Assembly’s Lone Green Switches to Independent

SACRAMENTO —  She was never supposed to be elected to the state Assembly. When she got there, she wasn’t supposed to like it.

And when she faced reelection in 2000 after fighting the noble fight for environmental causes, she was scripted to lose quietly with her integrity and good intentions intact.

But after her surprise victory in a special election in March, Audie Bock, 53, Harvard-educated Japanese film scholar, discovered that she relished representing her Oakland area legislative district.

Still, it was not easy being Green--particularly the only Green Party member in the California Legislature. And staying Green, Bock determined, was not going to keep her in Sacramento.

“The past eight months have very much whet my appetite for the job,” Bock said. “That is part of the ideological problem I had with the Green Party. If you are a Green, you are not supposed to say that you want to come back.”

So earlier this month, Bock went quietly to the Alameda County courthouse and changed her registration from Green to independent. This was widely portrayed in the press as a tactical move. By changing to independent, she could avoid the chaos and cost of the March primary and save her energy and limited resources for the November election.

The decision was lamented on all sides.

“The state party put a lot of hopes in Audie’s success and her holding that office,” said John C. Strawn, a California Green Party spokesman. “Certainly we were saddened. Some of us were upset. Some were very angry and others felt abandoned.”

As for Bock’s contention that the Greens prefer political martyrdom to winning, Strawn, a candidate for City Council in Santa Barbara, noted that 35 party members hold office in California municipal governments, including two City Council positions in Santa Monica.

Bock said that although she is leaving the party, her heart remains Green. There were tears along with the angry words when she announced the decision to a group of 25 Green Party leaders in an Oakland living room.

“A lot of these people put their heart and soul into my election. So this for them was like a blow to the gut,” Bock said, referring to her David vs. Goliath defeat of former Oakland Democratic Mayor Elihu Harris by 336 votes. Her shocking win came in a county in which 65% of the voters are registered Democrats and only 1.4% are registered Green.

But in an interview this week, Bock, one of two single mothers in the Legislature, said her reasons for leaving the environmentally fixated Green Party involved differences in political philosophy beyond pure electoral strategy.

There is the matter of raising money.

“The Green Party takes the position of not raising money from for-profit corporations,” Strawn said. “Audie was announcing openly that she willingly accepts money from any corporation.” That included contributions from two oil companies.

Bock agreed that money was the main rub.

“That was a core problem with the Greens, whose ideology basically rejects money,” Bock said. “Now I feel I can do fund-raising.”

She said she would accept contributions from “good corporations who are trying to make a difference.” Last week, Bock hired Ron Lofstrom, a former legislative assistant in Sacramento, as her official fund-raiser.

“I didn’t know anything about the Greens until I met Audie. But they have to learn that to get the message out you need to get the dollars,” Lofstrom said. “Audie markets herself well. My job is sitting her down with potential contributors, large and small.”

Winning her district again will be difficult, if not impossible. Her victory in a traditionally Democratic district was an embarrassment for party leaders. “Whatever happened, it was inexcusable,” said Gov. Gray Davis. “That district should be a slam-dunk for Democrats.”

Democratic legislative candidates in the March primary can be expected to spend $400,000 to $500,000. At last count, Bock had less than $8,000 in her campaign coffers. In the November election, the Democrats can be expected to pull out all stops to recapture the district.

Bock figures that she will use the money issue to her advantage. “The voters are disgusted with how much money is spent on campaigns,” she said. As for being an independent in a Democratic town, she points to Jerry Brown, former Democratic governor of California and now independent mayor of Oakland.

During her few months in the Assembly, Bock has impressed her fellow legislators as a good sport and a bit of a prankster. During a late-night budget session in June, she showed up on the Assembly floor wearing Bugs Bunny slippers and purple pajamas. When Democrats and Republicans retreated to caucus, she insisted on holding a Green Party caucus of one.

But she has also incensed some members with her righteous condemnation of certain legislation, particularly on gun control.

“These well-intentioned fragments of what we call gun control do not get rid of guns; the emperor has no clothes,” Bock declared in one impassioned speech.

This kind of talk about a bill the Democrats were describing as the nation’s most progressive reform of gun laws was criticized by some fellow legislators as a typical rookie mistake.

Bock admits she has a lot to learn. Her only significant attempt to pass legislation--a bill that would tighten reporting requirements for a medical waste incinerator in her district--went down in flames after 18 Democrats abstained from voting. All had been lobbied heavily at the last minute by Norcal Waste Co., owner of the plant.

“It was a fascinating and horrifying and spectacularly effective thing to watch,” Bock recalled, awed by the process. The low point, she said, was at midnight during the debate when she looked up in the gallery and saw the Norcal lobbyist, Denise Delmatier, a veteran of 20 years in the Capital, staring down at her in triumph.

“She was definitely on a learning curve,” Delmatier said.

Bock, meanwhile, said she wants more time to learn. To get that experience she needs to be reelected. She figures her chances are better as an independent than as a Green.