Long Beach Ready to Be a Reform Party Town

Compared to the multi-megawatt political circuses planned by Republicans and Democrats for San Diego and Chicago this month, the fledgling Reform Party’s first national convention in Long Beach on Sunday is going to look like a lodge meeting.

But then, Ross Perot and his followers have always been a bit unconventional.

City officials in Long Beach, while happy to preen for the national press, say they’re treating next Sunday like any other day. The Long Beach police SWAT team will be providing some extra security, but convention center administrators note that the Reform Party event, which is expected to draw 2,000 participants, isn’t even the biggest show in town that weekend.

There’s a major jazz festival to compete with, for example. And then there’s the Messengers of Godly Peace convention, expected to draw 13,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“We may recruit each other,” said Mark Sturdevant, the vice chairman of the Reform Party’s California branch. “We can stand there with our pamphlets, and they’ll have theirs. We’re all Americans.”

And equally fervent in supporting their respective causes. The California branch of the party signed up 120,000 members in 18 days last October, just in time to reserve a spot on the ballot for its yet-to-be-named nominee.

Now the party, bankrolled by Perot, confronts the tricky question of whom to select as its standard-bearer. One on hand, there’s the feisty Texan who drew 19% of the vote as an independent in the three-way presidential race in 1992. (He did even better--20%--in Long Beach, where days before the election he held a rally that drew 12,000). On the other is former Colorado Gov. Richard D. Lamm, a onetime Democrat and Clinton backer turned gloom-and-doom centrist.

Sunday marks the first step in a two-convention nomination process. In Long Beach, voters will take in speeches and perhaps a moderated “interview” with the party’s two candidates. Then they have a week to vote, either by phone, modem or mailbox. The party will announce its nominee at a second convention on Aug. 18 in Valley Forge, Pa.

On tap for the Long Beach get-together, organizers say, is a weekend of down-home values grown from the roots of the American Revolution. There’s a meet-and-greet aboard the Queen Mary, capped with a fireworks show. Out and about at the convention center theater will be actors dressed as George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and others in period costume as colonial soldiers.

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Even with busloads of voters expected to come to Long Beach from San Diego and Palm Springs, party officials concede that turnout could be as low as 1,500. Nationally, the party claims about 1.3 million loyalists, but many of them will be basking in democratic idealism from their sofas, thanks to C-SPAN’s planned live coverage of the event. For those who do show up, a Reform Party flier invites guests to check out Disneyland, Santa Catalina Island and what it describes as the “eclectic sophistication” of Long Beach’s Belmont Shore shopping corridor.

“It was one of those pieces of business that kind of fell into our lap,” said Gary Sherwin, vice president of marketing for the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau. “It’s primarily a local crowd, people coming in the afternoon, maybe doing lunch or dinner, and going home. The real benefit from our standpoint is the exposure the city is going to get.”

One reason to hold the historic face-off in Long Beach, party insiders say, is that Perot enjoyed the audience there in 1992. Another reason is its availability. San Diego, as most C-SPAN viewers are well aware, was taken.

Not to be upstaged by the Republican National Convention there, the Reform Party has scheduled its two conventions to bracket the Aug. 12-15 GOP event--a gambit to steal the media spotlight from Bob Dole two days after he becomes his party’s official nominee.

But political chess aside, the conventions and their impact on the two host cities are night and day, or perhaps David and Goliath.

San Diego has spent the better part of a year girding itself for the GOP’s 30,000 expected guests. Long Beach got word that it would host the Reform Party’s revolt just six weeks ago, and as of July 26, 107 hotel rooms had been booked for Reform convention guests through the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“I think it’ll be a quiet meeting,” said John Morris, owner of Mum’s restaurant, near Long Beach’s convention center. “Who knows who’s showing? They’re not really doing anything hyper in terms of getting local businesses involved. They’re going to drive in and drive out.”

Not so, said Reform Party state coordinator Platt Thompson. Perot and Lamm will stump in hopes of tapping the region’s politically disenfranchised, Thompson said.

“The Long Beach-Orange County area is ripe turf for the Reform Party,” he said. “It would seem there’s a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the traditional two parties there.”