| | They hunt their quarry outside of the packed malls and along the crowded beaches of San Diego. They lurk outside of Target or Trader Joe's–poised to swoop down on distracted, cart-pushing shoppers with their battle cry: "Excuse me! Are you a registered voter?" They are petitioners. Hear them roar.
"I'm making history!" Bill Roberts, 48, a petitioner says. "That's what I tell people to get them to sign: Come make history with me! Let's kick this Governor out!"
History being made? Maybe. Political war being fought? Absolutely.
And when it comes to American political warfare, a good starting point for any observer is the Deep Throat Dictum: Follow the money. Following the money will lead you to a man who hails from Vista, California. This man, Darrell Issa, is a Republican. He has a job, as a United States Congressman, but he wants a different job: Governor of California. Issa–in common with most Americans in Congress–is a very wealthy man. So he used 800,000 of his own American dollars to fund Rescue California, a state-wide organization working to force a special election to give Issa, and other Californians, a chance to fire Gray Davis, another very wealthy man who is the present Governor of California, and a Democrat.
The recall campaign used targeted, mass mailings, and a small army of people who took petitions into public places to gather signatures. Some of the petitioners were volunteers. Some were professionals.
Professional petitioners?
"The Republicans have the money, but they’re not the best payers," explains Ron Piper, 45, who is paying for his training to become a radiologist by continuing the professional petitioning he first started way back in the days of Proposition 13. "The Recall Republicans started paying seventy-five cents per name. But when the Anti-Recall Democrats started paying a buck a name, they matched it."
It's mid-Saturday morning and Piper sits on a folding chair at a small folding table placed in the middle of a busy Ocean Beach sidewalk. "The Indians pay the best," Piper continues. "They've got the money, and they're into sharing the wealth. I'm doing several petitions today. The Recall is the big one, then there's the one to dock the Governor's pay for every day he's late presenting a budget, and an environmental habitat one. There have been times I'll have up to 12 or 13 petitions going."
Piper is a master at enticing people to stop and sign a petition, usually the Recall petition. But before they've walked away from his table, most have signed all the other petitions Piper puts in front of them while rattling off key-word summaries of their critical importance. "You've got to keep people's attention, keep them signing. I mean, their wrists start to hurt, the kids are crying, the dog is starting to take a dump, but you just keep talking, keep them signing."
Yet Piper is not indiscriminate in the petitions he pushes. "I'm doing the Recall petition because it's important to me. Some other petitioners are doing the Recall, plus the Democrats' Anti-Recall petition. Sure, that's legal, but I don't support it."
Why would a "centrist Libertarian" and Republican-leaning petitioner come to Ocean Beach, a community proud of its reputation for vociferous liberalism? "You've got to go where the heat is," Piper smiles. "Right now, the Recall effort is the big fight. Everybody is into it."
| Not every petitioner is an engaging extrovert, both articulate and expert in every issue. Outside the Trader Joe's store in Hillcrest, a woman in late-middle age, with frizzy dark hair and oversized plastic glasses sits behind the regulation issue small folding table of the petitioner, a simple hand-lettered sign urging people to slash the Governor's salary. No one is by her table. I begin to introduce myself and she interrupts, "Are you going to sign my petition?" I explain that I'd like to interview her, to ask some questions about her work. "What kind of questions? I'm very busy." There is no one at or near her table, but I move to the side, and kneel near her chair. I ask if she is doing the Recall petition. "I don't do that one." She begins angrily moving the papers and pens around her small table. She says, "I'm very busy." As I leave, I glance back. The woman is still shuffling her papers and repositioning her pens. No one is stopping at her small table. | Business is brisk: people crowd Piper's small table, spilling into the street, asking questions, eager to sign, and more than just sign: they are eager to vent their anger over a fiscal mismanagement of heroic proportions that most seem to give Gov. Davis full blame for creating. Lucinda White and her husband have just signed the Recall petition. "We will always stop and sign a petition when it's something we believe in," White says. "We sign our convictions."
Amberly Culley, 28, an Ocean Beach resident, is angry. Even when asked if the Recall Elections, which would cost an estimated 25 million dollars, are worth it, she says, "It's costing us way more to keep him in office than to get him out. So let's get him the hell out."
In late June, the Recall petitioning effort was going so well, Issa, that very wealthy Congressman from Vista who wants to be Governor, selflessly donated another 200,000 of his American dollars to the campaign. In early July a Los Angeles Times poll placed Gov. Davis's approval rating as low as 22%, and shortly after, the Recall effort declared it had succeeded in gathering more than enough signatures to continue its push to hold a special recall election. But first, the signatures have to be declared valid by county election officials and certified by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley.
Piper isn't worried about the validity of the signatures. "There are only four or five companies that do this, " he explains, also mentioning that he routinely works for all of them. "And they've got to have a solid reputation, or they'll be out of business overnight." Piper explains that after he submits his gathered signatures to his employers, they use the first three letters of each last name, and the first three letters of the corresponding street address, and search a state-wide database for a match. If this check shows that Piper's signatures are 75% or more valid, he is paid for 100% of the signatures he has gathered. When these petitions are turned over to the government, a separate process to validate the signatures, and the only process that counts, legally, is started. "Maybe once in a while some new petitioner will be caught with bogus signatures, but it just doesn't happen much. And it's illegal for someone to sign the same petition multiple times. They can be prosecuted. It's not difficult to find the duplicate names."
Even while managing the many signers swarming his table, shuffling petition after petition under pen after pen, Piper, a true multi-tasking maestro, chats with a local skateboarder. He talks about Psychedelic Illuminations, a magazine Piper published throughout the 1990s. The skateboarder is so awed at the mention of Dr. Timothy Leary, the patron saint of LSD dabblers, that Piper leaves his table, dashes to his white van parked nearby, and returns with a copy of the slick, 100-page magazine, without losing one signer. He has the skateboarder open the magazine to page four. And there, is a photo of Piper, but with a mustache and hair down to his shoulders, with his arm around the stooped shoulders of a bald, aged Dr. Leary. "I'm working to publish the magazine again, but on a website," Piper tells the awestruck skateboarder.
Other professional petitioners tell how their unusual work helps support an alternative life-style. Roberts, who petitions locally but also travels in a fully supplied and outfitted van to petition around the country for large, non-profit clients, tells how the flexible schedule allowed him to spend time with his mother in the last few years of her life. "What other job lets you do that? People don't have that choice. They would get fired if they spent time with their dying parents."
Roberts also tells of another aspect of professional petitioning that he enjoys, "I meet a lot of women. In fact, when I was working on the Nativo Lopez recall, I met Sharon, and she's going to marry me."
The successful effort to recall Nativo Lopez, a Santa Ana school board member who advocated teaching Latino students in Spanish, not English, is one of Roberts's favorite battle stories. "It was a big fight. And it was rare to get the Latino community to stand up and reject one of its very own. But they did. And I was a part of that."
There is sincere pride, but also more than a little playful egotism, in his voice as Roberts says, "And now I'm going to unseat the Governor of California." |
