For Most, It’s a Race on a Shoestring

Ivan Hall knows he’s no Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s a denture manufacturer, not an actor. He lives in Redding, a Sacramento Valley town far from the mansions of Pacific Palisades. And his campaign for governor is being run on dental floss and a smile, not the budget of a minor motion picture.

Still, it stung a bit the other day when Hall, who’s a member of the Green Party, held a meet-the-candidate luncheon at a Marie Callender’s restaurant in his hometown. It was the biggest event of his campaign so far. And who was right across the street? None other than Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger’s wife, holding a fund-raiser at the Holiday Inn.

It was like the Oakland Raiders against a high school football team. And not the varsity.

Hall’s guests paid $11 for their meal; Shriver’s, a minimum of $150. Hall drew about 25 people; Shriver, about 300. Shriver landed on the front page of the local newspaper; Hall merited two sentences at the end of the story.

And when all was said and done, Hall had added $220 to his campaign, swelling his treasury to a grand total of $1,140. Shriver, meanwhile, had tossed a few more tens of thousands of dollars into Schwarzenegger’s multimillion-dollar-and-growing coffers.

This is how it goes for the Ivan Halls of the recall campaign. A few top dogs are piling up enough money to buy the governor’s mansion outright, were it for sale, while the other 130-odd candidates labor -- with varying degrees of effort and success -- to raise enough funds to cover their $3,500 filing fee.

Bob McClain, a civil engineer from Oakland who’s running as an independent, said he entered the race with a sense of cautious optimism, “a little Walter Mitty fantasy” that maybe lightning would strike and he would, improbably, win.

Several weeks and $27 in fund-raising later, “I’m still optimistic,” he said, “but a little bit of reality’s starting to sink in.”

Like most candidates, McClain launched a Web site (his and others can be found at www.politics1.com/ca.htm), complete with information on how to donate to his campaign and an online store with lots of Bob McClain for Governor merchandise -- bumper stickers, lawn signs, T-shirts, mouse pads, coffee cups and so on.

So far, he’s sold one $2 bumper sticker. His cost for producing the bumper sticker: $2.

McClain has lots of ideas about how to run California. Structural changes in the budget. Consumer privacy legislation. He’s for gay marriage and medical marijuana; reluctantly supports cuts in education and health-care funding. But for now, it’s safe to say, there will be no TV commercials touting any of McClain’s ideas.

“If I got a little bit of money,” McClain said, “I might send a postcard to everybody named Bob in the state, or everybody named McClain, or -- I’m a licensed engineer, so maybe to all the engineers.”

If he got a little bit of money.

Some of the lesser-known candidates have raised more than others -- some, considerably more. Although he isn’t famous outside Silicon Valley, venture capitalist Garrett Gruener of Oakland probably doesn’t even belong in the category of minor candidate, given a campaign treasury of more than $750,000. Virtually all of that came from Gruener himself, although he hopes to emulate the online fund-raising success of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.

Gruener, who founded the online search engine Ask Jeeves, has fittingly concentrated his campaign on the Internet, with perhaps the most elaborate Web site of any candidate. His big-league bank account will allow him to buy both television and radio advertising, with which he intends to spread the word about his Web site. Traditional advertising, he said, is too shallow.

How deep will he reach into his pockets? “I’m going to spend enough to get the message across to the people of California,” Gruener said. A Democrat, he opposes the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, but believes he would be the best alternative should the governor lose his job.

Some candidates say they’re proud to be running campaigns on the cheap. “I know it takes money to run a campaign,” said Republican Robert “Butch” Dole of Milpitas, just north of San Jose. “But this election is all about the budget, and if you just go out and spend money like it’s water, how are you going to control the budget?”

Dole is spending money like ... well, money. His campaign finance statement, filed last month with the secretary of state, showed that he had loaned his campaign $100 and had been given a digital camera valued at $399. That was it. His expenses: $0, unless you count his filing fee.

Dole even decided to forego placing a candidate’s statement on the ballot, which he could have done for $10 a word. “I get long-winded,” he explained.

Then there is Jim “One Buck” Weir, who had raised $65 by the end of last week, all of it in $1 increments. A Democrat from Grass Valley, Weir is no stranger to fund-raising. He formerly served on the Nevada County Board of Supervisors, and held his share of spaghetti dinners to drum up donations. But he never enjoyed open-palm campaigning, and decided to do things differently this time around.

“You know,” he said, “the odds of me winning this are pretty slim, so why not do it and try to make a statement?”

Thus did he become “One Buck” Weir. Most of his campaign spending, he figures, will be on gas.

Few candidates have received more individual contributions than Weir. But like most of the lesser-known candidates, he has yet to take a dollar from someone he doesn’t know. In this kind of campaign, donors tend to be spouses, parents, siblings, best friends.

A few candidates have broken through the media clutter to draw contributions from strangers. These tend to be the candidates who (a) have a marketing gimmick, and (b) have received national television exposure.

Porn actress Mary Carey, for instance, has sold about 300 T-shirts at $20 a pop, according to her campaign manager (and studio boss) Mark Kulkis. She has yet to snag a contributor who will pay $5,000 to have dinner with her -- her most unusual gambit. But she does have plans for a twist on the traditional fund-raiser: the premiere of her latest movie, “Club Carrie,” at a Los Angeles theater next week.

As Carey knows, sex sells.

Another candidate, Democrat Georgy Russell of Mountain View, has found a marketable fund-raising gimmick in the form of thong underwear imprinted with her campaign logo. Independent candidate Brooke Adams has received considerable exposure, her campaign manager said, in large part because she “is attractive to the camera.”

Adams’ youth, looks, and the articulate exposition of her conservative views have made her a favorite for television newscasters looking for faces in the 135-candidate crowd. “My job as the campaign manager is to convert that interest [into] funds,” Steve Spernak said. “So far,” he added, “so good.”

Spernak said Adams has raised “several thousand dollars,” mostly through sales of T-shirts and playing cards, and is aiming for $100,000 by the end of the campaign.

A natural question arises. Why?

“She is running hard, very, very hard, to become the next governor,” Spernak insisted.

In the next breath, he conceded, “Realistically, she may fall short of that goal.”

Still, Adams, a 25-year-old sales executive from Dana Point, is getting her name out and learning the ropes. If she loses, in a sense, she still wins. Whether or not she raises $100,000.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is to listen to Ivan Hall ruminate about getting bulldozed by the fat cats.

“We are using paid speech to drown out free speech,” he said. “Free speech doesn’t exist. It’s almost dead. Because I can go into the town square, and I’ve done that, and people run away from you. You’re crazy. And that’s what’s scary. Because we don’t live in a democracy anymore. We live in a hypocrisy.”