Taking ‘the First Few Baby Steps’ Into Politics : Fund raising: Liz Bergman’s nonpartisan L.A. List offers a helping hand to female candidates by stirring up small donations from women who dream of political parity.

When Judy Jordan finally made up her mind to run for reelection to her local school board, she knew the stakes would be high. She never knew how high until she went out and priced them.

The wooden yard stakes Jordan needed to post her campaign signs ran 99 cents each at the hardware store--and she needed 50 of ‘em.

True, $49.50 barely buys a chicken dinner in the free-spending world of big-time politics. But Jordan’s entire campaign budget was a mere $3,500--and dwindling fast as she battled 10 candidates for three seats on the Las Virgenes Unified School District board.

A retired teacher and mother of three, Jordan balked at spending money out of her own pocket for extra stakes, silk-screened signs and desperately needed flyers.

“I don’t think it’s fair to my family to spend our resources to get into an office that doesn’t pay,” said Jordan, 54, whose campaign nearly ran out of cash with weeks to go before the November, 1993, election.

In the end, Jordan won, thanks in part to a last-minute donation of $300 from L.A. List, a year-old nonprofit organization that supports pro-choice women candidates for everything from city councils to school boards to mosquito abatement districts.

The nonpartisan L.A. List is part of a nationwide effort to help women take what founder Liz Bergman calls the “first few baby steps” into politics. Like dozens of similar groups elsewhere, it is modeled after the national Democratic fund-raising organization EMILY’s List, which takes its name from the political truism “Early Money Is Like Yeast (it makes the dough rise).”

L.A. List supports women candidates by collecting small donations from women all over Los Angeles County and bundling them--similar to the way political action committees work.

A Republican turned Democrat and homemaker turned political activist, Bergman said she realized that she had to get involved in women’s politics in the summer of 1989. That August, the Supreme Court decided that states could write their own abortion laws.

At the time, Bergman hardly considered herself a feminist. A UC Berkeley graduate in social science, she married young and never strayed far from her husband’s political taste for Reagan-style Republicans.

But when her company turned down a proposal she had drafted to help pay for child care for its workers, Bergman decided enough was enough.

“I woke up one day and I was 29 and they were taking our reproductive rights away and women weren’t gaining anything in the corporate world and I realized we had to start taking the reins of power,” said Bergman, now 34.

Los Angeles County politicians say Bergman--now divorced and a public policy student at the Center for Politics and Economics at the Claremont Graduate School--has done just that.

Through L.A. List, Bergman said, she has achieved her vision of helping women get a seat on the dais. Beyond just raising money, Bergman and L.A. List try to promote cooperation among women all over Los Angeles County.

Culver City Board of Education member Barbara Honig spent a majority of her campaign riddled with anxiety because “everything had to be done and paid for at once.” But with the help of $300 from L.A. List, Honig won.

She credits her victory in part to women from Pasadena and Encino, Santa Monica and Long Beach--women who could not vote for Honig but who sent her dozens of small, sometimes even meager, donations.

“These checks were from people who didn’t know me,” said Honig, 45, a first-timer who spent $7,000 in a tight race to win her seat in the fall of 1993. “I realized this campaign was being touched by women from all over the county.”

Although L.A. List has donated only about $4,000 to candidates since it incorporated last summer, its ranks are growing--from about two dozen members then to 290 today. Eleven of the 19 candidates it backed were elected.

Its successes mirror a trend emerging nationally.

In 1990, 26 women’s political action committees gave a total of $3.1 million to women candidates nationwide. Two years later, 35 committees donated more than $11.5 million, said Lucy Baruch of the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University. The 9-year-old EMILY’s List raised $6.2 million in 1992 and was credited in part for the election of 25 women to Congress.

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But before they can get to Washington, Bergman said, women must gain political experience on city councils or school boards. Women running for the first time have a tough time getting elected because of a politically deadly combination of lack of connections and lack of wealth to fund a successful campaign.

Candidates with few resources agreed that they could ill afford to fall into the money pit that swallows many politicians. Prestell Askia, who lost a second bid for a Cerritos council seat in April, said she kept track of horror stories from other races to remind her to keep campaign costs down.

“Grace Napolitano mortgaged her home for $400,000 when she ran for Assembly, and Bob Epple borrowed $40,000 from his mother-in-law,” Askia said. “I also watched Charles Kim spend $106,000 in a 1990 bid for a Cerritos council seat--and lose.”

Determined to do the best she could with what she had, Askia sat down with her husband and children and asked how much money she should spend. The family agreed on a ceiling of $15,000.

Bergman worked for Kathy O’Neill when she lost a bid for state Senate in the May, 1992, Democratic primary in part because she did not have access to the financial resources Tom Hayden did. After that race, Bergman worried that the next Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein would never make it into even a local office:

“I didn’t see the decade of the woman materializing, I didn’t see a woman in the White House.”

Bergman had reason to worry.

In 1992--loudly proclaimed the Year of the Woman--the number of women in the U.S. Senate tripled, from two to six. Activists agree that women have a long way to go before their political representation matches their numbers in the population.

Women make up 52% of the nation’s population, but they hold only 10% of the seats in Congress--including 54 of 535 seats in the House, according to figures from the Center for the American Woman and Politics.

In 1992, Bergman held a series of what she calls “kitchen cabinets” to share her vision that women must give to other women’s campaigns to help gain political parity.

Out of these meetings--literally held in kitchens around town--emerged a decision by Bergman, financial consultant Carolyn Woosley and controller Joy Janes to start recruiting members to support L.A. List in the fall of 1992.

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Members pay an annual membership fee of $25 and promise to make two contributions, of any amount, to candidates recommended by the group each year.

And it’s a daunting task to recommend candidates in 88 cities running for more than 500 council seats--not to mention hundreds of other offices. The group joined forces with eight local chapters of the National Women’s Political Caucus to screen candidates.

Both groups require candidates to support pay equity for women, to agree with the concept of the Equal Rights Amendment, to be pro-choice and to advocate quality, affordable child care.

After the caucuses provide L.A. List with a slate of recommended candidates, the group’s 19-member board votes on which women it will recommend to its members.

Members are then mailed a flyer listing recommended candidates and asked to send contributions to a post office box. The checks are tallied, bundled and forwarded to each candidate.

Several candidates--including some who lost--said they would not have received contributions from as many women without L.A. List.

“This is a marvelous concept, it gives women the option of seeking out and receiving funds that normally would not be available,” Askia said.

Askia used much of her campaign money, including $300 received from L.A. List members, to battle fliers from another candidate in a diverse field of eight contenders for Cerritos City Council that read, “Wanted: White Male for Council.”

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While some Los Angeles politicos say the group needs to be more “in your face,” they say they have received nothing but positive feedback about the fledgling organization.

“What Bergman has done should be copied everywhere. It has a dual purpose: It educates and involves while raising money,” said Jill Govan Bauman, one of Los Angeles’ busiest fund-raisers, who has helped raise money for Feinstein, Kathleen Brown and EMILY’s List.

Nationwide, dozens of similar groups are popping up as the trend catches on.

In New Jersey, there’s Pam’s List. In New York, Eleanor’s List contributes to candidates. In Maryland, Harriet’s List sends slates of recommended candidates to its members.

Ellen Malcolm, who founded Washington, D.C.-based EMILY’s List in 1985, said small spinoffs of her organization will help women gain credibility at the local level necessary for them to win large campaign contributions.

“I’ve always found that the credibility gap keeps women from office. They have to prove themselves over and over again,” Malcolm said. “When people see women can compete financially as well as politically, they take them more seriously.”

EMILY’s List has had an informal relationship with its spinoffs so far and has provided information on fund-raising tactics and advice on political problems. Malcolm hopes, however, to mentor and encourage the smaller fund-raising groups more often in the 1996 election cycle.

While Malcolm is confident about EMILY’s ability to keep members--membership ballooned from 3,500 in 1990 to 33,000 today--Bergman is concerned L.A. List members will forget to renew their pledges this summer.

To counteract that apathy, Bergman plans a cable television show that will seek to educate potential donors about L.A. List by using examples of financially strapped candidates.

Other L.A. List founders add that the group’s members have gotten considerable bang for their buck by seeing 11 new Los Angeles County women in local offices during the past year.

And these elections will, eventually, affect women everywhere, said Woosley, one of L.A. List’s founding members.

“People will see that ultimately women’s issues are everyone’s issues,” she said.