Pitching in to pitch candidates

It’s only a day until the mayoral election, but L.A.’s hills and valleys are not abloom with as many campaign banners as one might expect. In many neighborhoods, it’s hard to tell there’s an election coming up, let alone one as contentious as this: An ex-police chief (Bernard C. Parks) versus the guy who helped take his job away (incumbent James K. Hahn) versus two candidates (Antonio Villaraigosa and Richard Alarcon) who some say will do themselves in by splitting the crucial Latino vote. And then there’s Encino Man, Bob Hertzberg, whose only campaign office (in Encino, of course), is larger and better furnished than most -- and who is one of the front-runners.

The heart and soul of all these campaigns -- indeed, of any political candidate’s effort -- is his or her corps of volunteers: individuals willing to donate precious time after work and on weekends to walk the precincts, hand out literature and signs, sit for hours in drab offices cold-calling potential voters who just might be swayed simply because of a chat with a well-informed (and persuasive) volunteer.

All the main candidates claim to have healthy volunteer rosters; all refuse to estimate how many people that might be. A few trips to campaign headquarters around town revealed that many offices are empty of volunteers much of the time. One candidate’s office manager, faced with no daytime volunteers to staff the cold-call phones, was trying to hire a van and driver to bring in senior citizens who otherwise couldn’t get there to volunteer.

But political do-gooders -- regular citizens who donate hours and want nothing in return but to see their candidate win -- still do exist in Los Angeles, although there probably are not as many as in years past, say those charged with enlisting such unpaid assistants.

“I think we [Democrats] may be a bit burned out after working so hard in the presidential race and then seeing what happened” says Gilbert Garcia, 50, who began this campaign as a volunteer for Richard Alarcon and apparently had so much passion for the job that he was offered a paid position running Alarcon’s mid-Wilshire campaign office.

Garcia is an electrician by trade who has “temporarily given that up” to work on the campaign. “Things in this city have to change. The big contractors who donate to political campaigns control what happens in this city. Alarcon is against that kind of pay-to-play,” Garcia says. “And so to make the necessary changes happen, there are sacrifices people have to make.”

His sacrifice is the bigger income he’d be earning as an electrician if he hadn’t taken time out for politics. And now he’s realized he loves political work, he says. So will he go back to being an electrician after the campaign? “If I want to eat, I will.”

The passion to set things right, to make a difference in the community, to participate in an effort that is bigger than oneself stirs in the dozens of individuals who volunteer for the various candidates. But there might have been many more of them if Angelenos weren’t suffering from what USC political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe calls “election fatigue” -- a kind of I-don’t-care syndrome that sets in after citizens have been exposed to too many elections, runoffs and recalls.

“We’ve all got it” here in L.A., she says, and ticks off at least a dozen or more state and local elections in which Angelenos have been asked to participate in the past two or three years. Actually, that there are any enthusiastic volunteers left to participate in the mayoral race is remarkable, when viewed from Jeffe’s perspective.

For committed activists, however, the fatigue factor doesn’t seem to exist.

Christopher Perez, 25, is a Cal State Northridge graduate and Villaraigosa volunteer who says he’s been interested in politics since high school, when he volunteered for Bill Clinton. In 2000, he volunteered for Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. With a B.A. in journalism, he had planned to go into that field, he says, but “I find it harder and harder to be objective, which is what a good journalist has to do.” So he’s decided to work in government in some capacity, he says. In the meantime, he volunteers.

“I come from a blue-collar, working-class background. My parents had a hard life. They had a harder childhood than mine. They didn’t even graduate high school. I’ve grown up seeing their struggles, so I’ve always taken the side of the worker. I volunteer for Villaraigosa because I believe he has those same interests. I believe he’s a good and compassionate man.”

Bernard Parks volunteer Anderson Hitchcock, 57, of Leimert Park, is not new to the task. “I worked for Tom Bradley, Jesse Jackson in ‘84, and for the United Farm Workers.” Hitchcock, who runs a nonprofit group called Institute for Economics as a Second Language, says he started volunteering for Parks about two months ago.

He goes to campaign headquarters three or four times a week and spends up to 15 hours weekly working to get his candidate elected. Why? “He’s a huge focal point for the community. He cares about education, safe and secure streets, decent housing -- he would reach out and support the diversity that is this city in the most positive way.”

Audrey Quarles, who says she’s “over 70,” has volunteered in the past for Diane Watson, Maxine Waters, Mayor Hahn -- and now is on the Parks volunteer team. “I’m passionate about politics. I want to make my community a better place, and if there’s someone who I think can do the job, then I get in there and help. I believe each person makes a difference. The Parks campaign is very diverse: black, white, Spanish, Korean, Indians ... we’re all pitching in.”

Over at Hahn headquarters in mid-Wilshire, a cadre of volunteers manned the phone bank on a recent evening, dialing potential voters from numbers on huge computerized lists

Among the group: Jimmie Gray, a preschool teacher who describes herself as “a political person.” She is past chair of the L.A. County Democratic Central Committee, “the first person of color ever elected chair of that committee and only the second woman.” Gray says she’s watched Hahn during his three years in office, “and I’ve seen his commitment to this city. And how he’s gotten us through crisis after crisis. Fires, floods, mudslides -- and the city still works, and services are still being delivered. Whenever a person does a good job, he deserves to be reelected. And I want to help him achieve that.”

Rolando Cuevas, 36, a community outreach activist originally from Boyle Heights, says he’s a Hahn volunteer because “I have the ambition to make my community safer. Boyle Heights is very gang-ridden. I think it is very important for Hahn to win because he’ll help achieve the goal. So I volunteer as much time as I can.”

Dan Ruiz, a communications engineer who lives in Downey, can’t even vote for Hahn, yet he volunteers in his campaign. “I work in downtown L.A., I see all the big improvements since Hahn took office. Downtown is my livelihood. I am going to help the candidate who is helping to make downtown a better place.”