GREEN CANDIDATE HAS SOME CLOUT

Ex-congressman could siphon Davis votes

UKIAH -- ``Am I for or against ferrets?'' Dan Hamburg pondered. Sitting in
a campaign headquarters decorated with cut-outs of fish and trees, the
Green Party's first-ever candidate for governor of California is answering
his e-mail.

The ex-congressman from Mendocino County, who rode Bill Clinton's coattails
to Washington in 1992 only to ditch the Democratic Party two years ago,
didn't need to think twice to answer the next e-mail. He is against
tobacco, ``the most insidious drug in the world,'' but for decriminalizing
marijuana, because ``when you smoke marijuana, it's just a tiny, tiny
little bit.''

Anti-establishment and proud of it, Hamburg has the highest profile of the
five minority-party candidates challenging Republican Dan Lungren and
Democrat Gray Davis. When those third-party candidates meet tonight in
Orange County for their only debate, Hamburg will be the one in jeans and a
work shirt sporting a short pony tail. Scheduled to join him are Harold
Bloomfield of the Natural Law Party, Peace and
Freedom candidate Gloria La Riva, American Independent Nathan E. Johnson
and Libertarian Steve Kubby.

The one-term U.S. representative is the only one of the five with a shot,
albeit a distant one, at altering the outcome of the tightening race
between the two major-party candidates. His notoriety as a liberal
ex-congressman with charisma is adding yet another strange undercurrent in
an election year filled with the unpredictable.

Hamburg is unabashedly basking in this limelight. He is traveling in his
1986 Toyota to barrios, Superfund sites, college political science classes
and Indian reservations to spread a vintage 1960s message of curing social
injustice, ending rampant consumerism and saving the planet from ourselves.

It's a message he's honed living much of the past 27 years in Ukiah, a
lumber town where about the only thing the loggers in steel-toed boots and
ex-hippies in tie-dye share is the sidewalk.

Tonight's forum for candidates comes after months of protest by Hamburg
over not being included in the Lungren-Davis debates. Organizers say both
Lungren and Davis were invited but did not respond.

Diversion tactic

Hamburg assails his mainstream rivals for conducting ``the old misdirection
play,'' diverting attention from serious issues.

``Get everybody hyped up on crime, get everybody hyped up on gun control,''
he told the Sacramento Press Club recently. ``And don't talk about the 7
million without health care, don't talk about the third of California
children living in poverty. Don't talk about the growing problems of
homelessness, drug addiction and various forms of social decay -- and the
straw on the camel's back -- the environment.''

Hamburg's politics, formed as a history student at Stanford in the late
'60s, start left (he's anti-death penalty and pro-affirmative action) and
veer off the charts (he's for a fossil-fuel-free society and would support
one-child per couple.)

``There's probably too many of us in the state of California already,''
said Hamburg, a father of four who grows much of his own food at his home
south of Ukiah.

His shorter-term goal, however, is to build the Green Party into a viable
alternative, modeled on the party's success in Europe, with an appeal to
environmentalists, counterculturists and liberals disenchanted with the
rightward shift of the Democratic Party. He has a long way to go.
California has 30 elected Green Party officials, including the mayors of
Davis and Albany, but accounts for just 0.65 percent of registered voters.

Whether Hamburg, who pulled 1.5 percent of the vote in June, can siphon off
enough liberal votes from Davis to allow Lungren to claim victory is
unknown. But at least some pollsters and some Democrats say his influence
can't be entirely dismissed.

Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll said he would expect Hamburg to capture a
majority of the 5 percent of the electorate who say they plan to vote for a
minority-party candidate on Nov. 3.

``People are aware of Dan Hamburg more than most third-party candidates,''
DiCamillo said. ``These voters are much more likely to be liberal, Northern
Californian and young, the voters who would have gone for Gray Davis.''

For Hamburg to be a factor, the race would have to tighten further. Last
week's Field Poll showed Davis with a six-percentage-point advantage over
Lungren, who after hearing the Green Party candidate deliver a rousing
speech this summer, led the chant, ``Go Green Go.''

It's not impossible. In two New Mexico congressional contests and a
governor's race, the Green Party candidate took enough votes from the
Democrat to swing the election to a Republican in a state where Democrats
outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 ratio. Hillary Clinton made a trip to New
Mexico to persuade Democrats not to defect Green this year.

The role of spoiler pleases the 50-year-old rebel with a new cause, who ran
his first city council race in 1975 as Dan ``Buzz'' Hamburg. (Buzz is a
family nickname given him at birth, though opponents have used it to deride
his support for the legalizing marijuana, and he has since dropped it.)

On the campaign stump, Hamburg alternates between caustic critic and
lotus-eating idealist. He's not spending much time campaigning in the Bay
Area because it ``is so Democratic it makes you want to puke.'' He
derisively calls Lungren and Davis ``tweedledee'' and ``tweedledum.'' He
said he was hoodwinked into thinking Clinton ``was our guy because he was a
hippie, he was against Vietnam, he smoked dope,'' but he turned out to be
``an opportunistic, very narrow corporate-statist Democrat.''

In fact, he blames Clinton for the resurgence of Republicans. ``They want
to call me the spoiler? Point the finger somewhere else. It ain't my load
to carry.''

Democrats are not amused. ``Dan's been partying way too hard if he thinks
there is a similarity between Dan Lungren and Gray Davis,'' said Davis
spokesman Michael Bustamante. ``Dan Hamburg's qualifications are he has a
pony tail and is a one-time congressman who was booted out of his
district.''

Worrying about split vote

The state's mainstream environmental groups are begging their members to
stick with Davis. The Sierra Club contends Green stands for Get Republicans
Elected Every November. Hamburg says liberal congressional leaders have
tried to contact him about dropping out, but he's refused to talk to them.
Thumbing his nose at Democrats has cost him friends and supporters, some of
whom say Hamburg is still looking for someone to blame after the bitter
loss of his House seat to Republican Frank Riggs in 1994.

``He's acting like a spoiled child,'' said Rachel Binah, a former Hamburg
friend from Mendocino and member of the Democratic state central committee.
``He's having a hissy fit.''

Responded Hamburg, ``Am I angry and resentful about the Democratic Party?
To some degree. Is that why I became a Green? I don't think so. I think my
current politics really are more coming back to the politics that have sort
of been at my core my whole life.''

Raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in St. Louis, Hamburg's
parents sent him to Stanford expecting him to become a lawyer. Hamburg,
influenced at a young age by a widowed aunt who packed him up in her white
Roadmaster to see ``what the world really looked like'' and a black live-in
maid who ``did most of the mothering in my life,'' had other ideas.

Off to Ukiah

When ``the revolution we were all expecting never came,'' he and several
Stanford friends headed to Ukiah to start an alternative school heavily
geared to the environment. There, he won election to the Mendocino County
Board of Supervisors in 1980 and, after a stint living in China, returned
home to beat the then-incumbent Riggs in 1992.

On his arrival in Washington, the outspoken liberal in jeans and bolo tie
appeared regularly on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Hamburg, whose GQ-looks
earned him the nickname Hunk of the Hill, was named by People magazine as
among the ``50 most beautiful people in the galaxy.'' But the Mendocino
politician was quickly disillusioned not only by Clinton, but by a world
that revolved around campaign contributions or ``corporate bribes'' as he
likes to call them.

At a Dick Gephardt fundraiser, ``I remember walking around the room looking
at name tags,'' he recalled. ``It was every pharmaceutical company, every
agribusiness, every financial institution. I thought, is this a Gephardt
fundraiser or a Gingrich fundraiser.''

Clinton's signature on the welfare reform law in 1996 was the last
disappointment Hamburg could stand, and he registered Green. About a year
ago he decided to run for governor and tried recruiting a slate of
statewide candidates. He found only a lieutenant governor candidate, Sara
Amir, an Iranian-born environmental scientist.

Sitting in the back of Ukiah's Cheesecake Mama bakery, which doubles as
campaign headquarters, Hamburg said he didn't intend to become an angry
man.

But, ``I do feel angry -- I feel angry at a system that doesn't allow the
Greens to be heard,'' he added. ``I'm trying to give people some reason to
hope. Cynicism and disillusionment, those kinds of feeling that seem so
pronounced in the electorate are death to a democratic society.''

1997 - 1998 Mercury Center.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson