Editorials

Someone called us this week to complain that the depiction of mayoral candidate Zelda Bronstein in Tuesday’s cartoon was, to put it kindly, very unflattering. The caller opined that she and two (female) friends thought that the cartoonist must be a misogynist at heart, since he always seems to draw Bronstein harshly. Well, probably that’s not the explanation. 

Bronstein (although quite attractive looking in real life) is a caricaturist’s dream. She has a head full of springy curls, glasses, a mobile, active face with a big mouth and lots of vivid facial expressions reflecting her many opinions. Her opponent Tom Bates, on the other hand, is a cartoonist’s nightmare. What hair he has left is now white and flat. His countenance is bland and regular, sometimes with a pleasant smile, often with neutral affect. A picture of Bates is apt to look just like any other old white guy, even when you draw an (uncharacteristic) scowl on his face for cartoon purposes. That’s just how it is, and the cartoonist’s attempt to show the two of them debating resulted in a recognizable if plug-ugly Bronstein and a Bates who could be AnyGuy getting grouchy. 

Another caller thought that the cartoon was trying to be a nasty dig at dumb young people. The candidates on the podium were spouting acronyms at a heavy rate—EIR, ZAB and such—and a young listener was saying that they weren’t speaking her language. That one could have been intended to cut either way—the cartoonist might also have been saying that the candidates ought to be spending their time on the big picture with more universal non-planning topics, presumably saying things like “give peace a chance,” “impeach George Bush” or “a chicken in every pot.” I don’t know what he intended, since he doesn’t clear his topics with me.  

On the other hand, both District 7 candidates, George Beier and Kriss Worthington, are gifts to cartoonists. Worthington, a very sincere fellow indeed, looks a lot like cartoon detective Dick Tracy, with his square jaw, angular head and determined expression. Beier, a self-made millionaire, is the spitting image of Daddy Warbucks, the millionaire patron of cartoondom’s Little Orphan Annie, with his round bald dome.  

And really, it’s impossible to caricature candidates better than they caricature themselves. Case in point: several volunteers in Kriss Worthington’s campaign gave the Planet copies of an invitation to a party Wednesday night staged by his opponent George Beier. It promised attendees free drinks at Larry Blake’s (“$1000 bar tab”), a ticket in a raffle of a game machine, and featured a grinning bobblehead Beier photo superimposed on a Cal football player’s tiny body. “FREE BOOZE!” “FREE FOOD!” it said. Registering to vote at the door was one way to earn your spot on the guest list. 

One of our older staffers worried that since the party was also advertised on myspace.com, a near riot was likely to ensue as thirsty students lined up for the free liquor. Another thought it was a mistake for Beier to sponsor this kind of possibly rowdy drinking party since a big feature of his resume is his service on the board of an addiction recovery charity.  

I took a look at Beier’s MySpace slide show which advertised the event, and I wasn’t even a little bit worried about a deluge of students looking for a big blast. The background music, just for starters, was the Cal band playing what seemed to be a football song of some sort. Here I must confess that never in my undergraduate career or subsequently have I attended a Cal football game. I don’t know the statistics, but I’d take almost any bet that the percentage of University of California at Berkeley students and/or alumni who care passionately about football has not gotten above 25 percent in the last 40 years. Today’s students are even more serious, if that’s possible, than they were in my Beatnik-wannabe crowd.  

Perhaps typical MySpace viewers are more likely than average to be in the school-spirit segment, but other resident voters in the district Beier hopes to represent often regard Cal games and their fans as a nuisance. And they too can look at MySpace if they want to. The Worthington campaign is busy circulating the URL to all comers: www.myspace.com/votegeorge. 

And the pictures they’ll see there! The first one shows George with his arms outstretched around three charming specimens of what used to be called “gorgeous co-ed cheerleaders.” Unwitting viewers might be tempted to think “dirty old man,” unless they knew that George is actually a happily-partnered gay guy. Another picture shows him with a toothy smile standing in front of a nice display of what used to be called “bongs” or “hash pipes.” In the olden days such implements were used to inhale controlled substances, and as such would also seem to conflict with George’s substance abuse board membership, but perhaps nowadays students use them instead for legal herbals or just for medicinal inhaling. And the title of the slideshow? “Oski is One of My Biggest Supporters!” The overall impression is that George Beier is an overgrown version of the kind of rah-rah undergraduate more sophisticated students (and there are still plenty of them in Berkeley) try hard to avoid.  

We remember that when Mayor Elihu Harris offered Oakland voters free chicken dinners he was widely criticized. We also remember the splendidly named Vanzetti Hamilton, candidate for district attorney, saying on one Michigan election night that “the other side’s offering voters five bucks a carload to vote for their guy!” What can we do about it? asked the ever-present straight man. “Well, of course, we have to pay 10!” Vanzetti said. (In case he’s still alive somewhere and reading this, he was joking, of course.) 

The Larry Blake’s party took place as scheduled on Wednesday night. (The Planet sent our youngest reporter, and she’ll have the inside story in today’s paper.) We stopped by the door of Blake’s briefly on our way to pick up a murder mystery at Moe’s. The Worthington people were bearding would-be party-goers at the door with a handout that reproduced for student enlightenment a bowdlerized version (Kriss is a very proper guy) of the late California Assembly boss Jesse Unruh’s legendary take on how to deal with lobbyists: 

“If you can't take their money, drink their booze, eat their food, screw their whores, and still look them in the eye and vote against them, you don't belong here.” 

At a glance, it looked like very few students had shown up to take that advice—there was no unruly crowd beating down the door and offering to trade votes for free booze. We were not surprised. Some students are party animals and some are political activists, but there’s not much overlap between the two groups.