You might not recognize him if it wasn’t for what he was saying.
There is a bit more skin beneath his eyes and chin and a middling paunch around his waist. Gray is waging a successful guerrilla insurgency in his hair.
But there is something very familiar in what he has to say.
“This reform is about the reform of our entire party,” he says, sipping fruit juice and munching carrot sticks as he talks to guests at a small house party. “That is hard for people to hear, but it is true.”
Lambasting special interests, political power brokers, wheeler-dealer lobbyists, and Democrats who espouse Republican-style economics, he sticks to a radical theme.
“You can’t talk about the great issues like the environment and the economy unless you talk about how great power works.”
Three decades after he demonstrated with civil rights protestors in the South and 26 years after he helped lead a counterculture revolt against the Vietnam War in the streets of Chicago, Tom Hayden-state Sen. Tom Hayden-is running steeply uphill in a race for governor of California.
Few people, including Hayden himself, think he has a chance of becoming chief executive of a state with a $56 billion budget and a workforce of 286,500 state employees.
The latest polls show him getting from 8 to 10 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, where he faces state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, heir to the California family political dynasty, and state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi.
But Hayden, 54, doesn’t appear to be fazed by the prospect of defeat. Rather he seems to have brought a stock of well-preserved 1960s radicalism to a broader fight for political reform as the millennium approaches.
“There is an urgency about the times in which we live,” he said in February, when he publicly warned Brown and Garamendi that he would run against them if they didn’t focus on the issues he felt were important. “We have become dangerously lost, I think, in the values of Babylon.”
At house parties like the one in this comfortable middle-class neighborhood and at small gatherings like the one he rushed to afterward at a local public library, Hayden sounds a call with a spiritual resonance.
“I’m not talking about religious with a capital R,” he said sitting atop a folding table in the library. “What I’m talking about is finding that spirit inside that makes us stand up for what is right.”
Hayden’s message may sound like New Age spoutings to a generation too young to remember the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the Chicago Seven, but the themes he sounds now are similar to those he raised decades ago.
Hayden and his 1990s radicalism seem to have been tempered by a heavy dose of pragmatism bred during more than a decade spent battling inside the system as a member of the California Legislature.
After a middle-class youth spent in Royal Oak, Mich., in the 1940s and ’50s, a radicalizing time at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s, the civil rights protests of the early 1960s and the anti-war movement of the last half of that decade, Hayden first came to California politics with a bang in 1976.
That year he challenged incumbent John Tunney for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Then married to actress and activist Jane Fonda, Hayden poured an estimated $750,000 into the Democratic primary race, but lost. Tunney went on to defeat that November.
Six years later Hayden was back, this time winning a race for the state Assembly where the classic outsider fought through the following decade to gain acceptance from an entrenched Establishment.
Against the tide
“This is the Rodney Dangerfield of California politics,” wrote Joseph Farah, editor of a political newsletter called Inside California.
Hayden did win a degree of respect from some of his originally dubious legislative colleagues and worked his way up the seniority system to become chairman of the Higher Education Committee.
Sen. Ralph Dills, who was first elected to the Legislature the year before Hayden was born, credited him with keeping the old guard “on our toes.”
Part of Hayden’s reputation was built on the strong challenges he mounted against political nominees submitted to the Senate by G.O.P. Gov. Pete Wilson, turning what had been rubber-stamp hearings into political debates.
He also challenged previously appointed members of the Wilson administration, leading a successful drive for the removal of Sharon Sharp as director of the California lottery. Sharp, former head of the Illinois State Lottery, had awarded a $400 million, no-bid contract to a firm called GTECH under the influence of Sacramento lobbyist Clayton Jackson. Jackson was later convicted on unrelated political-corruption charges and sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.
Hayden’s anti-Establishment image and refusal to play politics as usual in Sacramento has had a profound impact on his effectiveness as a lawmaker.
During more than a decade in the Assembly and the Senate, Hayden has sponsored 26 major pieces of legislation, dealing mainly with the environment, campaign-funding limitations and political reform. Of those 26 bills, 24 have either been defeated, died in committee or are still being debated.
Of the two Hayden bills that have been signed into law, one requires the alternate member of the Los Angeles County Transportation Authority to make campaign-financing and other political disclosures; the other requires that University of California regents’ meetings dealing with salaries and benefits be open to the public.
“He is not a get-along, go-along kind of legislator,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a California political commentator. “Nobody is going to give him anything up there,” she said of the Statehouse.
In 1991, Hayden’s Assembly mates voted for a redistricting proposal that eliminated his seat. The next year he ran for the Senate and, using an estimated $700,000 of the money he got from Fonda in their divorce settlement, won.
An assist from the FBI
He now represents 800,000 people in a district that stretches from the coastal town of Santa Monica east into the San Fernando Valley.
The focus of much of Hayden’s present anger and the rallying cry of his gubernatorial campaign is what he views as the cozy-and sometimes illegal-relationship between lawmakers and power brokers in Sacramento.
Hayden officially announced his candidacy March 10 outside a well-known cafe a few blocks from the Capitol where a senior legislator was videotaped taking a bribe in an FBI sting operation.
For more than a decade, the FBI has been carrying out an investigation-sometimes using such stings-of the California Statehouse and the workings of lobbyists and legislators. So far 13 lawmakers have been convicted or are awaiting trial in connection with the FBI probe.
In a frequently repeated campaign theme, Hayden recently lectured a gathering of supporters on the high-level workings of the state capital.
“Every night in Sacramento there is a fundraiser where the lobbyists come; they drink wine, they nosh on a gourmet hot dog; they give a check to a politician; they go home,” Hayden intoned.
“The next morning they go to a hearing, and at the hearing they ask the same politician to vote their way.”
In part as protest against campaign-financing practices, Hayden has run a low-budget campaign, shunning all contributions over $94. This, however, has sharply limited the amount of money available for such campaign necessities as radio and TV ads.
The lack of money also has led to much that is makeshift about the Hayden campaign. On the night before he announced his candidacy, his staff scrambled for office space, rented computers and even wound up standing in line at a copy shop at 11 p.m. while they photocopied a 20-foot-long “Hayden for Governor” banner for the next day’s press conference.
Hayden’s team also came up with a low-cost documentary-style campaign ad that has aired on public-access TV stations. The 13-minute video, shot in black and white using a hand-held camera, was produced by a crew that previously specialized in making rock videos.
It opens with Hayden on the steps of the Capitol and quickly cuts to earthquake damaged parts of Los Angeles where the candidate condemns state transportation officials for spending more on expanding and landscaping freeways than on making existing roads earthquake safe.
He pops up later in front of a Santa Monica hospital that had to close because of the massive damage done by the January quake, noting that state regulations did not require that the building be upgraded to meet new seismic standards.
“The lobbyists for the hospitals say that it would cost too much money to bring them up to seismic safety standards,” Hayden pronounces. “When I ask them at least could patients and their families know that the hospitals are not built up to seismic safety codes, they say that would make them hysterical.
“I don’t know about hysteria, but it makes me very angry,” Hayden says.
Hayden’s radical roots have played both ways in his campaign.
A leaflet produced to lay out the candidate’s stand on the issues highlights a 1961 news service photograph of Hayden being punched in the side of the head during a civil rights demonstration in Mississippi. It also talks of him spending his 21st birthday in jail because of his protest activity in the South.
`I wanted to believe’
But others portray Hayden’s past differently.
During a May campaign appearance at the University of California at Irvine, Hayden was heckled by a small group of students belonging to the conservative Young Americans for Freedom.
As Hayden condemned recent cuts in the state university system’s budget that have forced up student fees, the group shouted, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ron Unz is gonna win.”
Ron Unz, a 32-year-old computer entrepreneur and conservative Republican, is challenging Wilson for the party’s gubernatorial nomination.
When the students later demanded that Hayden explain a comment he made after a trip to North Vietnam in the early 1970s that American prisoners of war were not being tortured, Hayden said he had made a mistake.
“I wasn’t tricked,” he said. “I said what I wanted to believe.”
After all these years, all the campaigns and all the criticism there is still a quixotic air about Hayden charging with his lance against the political windmills of California’s Establishment.
At the Pasadena house party, Hayden offered a wry smile and an ambiguous response to the two dozen well-wishers who thanked him for his anti-Establishment campaign.
“They (political analysts) say, `Hey, go ahead and run up and down the state, exhaust yourself, you’re meaningless.’
“But this is the basis of the Democratic Party,” he said of the grass-roots gathering. “I just don’t know if we are all an endangered species, or if we are on the brink of renewal.”
During three recent debates among the Democratic candidates for governor, Hayden forced his opponents to discuss matters they seemed anxious to avoid, including the state’s growing budget deficit, campaign financing, and ecological and immigration issues.
Brown and Garamendi, both wealthy members of the party’s Establishment, differ little on the major campaign issues that have centered on California’s weakened economy and ways to attract jobs to replace those being lost in the aerospace and defense industries.
Hayden also used the debates as a platform to charge that Brown and Garamendi were beholden to powerful businessmen and financiers in the state and had lost touch with their party’s traditions.
Said Jeffe: “It is an amazing time when Tom Hayden emerges as the legitimate defender of the Democratic Party’s basic principals.”
