Robert Scheer

"Whaddya mean, 'What does a peace campaign prove'?" the bearded little man flashed at me, as we turned into the Window Shop. Without any sign of irritation he calmly put me down: "You shouldn't think that a peace campaign has to be some grand gesture, girl. Maybe that's the way Thomas Boylston Adams operated his campaign but, in California, we're different."

Robert Scheer, who looks like a fat cat New York hippie in his three-piece suits and polished Italian boots, won 45 percent of the vote in California's seventh district in the June primary election. Since then, he has been quizzed about how it happened, and urged to run for the U.S. Senate or at least the Berkeley City Council; he has also become an ornament for the New Left.

Scheer spent the pre-election weekend in Cambridge, and was wined, dined, and shown off by Harvard's own eager, aspiring radicals. He confronted -- somewhat unwillingly -- audiences of skeptical, composed undergraduates, and convinced many that the "New Politics" should be taken seriously.

Scheer wasn't especially committed to converting Easterners. He broke appointments, miffed Kennedy Institute fellows and Mass. PAX members, and seemed most intent on finding some "decent food" so he could finish his restaurants column for Ramparts. And, in the end, he skipped out on several engagements, pronounced Harvard students "too cool" and Harvard "boring," and went drinking with a pal from Ramparts.

Speaking before an audience, Scheer is not as obscene, off-hand, or ungrammatical as he is with two or three people; he considers even hostile questions for a long time and insists on giving complete answers. He is almost earnest, in fact, about what radicals can do in politics, and seems genuinely to care about "participatory democracy."

"My campaign had a lot of pizazz, a lot of sex," he explained. "I tried to turn people on, to show them that politics wasn't boring, or useless, or distant. We used every device known to Tammany Hall: we raffled off turkeys and transistor radios, held bingo games, and even hired go-go girls to wake people up."

Scheer's open appeal to Negroes and lower class whites probably alienated many Berkeley faculty members. "The Cal people didn't like me finding lawyers for Oakland winos and providing community services, like the old Tammany Hall," he says. "They said they couldn't vote for me because 'undesirables' were taking over my campaign. I figured my campaign wasn't enough of a glorious symbol for them."

Having the university in his district was no advantage, Scheer insists, "although everyone always assumes I did well because I had the faculty and all these fervent student leftists behind me." Actually one political scientist from Cal worked for him; the others, he says, were friends of Jeffrey Cohelan, the incumbent Democrat. Even the student leftists, including the Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, opposed him. "They accused me of legimitizing the Democratic Party and ruining the left movement. I didn't care. But as it turned out, the 1000 kids who worked were mostly dormies and frat people."

Scheer claims his district is pretty typical of California and says what they did there can be done anyplace. "We had poor Negroes, bourgeois Negroes, fat cat whites in the hills, and the working class whites in Emoryville and Albany, outside Berkeley."

The way he got at this mixed constituency was "through the war," he insists. "I convinced voters that at least three-quarters of their taxes was spent on defense appropriations. One of our most effective slogans was 'more is spent in one half hour in Vietnam than in an entire year fighting poverty in Oakland.'"

His campaign staff, made up of students, housewives, and Negro Vietnam veterans, stressed these figures wherever they went. "Lots of people decided they weren't so hot for the war" when "we connected local issues with that distant legislation in Washington. Nobody had ever tried to do that with them before. They've always had Congressmen who stayed in Washington."

Scheer swept all the Negro communities, although none of the established Negro leaders endorsed him. "I said Watts was a good thing, you know, and the people in the black ghettoes know that. None of them give a good goddamn how Cohelan votes on civil rights laws. They know you don't get action until you make trouble."

Announcements like these won Scheer a lot of free television coverage. Suddenly cameraman -- even from William Knowland's conservative Oakland Tribune -- were following him everywhere. "Some of my Ramparts friends told me to cool the 'Black Power' stuff if I wanted to win, but I insisted there really wasn't any white backlash in the District."

Instead, it seemed to Scheer that racists -- including Oakland's White Citizens Council -- thought their taxes were going to support Negroes on welware. When these voters were convinced that only two percent of their taxes were spent on welfare programs -- that it was the war that was putting the burden on them -- "racism disappeared." "I was frank with whites," he added. "I told them they had damn good reasons to build Negro schools and start other crash programs. I told them they were going to be the victims of Negro frustration."

The San Francisco newspapers called Scheer's campaign the "Children's Crusade." He says there's some truth to that: "I had my opponent's nephew working for me." But he complains that "people shouldn't dismiss me that easily. Radicals were once considered dangerous, you know, and then for a long time, they were thought just plain ineffectual. My campaign proves that's not true. When people see the returns Tuesday -- and Brown loses -- they'll realize how important radicals can be."

Scheer predicted Brown would lose because "he decided California voters were racists and maniacs and ran his campaign that way." In doing so, Brown sacrificed the support of the radicals and the middle-class liberals of the California Democratic Council. "We were his workers, you know, and he never thought he could lose us, no matter what he did. He was convinced we wouldn't vote for Reagan, and so he moved further and further right."

What Scheer and other leftists did, of course, was decide to boycott the election. Even CDC members refused to work in the Brown campaign. "Now no Democrat will ever again take us for granted," Scheer contends. "They'll have to make concessions to us. We'll have more of a machine than the pros when Brown loses."

Scheer and the rest of the California Conference for New Politics -- part of the national movement -- want to test their theory by running a candidate for Thomas Kuchel's Senate seat in 1968. Whether the candidate will be Scheer himself or Simon Casady, the ousted CDC president, has not been determined. Scheer says he might also like another crack at Jeffrey Cohelan's House seat.

"I have this Golden Dream, you see. I want to lead 10,000 Oakland Negroes to the Capitol for a sit-in. Then I want to stand up as a member of the House of Representatives and throw a tomato at the Secretary of Defense."