You’re Who, and You’re Running for What?

Quick, now: Who is the lieutenant governor of California, the Al Gore of the Golden State?

Don’t take it so hard. You’re not alone.

The sad truth is that cigarette-smoking cartoon animals have more celebrity than the public servants who hold seven major state offices. The average voter could not identify them all if he were staked to an anthill.

And still, dozens of candidates are spending piles of cash to win their parties’ nominations in the June 7 primary to these rather obscure posts: California’s lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer, controller, state schools superintendent and insurance commissioner. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates for attorney general are unopposed and are leaving that fight until November.

For the first time in memory, six of these seven statewide positions are vacant, up for grabs, untenanted by virtue of Proposition 140, burnout and ambition.

Should you care? Oh, yes; the holders of these jobs enforce the state’s laws, invest its money, direct its schoolrooms, sign its checks, ride herd on its insurance rates, run its elections.

This will be one fight card worth following.

Whether the fans will turn out is another question.

“Generally, while there may not be a lot of interest,” says consultant Steve Glazer, who is working on Michael Woo’s primary campaign to be secretary of state, “you just keep plugging away. And while people may not seem to care, you know the office means something to people’s daily lives.”

That’s not the stuff that kindles political fires, but still, the contenders press on, campaigning in relative obscurity, outshone by the sexy clamor on crime and immigration at the top of the ticket in the governor’s race. The lesser lights are overwhelmed even before they begin by this enormous, expensive, hard-to-reach state where even Alan Cranston, comfortably established with all the cachet and visibility of a United States senator, would spend upward of $10 million in 1986 to make sure he was reelected.

It’s enough to tear at Ken Khachigian’s heart:

“They come in to see me before they run, they’ve got all these grandiose plans, they have all this energy, all this money, they’re running around the state--and it’s all playing at the margins,” says Khachigian, the grand old campaign consultant to the Grand Old Party. This time he is advising Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, the only statewide incumbent except Wilson seeking reelection.

“It’s very, very tough,” agrees Assemblyman Stan Statham (R-Redding), facing state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) in the primary race for lieutenant governor. He is best known for his quirky proposal to divide California into three states.

“I just got off the phone with a stranger in Sunnyvale who’s going to send me $500. But his question was, after I told him what I was trying to do, ‘Who is your opponent?’ ”

And Statham’s one of the bigger guys on this big ballot.

Listen to a couple of smaller ones:

Perry L. Martin, physics teacher and parent, one of a dozen candidates for the nonpartisan office of superintendent of public instruction: “It’s hard to get taken seriously. . . . There are 12 of us (running), and some of us are nuts.”

The educationally well-credentialed Lewis S. Keizer, seeking the same office: “As an educator, I’m a giant. As a politician, I’m nothing.”

“You have the voter,” says Khachigian, “trying to make a somewhat intelligent decision based on very little information. And you have candidates hoping (in the case of the schools superintendent) to make a runoff. And yet all of them have such meager resources, it’s hard to tell where to put it to hit the jackpot.”

Voters in these heavily populated “down-ballot” races tend to remember the officeholder, not the office.

Everyone knows Jerry Brown--as governor, not as the secretary of state, his first state job. Alan Cranston--as senator, not the state controller. March Fong Eu’s name rings familiar for getting pay toilets banned. But she did it as a legislator, not as secretary of state, a job she held for 20 years until she quit this year to become ambassador to Micronesia.

A mid-April Field Poll of these races showed that even the one incumbent, Lungren, is familiar to only 56% of his fellow Republicans and 49% of Democrats. Identification scores of 12% and 15% are common for most candidates.

One of those with higher favorables among Democrats than fellow Republicans is Wes Bannister, who four years ago polled respectable numbers in a vastly outspent campaign against John Garamendi when the insurance commissioner’s job first became an elected one.

He’s running again, but in the recent Field Poll, few of those polled from either party knew enough about him to offer a judgment. He thinks he’s doing better than that, but he’s doing things differently in 1994.

“I learned my lesson the hard way last time, and this time I haven’t even tried” raising money, Bannister says. “I’m just going around and running a literally hundred-percent grass-roots campaign--no TV, no anything. Literally, I’m running the campaign like you build a sales force.”

How, then, do dozens of contenders win millions of voters’ attention, much less their hearts and minds?

The easiest is name ID. Voters may cast a ballot based on nothing else.

This year, as the Proposition 140 diaspora continues, voters may experience a kind of cognitive dissonance at seeing a familiar name next to an unfamiliar office--former L.A. mayoral candidate Woo up for the Democratic nomination for secretary of state, for example. Or Assemblyman Bill Jones (R-Fresno), author of the “three strikes” legislation, wanting to be secretary of state. Or ex-Senate leader David Roberti vying for treasurer.

“(Voters) say, ‘Oh, that name’s familiar,’ ” says Khachigian, “and I confess I’ve done it for municipal judgeships and local obscure positions. I figure if I know that name, that candidate has done something right, so I’ll remember it.”

If the name isn’t familiar, voters may then judge by what the candidate does for a living. What kind of signal does “environmentalist” send out? Is “incumbent” the kiss of death? Twelve-year Assemblyman Jones reached for a triple with “legislator, businessman, rancher.”

Failing even that, voters may choose on gut instinct, or caprice: the candidate’s gender, the sound of the name.

The reason those little things matter is that six primary races brawling across the state have registered hardly a blip on TV screens. Except for newspaper stories, there hasn’t been much of what the pros call “free media”--news coverage--as opposed to “paid media”--ads.

George Urch is campaign manager for Tom Umberg, the only Democrat that Orange County sends to Sacramento, and the sole Democratic candidate for attorney general.

“You have to rely on a lot of free press, and when the press doesn’t seem interested in these races, only covering the governor, it makes your life miserable. It’s a Catch-22--how do you raise money unless you’re known? You get known by being on TV. How do you get on TV? You need money.”

Little enough political news gets covered by TV, and that tends to be devoted to the governor’s race. “I fault the electronic media for doing a real miserable job of covering politics in this state,” says Khachigian. “I think the TV and radio stations really ought to be ashamed of themselves for the lame way in which they cover politics . . . but the electorate sure can tell you who Erik and Lyle Menendez are, and Heidi Fleiss.”

Candidate Statham is more benevolent:

“I don’t blame the public or press for this lack of coverage. There’s been this quantum leap in musical political chairs in California” with term limits throwing career politicians into other lineups as new players start coming in.

Any candidate can pay to get the voters’ attention--but remember Alan Cranston: The entire campaign budget for one of these statewide candidates could be gobbled up in a week’s worth of TV spots in a mid-sized California city, and not make a dent in the results.

Those candidates who have any real money would often rather save it for the dash to the finish line, which is when most voters begin to tune in, anyway. “To compete at the end,” says Rob Lapsley, campaign manager for Jones, “you have to be able to communicate your message on TV. As hard as you try, you cannot reach 15 million voters in California without going on TV. And that takes money.”

There is one other way: The slate card.

Although primary candidates don’t run on “tickets,” many do pay to get on the slates, which are mailed out as top-to-bottom voter recommendations, from governor to Assembly.

Mailers are like a last bus out: Everyone wants to be on it. A big name at the top of the mailer confers some cachet to the candidates near the bottom, candidates who couldn’t possibly afford such a vast mailing themselves. Sometimes there are bidding wars to get on good slate cards, thousands and thousands of dollars.

“The infamous slate card,” says Khachigian. “In these races, slate cards play a big role. You talk about buying an election? This is the one time I think you can argue in this state that an election can be bought.”

The significance of winning these offices is not only the steppingstones they provide to higher office, but the fact that California’s founders saw them as critical to making the state work.

Oh, the current lieutenant governor? Leo McCarthy, since 1982.

If you read far enough to find that out, you get an A in civics.