Selling Socialism on the North Coast : A primary candidate tends the hustings and finds people open to some unorthodox approaches.

To judge from the legislation they’re trying to rush through Congress, most politicians reckon the voters want a steady diet of throw-away-the-key sentences for malefactors, plus an end to welfare.

What is it like down there in the trenches, making eye contact with the citizenry, seeking their support? My good friend Bruce Anderson is running for Fifth District supervisor in Mendocino County, in California’s June 7 primary.

It’s a huge slab of terrain, running from Gualala (100 miles north from San Francisco) up to touristy Mendocino Village, to Fort Bragg with its struggling mill workers, east to out-of-work loggers in Willits and Ukiah, and up in the hills the dope growers. This is beautiful country but economically depressed, with the two big earners being timber and marijuana. The more desirable portions of it are increasingly the preserve of the rich, comfortably deployed on their 160- to 320-acre parcels.

Anderson is a socialist and the editor of the widely read and combative Anderson Valley Advertiser, to which I am a regular contributor. He’s also a proved vote-getter, having run up 16,000 votes on the North Coast in 1990, the year mutinous citizens threw out Democrat Doug Bosco. Now the First Congressional District is held by Dan Hamburg (D-Ukiah), one of the more liberal reps in Congress.

Anderson’s program calls for eminent-domain takeover and local public management of corporate timber lands; rent control on residential and commercial property; reinvestment of county employees’ pension funds in the county housing authority; a small-business “incubator,” meaning business people can find the relevant bureaucracies under one roof. Anderson calls for no prosecution of families growing marijuana for cultivation of fewer than 50 plants, which is the way it used to be with Dist. Atty. Joe Allen back in the middle-1970s. Anderson’s campaign mailer also calls for “an end to the DA’s so-called welfare-fraud unit, which basically persecutes and prosecutes welfare mothers for the crime of working to supplement their AFDC grants.”

After several weeks of candidate forums--there are seven active aspirants for the supervisor’s slot--plus campaigning in trailer parks, doing radio talk shows, Anderson says it’s true: People mostly do want to talk about crime and so-called welfare fraud, often parroting exact phrases from the nightly network news shows.

“Contrary to myth,” he said, “there’s no crime wave here. I read the sheriff’s weekly printout for all the county and what I see are the same drunks, crankheads and lowlifes doing the same self-destructive things, week after week. The full-time criminal population is virtually nonexistent except for a few meth(amphetamine) manufacturers affiliated with the Hell’s Angels in the Bay Area.”

Phrases about “eminent domain” don’t make much impact. But at a joint endorsement session of the International Woodworkers of America and the Carpenters’ Local in Fort Bragg, Anderson did get an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd when he challenged the idea that environmentalists are the problem in timber country. To the contrary, he argued to a group that included at least two T-shirts bearing spotted-owl recipes that the true criminals are the big timber corporations ruled from Atlanta and Portland.

He got a warm welcome for the proposal that the holdings of Louisiana Pacific and Georgia Pacific should be confiscated “on the grounds that their short-term profit-taking has caused great harm to the people, streams and forests of Mendocino County, and Harry A. Merlo (chairman of Louisiana Pacific) should have been arrested for treason when he shipped our jobs, trees and mills out of Covelo and Potter Valley to Mexico.”

There’s almost no radical idea you can’t get a cheer for in America as long as you put it in terms people can understand.

Anderson outlines his plan for reinvesting the county employees’ fund in a county housing association, for low-interest mortgages for local people, affordable housing and a steady, secure income for the fund. This goes down very well.

Is there room for a socialist in the populist style?

“The choice here is the same as at the national level, between the fuzzy pseudo-liberals and the corporate surrogates. The ruling conservatives are all Farm Bureau types, reading manifestoes written for them by corporate timber. The local liberals are Clinton types. Plenty of high-minded rhetoric, but behind it they’re greedy, grasping and sanctimonious.

“I find that there really is a strong sympathy for left populist ideas. The Democratic Party has conceded this whole terrain to the Rush Limbaugh right.”