Political Camp Fire: Vet’s Stories From the Front

When Jimmy Camp went to work in 1989 manning a phone bank for Lois Lundberg, an Orange County political consultant, he was just another apolitical rocker who needed a day job.

With punk rock influences such as the Clash and the Ramones from his high school days, and blues and country music soaked up during a three-year sojourn in Austin, Texas, in the late ‘80s, Camp was a well-rounded, well-qualified musician.

Lundberg soon found that he also had the talent and drive to be an effective political operative.

“I got drawn in,” Camp recalls. Having reconciled with his family by his early 20s after a turbulent time in his teens, Camp, whose father was a pastor in Orange, was open to conservative Republican ideas that meshed with the values of his upbringing.

“I thought, ‘Those things [the conservative Republican candidates who hired Lundberg’s firm] are saying are cool.’ ”

GOP candidates and consultants would come to value Camp for his loyalty and his ability to organize and inspire the volunteers and office staffers who do the mailing, sign-posting, precinct-walking, phone-calling and other unglamorous but essential duties in a local campaign.

“He’s perceived as the best in the state as far as the management of campaigns on the ground. Whatever it takes to get the job done, he does it,” says Mark Thompson, an O.C. political consultant with whom Camp has worked closely.

Mickey Conroy first met Camp in 1991 when Conroy was running for the state Assembly. “He showed up at my campaign headquarters on a motorcycle, with black leather pants and a black leather jacket and a pair of boots,” Conroy remembers. “He’d give you anything but the image of a conservative Republican type person. To me he looked like a little hippie. [I thought], ‘Who is this guy?’ ”

Conroy quickly learned to judge Camp not by his look, but by his work. As a political operative, Camp mainly sported a rocker’s denim garb, but he wore long sleeves to cover his tattoos and donned a coat and tie on formal occasions.

Camp’s rocker friends knew about his double life. While they might jokingly razz him about being a hard-core Republican, he says he can’t recall any heated debates or unpleasantness over issues.

It might have been different had Camp tried to emulate Bob Roberts, the fictitious political folk singer played by Tim Robbins in a 1992 film satire, but Camp made a point of not bringing his politics into his music.

It also might have been more difficult had he been trying to make his way in Los Angeles, where such influential, left-leaning bands as X and the Blasters set the tone for the alternative-rock and roots-rock scenes.

Most rockers in Orange County have been more concerned with personal themes than political ones, except for the occasional outburst along the lines of D.I.’s mid-’80s broadside, “Reagan Der Fuehrer,” which mockingly proclaims:

Reagan’s our Fuehrer. We need someone newer.

If I had my way, I’d hang him on a skewer.

“We never really talked about politics. We’d usually end up talking about the Beatles or something,” recalls Michael Ubaldini, who has played with Camp in several bands since the early ‘80s. “I do think it’s kind of funny though, because Jim’s a wild guy. He’s far from conservative [in his personal style]. It’s kind of the Clark Kent thing.”

After a recent period of personal turbulence and self-evaluation brought in part by Conroy’s defeat in November’s heated race for Board of Supervisors, Camp says he is irreparably disillusioned with electoral politics and is determined to devote himself to music and to raising his two young children.

But he still tells his war stories with matter-of-fact pride. “Last year I was known as the best campaigner in the state,” he said. “I was so aggressive, and people wanted the pit bull on their side. As far as the process went--fund-raising or signature gathering--I wouldn’t do anything illegal. But in the recall of Paul Horcher [a state Assemblyman from Diamond Bar whom other Republicans perceived as a turncoat], we were damn-near militant.

“Willie Brown [the Democratic political baron who was able to hold tenuously to the Assembly’s Speakership in 1994, thanks to Horcher’s crucial support] said the Republicans hired a bunch of juvenile delinquents to run that campaign. I thought that was great.

“I went through their trash,” coming up with Horcher’s polling list of prospective voters and the pager numbers of his campaign staff. Camp said he and aides would punch up the pagers to create a nuisance. Horcher was ousted by a landslide.

Camp “was arrayed against the whole Democratic machinery. It was the campaign of a lifetime, and he smoked them,” said Wayne C. Johnson, a veteran Republican consultant in Sacramento who helped with the Horcher recall. “Rock music’s gain will be our loss.”

Horcher, an official in Brown’s mayoral administration in San Francisco, said he recalls Camp “vaguely [as] one of probably hundreds of political operatives the Republican Party brought into the [recall] campaign. I’m glad he’s come to his senses and gotten into music. I wish him well in his career.”