Darren Scheidle wants to teach Sacramento how to live within a budget.
Bruce Margolin wants to push California into the black by legalizing (and taxing) Cheech and Chong’s pastime of choice.
And Scott Mednick wants to sell you a beer.
Gubernatorial candidates, start your engines. It’s recall time.
With hundreds of candidates vying to win the right to move their swag into the governor’s mansion, it seemed a few would likely be Jewish. Seven identified themselves as Jews: Scheidle, Margolin, Mednick, Dan Feinstein, Mike Schmier, Robert Mannheim and Gary Leonard. Feinstein of San Francisco and Schmier of Emeryville are our resident locals.
None of the above, incidentally, made it into August’s televised recall candidates’ debate in Walnut Creek. Schmier, for one, found himself sitting outside on the curb after unsuccessfully lobbying to sit in the chair reserved for no-show Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The aspirations of this Semitic “Magnificent Seven” are roughly the same as every candidate’s, and they can be sorted into three categories:
• Guys who think they’ve got pretty good ideas but know they can’t win.
• Guys who take their candidacy quite seriously and really think they can win.
• Guys who know they’ve got as good a chance of winning as Yasser Arafat does of bagging another Nobel Peace Prize, but either want to have some fun or make a few bucks.
Darren Scheidle fits neatly into the first category. The 37-year-old resident of El Cajon, near San Diego, runs four companies but is most proud of his work as the CEO of Livescan San Diego Fingerprinting — which, he notes soberly, is the only facility in the county open on Saturdays.
The self-made businessman’s fingerprinting operation grossed nearly $450,000 last year. The state, he believes, needs someone with a business-savvy mind to run this place like a company. Being $38 billion in the hole, he remarks, is not the hallmark of a successful business.
Just as a customer abandons a faulty product, and California businesses are abandoning this state for its “competitors”: Nevada, Oregon and Arizona.
“We need to be more business-friendly and we are not. We are chasing businesses out of California. But we could boost our economy without raising taxes,” he said.
“Two years ago, Davis promised to build power plants so we wouldn’t be at the mercy of other companies outside the state. That would create jobs, not only construction but maintenance once the stations were operational.”
Similarly, why not cut Southern California’s dependence on Northern California for water by building desalinization plants? he proposed.
“My whole idea is that without raising taxes, we can get more business in here.”
Not so fast, says Robert Mannheim, 55, a retired lawyer and accountant from Agoura Hills near Los Angeles. His mantra is “business is not overtaxed and not over-regulated — I know that is not a popular theory.”
If state commerce is a basketball game, Mannheim sees the governor as the whistle-wielding referee. And when the ref turns his head, action on the court starts to resemble Wrestlemania.
In pushing for deregulation, Mannheim accuses Republicans of applying the figurative folding chair-blow to the ref and “leaving taxpayers holding the bag.”
Now, he believes, is the time to rebuild California’s woeful infrastructure, investing in something of lasting value and borrowing money when the rates are low.
He would also like to see workers insured “as a cost of business and mandated by the state.” That may cost consumers a bit more, but Mannheim thinks it’s worth it.
“I’d rather pay an extra 25 to 50 cents for a [McDonald’s] Happy Meal so the employees who are trying to be productive citizens don’t end up sick in public hospitals, where taxpayers pick up the entire bill,” he said.
Of all the candidates, Feinstein has the most ironic day job. He’s paid to make Schwarzenegger the thespian look good.
The 40-year-old San Franciscan is a rotoscope/paint artist at George Lucas’ Marin special effects factory Industrial Light and Magic. Feinstein — no relation to Dianne, by the way — is in the business of cleverly removing “riggings, wiring and other sorts of unwanted elements from the scene.”
So when Schwarzenegger dangles from the back of a cherry-picker truck and a helicopter in “Terminator III,” it was Feinstein who undertook tasks such as erasing the wires coming out of the stuntman’s leather jacket or the padding he landed on. In addition to “T3,” you may have seen — or, more accurately, not seen — Feinstein’s handiwork in “Castaway,” “Hollow Man,” “Men In Black II” and “Blade II.”
While Feinstein works in the digital fantasyland that brought the world the Millennium Falcon and the Death Star, he insists he’s a regular guy who could bring a bit of reality to Sacramento.
“I’ve been unemployed at times, I’ve struggled a lot, I’ve seen what it’s like. I’ve lived it. You can’t just acquire that experience” by reading a report, he said.
One of Feinstein’s major issues is to spare the University of California and California State University systems from cuts and fee hikes. His first foray into politics came in his student days at San Jose State, when he fought against rising tuition.
Fee increases “are bad not just for the individual students but for the entire state. When you start limiting the number of people who can graduate and get out there, you have a problem. I think you saw that in the dot-com boom. Things were going good, but we ran out of quality people. We had to bring in a lot of people from overseas,” said Feinstein, who has participated in the Volunteers for Israel program several times.
“You raise fees, and you kill the goose that laid the golden egg.”
Feinstein eschews the term “minor candidate” in favor of “citizen candidate.” He helped to organize a gathering of about 40 citizen candidates who trekked to Alameda for a meet-and-greet aboard the USS Hornet, and a similar gathering in Southern California.
If the recall is good for anything, Feinstein hopes it brings about a greater citizen involvement with politics. And, if that’s the case, the Gary Colemans and Larry Flynts of the world will cease running vanity campaigns when the novelty wears off.
Echoing Scheidle and Mannheim, Feinstein admits only a fool would think he has a chance to win, “when someone like Arianna Huffington or Peter Camejo is going to get maybe 4 percent.”
Still, he said, “I’m getting some common-sense ideas out there that I think are good, and if this gets a budget analyst to look at them and give me the thumbs up or thumbs down, that’d be pretty good.”
Bruce Margolin, on the other hand, thinks it’ll take 15 percent of the vote to win. And he believes he can pull that one off.
“Many people are disenfranchised in this election; they don’t believe anybody. [No candidate] is saying anything they’re going to do. When people go to the polls and see ‘marijuana legalization attorney,’ they’re going to say ‘I’ll vote for something I know should be done. I’m going to punch in that guy,’ said the Wilshire Boulevard Temple congregant and, of course, marijuana legalization attorney.
Margolin sees a ripple effect stemming from the legalization of “California’s No. 1 cash crop.” The cutthroat black-market trade would be crippled. The thousands of prisoners locked away for nonviolent pot offenses would be released, easing the prison glut and saving millions in taxpayer expenses. And the time and money invested by police in combating pot would be diverted elsewhere.
“Last year [the government] cut down a reported $1.4 billion using 70 police agencies, wasting taxpayer dollars. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much marijuana is distributed and sold in California. It’s well in excess of $10 billion — and the sales tax alone is 8 percent,” said the 62-year-old Beverly Hills attorney.
“I would encourage the holistic health-care industry to flower in California. Also, the hemp industry is a whole other side of marijuana laws. They deprive us of the ability to raise hemp here, which would also be a billion-dollar industry. You may not know this, but one acre of hemp can grow as much [paper] in one year as four acres of wood in 20 years. And it’s completely biodegradable.”
To those who would laugh at Margolin’s positions, he reminds that the drug war’s status quo is very real and very expensive.
“I was talking to the D.A. here in Los Angeles not 10 minutes ago and he said if they changed the drug laws, he wouldn’t have anything to do,” Margolin told j. in September.
“They’re not keeping drugs off the street, and people can buy drugs and guns anywhere they want. We need to put the emphasis on education and recovery and stop this whole ridiculous prohibition, which is eating the guts out of our ability to function financially. It’s a complete waste.”
Mike Schmier has run three times for public office — twice for state attorney general and once against Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2000 for U.S. Senate. He didn’t win.
Now in his bid for governor, he is not ready to concede defeat yet. He does, however, concede that his is not the most well-known name in the race.
“I can’t judge as to how well I’m known. But if you walked into a bar or asked a field poll or L.A. Times poll to call a household, it is likely no one has heard of my name,” admitted the 58-year-old Emeryville lawyer.
And name recognition is key in a political system Schmier believes has started to resemble “Hollywood Squares” a bit too closely.
“I call it our ‘celebritocracy.’ We have people who are famous for being famous. So I have a question: If you had a terrible appendicitis attack would you make the first call for help to Jack Nicholson? Maybe some people would. I wouldn’t,” said Schmier, who volunteers for the Jewish Vocational Service prepping emigres for job interviews.
The foundation of Schmier’s campaign is a statement he calls “The 12-point Reality Check.” Among other goals, he proposes the establishment a five-to-seven-year reasonable system of fair income and property taxation, the promotion of environmentally friendly businesses and the aggressive pursuit of universal health care.
When Schmier walks across the street from his office to the Trader Joe’s in Emeryville, people tell him his ideas make sense. But how to put his 12-point plan in everyone’s hands? Not everyone shops in Emeryville, after all.
“One of the first steps is not being outside on the curb,” when better-known candidates are debating on TV, he noted dryly.
“The presentation of those 12-point reality checks to the people of California will result in me winning the race. I feel like Ben Franklin must have when he was doing his kite-flying experiment. If I can’t get my kite [up], I’m not going to win any elections. The issue for me is whether I am a skillful enough kite flier.”
What do you do when your home state is $38 billion in the red? Drink.
That’s the idea Scott Mednick and his business partner Kelly Kimball are pushing. Both Mednick, who is Jewish, and Kimball, who is married to a Jew and raising Jewish children, are heavily involved politically and successful Southern California businessmen. So they’re using the recall to make a political statement while brewing up a little business.
The partners were planning to come out with a line of beer next year anyway and figured that for an investment of $3,500 apiece in a candidacy, they could buy a lot of free publicity for their nascent ale. So they concocted the eye-catching (and stomach-turning) moniker of Butt Monkey Beer, running on the “Butt Monkey Beer Party” platform.
“For 3,500 bucks, that’s not a lot of money to spend to be on every TV station and radio station as far away as Boston and Detroit and sell T-shirts all over the country off our Web site. It’s a pretty inexpensive way to twist the system,” said Mednick, 47, who calls Calabasas home.
“In our first week alone, we got 50,000 hits on our Web site. That’s an awful lot of branding, and as a branding expert I can tell you it’d cost a lot more than $7,000.”
Kimball, 45, of Tarzana estimates the pair has received millions of dollars worth of free advertising. They’ve also paid for some advertising as well, running radio ads calling for the annexation of Oregon and Washington and the swapping of Sacramento for Las Vegas — “by force if necessary.”
As well as selling a lot of beer, Mednick hopes that the spectacle of two beer peddlers running for governor points out the flaws in our recall system.
“The fact I’m running for governor is nuts. There’s a process to take out the governor of California: It’s called an election,” he said.
“The recall law was done in 1911, and was created with malfeasance in mind. This recall was [started] three months after the election. That’s sour grapes. [Rep. Darrell Issa] didn’t like the election, so he pulled this off with his own money and then ran away with his tail between his legs when Arnold stepped in.”
Mednick, incidentally, said he has known Schwarzenegger for 20 years and praises him as “the real deal, very smart and compassionate, a driven guy.” Mednick also worked alongside former President Clinton and former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. In fact, Riordan used to be Mednick’s lawyer.
If only 5 million Californians cast a ballot in the recall, then, Mednick notes, only 500,000 signatures will be required to institute another recall.
“We can’t have the governor in Sacramento worrying about if he signs something that no one likes in the short term he’ll have to worry about someone ponying up $1 million and getting a recall going,” said Mednick.
“We’re pointing out that if two guys who own a beer company can get on the ballot, then we have a huge problem. We’re doing this so you can see the flaws in the system. So fix it.”
Gary Leonard, meanwhile, is getting up an hour and a half earlier every day so he can campaign a bit for governor. He never leaves the L.A. area, and he restricts his politicking to handing out buttons with his name on it.
“I’m always going around the city, so all I need are buttons,” said the 52-year-old photographer with a laugh.
“I made myself a candidate because, as a journalist, I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I knew by my instincts it would be a good story to write and shoot.”
Sometimes Leonard finds himself shooting photos of his fellow recall candidates (he recently covered a feminist protest in front of Schwarzenegger’s L.A. headquarters). The notion that, in California, even the guy snapping the politicians’ photos is running for office is more than a little surreal, and it hasn’t escaped Leonard.
And the large number of registered voters who come out to hear Schwarzenegger, Davis, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and others has proven to be fertile ground for Leonard’s understated campaign.
“I run into people and before I know it I’m passing out buttons. And a lot of people are saying they’ll vote for me,” said Leonard.
“That’s something I didn’t anticipate, actively pursuing votes,” added Leonard, who grew up attending the same San Fernando Valley synagogue as former junk bond king Michael Milken. (“He was in my sister’s class. They were friends. I remember she had a party and they had a scavenger hunt and his team was back so much faster than any other group. I’ll never forget that.”)
While Leonard says he’s having a blast, he’s aware of what $3,500 could have bought for his young daughter — and his wife won’t let him forget it. Still, he may yet recoup his entry fee and then some by coming out with an insider’s recall scrapbook or “one or two museum-quality archival photographs.”
Leonard has been presented awards by two L.A. mayors honoring his decades of documenting the lives of Angelinos, but his parents are most proud, he says, of siring a gubernatorial candidate.
And maybe he’ll even get a few votes.
“It’s a statewide election with millions of voters,” he said.
“Maybe someone who reads this will relate to me. I’m a working man. If I get 100 votes, I’ll feel great.”