently returned from South Africa, where she advised local politicians on how to deal with an uncensored news media.

South Africa will hold its first election open to all races on April 27. Californians have been all over the country.

Pearl-Alice Marsh, 47, on leave as director of the African Studies Center at UC Berkeley, said last week in a telephone interview from Johannesburg that “people are getting shot at rallies” and “it’s really unsafe to drive along rural highways because they’re setting up vigilante traps and killing black people.”

Marsh, who is black, has been advising black political parties on the basics of old-fashioned American fieldwork aimed at turning out the vote.

“I went into one neighborhood where a theater group was doing voter education and was astounded by some of the questions,” she related. A housekeeper “said her madam had told her that good Christians don’t vote. It was godless communism. Being a good Christian, she was completely confused. She was reminded that (white) Afrikaners have been voting for a long time.”

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Ken LaCorte, 28, says he learned while working in a Colombian presidential campaign “to never travel with your candidate. Don’t even walk through the airport with him. It’s when they’re on the road that they usually get assassinated.”

Four candidates were killed by drug kingpins in that 1990 race, when LaCorte was an employee of consultant Roger Ailes and advised a losing candidate. “Our campaign office was literally a fortress with a gun turret in front,” says LaCorte, who now runs his own consulting firm in Glendale.

Mike Marshall, 32, a San Jose native with the National Democratic Institution for International Affairs, recalls having to change the definition of volunteer while working in Romania’s 1992 elections. “Under communism, people were forced at gunpoint to ‘volunteer’ in the fields at harvest,” he says. “People were saying, ‘We won’t volunteer.’

“But on Election Day 5,700 did. This old man walked in and I thanked him. He said: ‘No, thank you for letting me participate.’ For me, that’s what this is all about.”