Green Party Candidate Campaigns for Change

When Dan Hamburg, the Green Party candidate for governor, launched into a discussion of the Headwaters Forest issue, students in the political science class at Harbor College in Wilmington looked clueless.

Instead of spectacular vistas of towering redwoods, these students from Wilmington and San Pedro grew up looking at smokestacks from nearby oil refineries or the cloud-scraping gantry cranes that unload cargo ships in Los Angeles Harbor.

But then Hamburg, who campaigns in jeans and wears his shoulder-length hair in a ponytail, started talking about the economics of marijuana cultivation. He argued that the drug should be decriminalized, but not legalized, arguing that keeping marijuana illegal keeps the prices high.

Suddenly the student audience perked up.

“Someone was telling me earlier today that one-quarter ounce of marijuana in Los Angeles costs, like, $100,” he said. Figuring that a single plant could produce a pound of marijuana, he said, “You’re talking about a $6,000 weed.”

For Hamburg, a former congressman from Ukiah and Mendocino County supervisor, a day in Los Angeles is akin to moving around in “the belly of the beast,” the same term he uses to describe Congress.

As Republican Dan Lungren and Democrat Gray Davis prepared for their third debate Wednesday, Hamburg searched for votes in the college classroom.

He got numerous laughs, as when he talked up what he sees as a lack of differences between Democrats and Republicans.

“That’s why we call them tweedle-do and tweedle-dee--or tweedle-dee and tweedle-dumber.”

A Democrat for 30 years, Hamburg broke with the party in 1996.

“The Greens were very welcoming,” he said, adding that he is the only member of the party who has ever held a seat in Congress.

As leader of the party’s California ticket, Hamburg travels throughout the state on a shoestring budget, ferried from event to event by supporters. He figures he will be lucky if he can raise $150,000 for his campaign, compared to the millions that Lungren and Davis will spend.

“Our biggest problem is that we have been shut out of the debates,” Hamburg said. But he has received decent exposure on the radio and has won the endorsements of a number of alternative weeklies, he said.

Now 49, Hamburg, a graduate of Stanford University, has been married to his wife, Carrie, for 27 years. They have four grown children and two grandchildren.

In speaking to the audience of about 40 students, Hamburg gave a wide-ranging talk that jumped from topic to topic.

He was peppered with questions about his switch to the Green Party after serving as a Democrat in Congress from 1993 to 1995.

Hamburg said he broke with the Democratic Party when he became convinced that it had stopped being “a vehicle for social change.”

“It is hopelessly sold out,” he said.

Conceding that he was once part of it, Hamburg estimates that he raised $3 million for his two campaigns for Congress.

While in the House, Hamburg said, he spent much of his time “calling people and begging them for money.”

“If you are from a swing district like mine . . . you have to raise the bucks. You have to be on TV, you gotta hire consultants--$1.5 million spent twice,” he said.

In Congress, Hamburg said, he was in a caucus of 40 to 50 like-minded progressive lawmakers. “We never got any legislation, but we had a good time talking to each other about everything that is wrong with Congress,” he said.

His biggest regret, he said, is voting for an anti-crime bill in 1994, because “it extended capital punishment and I am totally opposed to capital punishment.”

Scratching for votes, Hamburg figures college campuses offer fertile opportunities. After he left Harbor, a community college, on Wednesday, he went to USC.

During his talk at Harbor, Hamburg covered fish hatcheries, logging problems, former Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., water shortages, food stamps and health care, as well as marijuana cultivation and the fight to preserve Headwaters Forest, a 7,500-acre tract of old-growth redwoods.

Political science professor Bill Loiterman interrupted the candidate at one point and told Hamburg that the students had never heard of Headwaters.

“When he was talking about Headwaters, he was talking about something they knew nothing about,” Loiterman said in an interview later. As for the marijuana issue, he said, “There was obvious interest in that topic.”

During the primary, Hamburg ran unopposed and captured 82,000 votes, more than any other candidate outside the two major parties.

Other minor party candidates running for governor in the Nov. 3 election are Steve W. Kubby, Libertarian; Harold H. Bloomfield, Natural Law; Marsha Feinland, Peace and Freedom; and Nathan E. Johnson, American Independent.