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What's So Funny about the Campaign Trail?

October 1, 1996   Mimi Hall is looking for humor. She wants funny stories from the third-party campaign trail. She has already spoken to the Libertarians and the Greens and hasn't gotten much to work with. Now she has John Hagelin and myself racking our memories for something humorous and newsworthy on this Saturday afternoon, as we sit on stools in an almost empty newsroom at USA-Today's national office in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

Mimi Hall covers politics for USA-Today, and she is doing a feature story on third-party presidential candidates.

The fact is, Hagelin tells her, it's really not that funny on the campaign trail. You do wait long hours in airports to take bargain-basement flights (now that's a riot), and you do stay in the homes of supporters rather than in hotels as often as possible to save on expenses (awkward? sometimes; funny? not really).

It may not be particularly funny, but during the final weeks of the 1996 campaign it was a blast. I had three cellular phones ringing nonstop; I was scheduling interviews for John Hagelin and Mike Tompkins around the clock. There was interest, interest, interest everywhere. Hagelin claims to this day that if the same media attention that the Natural Law Party rode for the last month of the 1996 campaign (a drop in the bucket compared to the Republicans and Democrats), could have been sustained for another month, Natural Law Party candidates would have received 10 million votes, not two-and-a-half million.

Mimi Hall is waiting patiently for her funny anecdote, and John Hagelin doesn't want to disappoint, so he confides a true story. During his acceptance speech at the national nominating convention, broadcast live via C-SPAN, Hagelin knocked over a tall glass of ice-water on the podium shelf. The water submerged his notes and poured off the lip of the podium, soaking his suit coat. Hagelin vowed to himself to speak for as long as it took for his suit to dry. And he did. He went 70 minutes-25 minutes over his scheduled time, adding details that didn't appear anywhere in the original draft. When he walked off the stage, dry as if he just came from the cleaners, no one was the wiser. After telling this story to Hall, Hagelin rethought the wisdom of it and asked her to keep it off the record. She agreed. But now time has healed all, and the story can be told. And I'm afraid that's about as funny as it gets.

January 14, 1998   Traveling the country now in a "party-building" mode is entirely different from traveling when the election is four weeks away. The buzz is off. On the other hand, you get a chance to really talk to people. And that's what John Hagelin, Mike Tompkins, and Kingsley Brooks are doing as the early months of 1998 roll by. In two days they go to California for a series of intimate livingroom meetings. This is how the party is built. I decide to go with them. There are two people I have been eager to meet with-Harold Bloomfield, M.D., and Rashi Glaser, Ph.D. They represent the cutting edge of key Natural Law Party policies.

I grew up in California and, though I moved away 20 years ago, whenever I come back the state amazes me. There are health food stores the size of huge Safeway supermarkets, both the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle wrote major editorials calling for the banning of genetically engineered ingredients from organic foods, and billboards advertisements offer consumers "green energy" to fuel their homes. In California, you can choose the energy company you want just as you choose a long distance phone service. For a few dollars more each month you can have an energy package to run your appliances that includes renewable energy, such as wind or solar. The rest of the country seems to be catching on. I recently saw a news story on how the Ford Motor Co. is moving 250 of its top executives from Dearborn, Michigan, to Irvine, in southern California, to live and work. Ford wants its most creative minds to absorb the state's "style of thinking" and put it into their design plans for cars in the next century.

California is a nation unto itself. One in nine Americans live in the state. California also boasts the fifth largest economy in the world. When the Natural Law Party qualified for the 1996 ballot in October 1995, the news received national and international publicity. Today, the Party is the fourth largest active party in the state, after the Democrats and Republicans-and just behind the Reform Party. In one city, Compton, located just outside of Los Angeles, the Natural Law Party is even larger than the Republican Party.

I'm heading out the door. It's 40 degrees and pouring rain here in Washington, D.C. The Weather Channel says it's sunny and 70 in San Diego. This is the kind of campaigning I like.