A Man of the ‘60s for the 21st Century

He’s a financier who wants to become governor, thinks Californians are overtaxed and says he is disgusted that Gray Davis failed to follow basic business principles during the energy crisis.

The candidate is not Republican Bill Simon Jr., but the Green Party’s nominee for governor, Peter Miguel Camejo. He is probably the only person on the ballot in November who has sailed in the Olympics, been expelled from Berkeley, run for president as a Socialist and founded his own money management firm.

Camejo, 62, travels in a 10-year-old Infiniti convertible plastered with “Ralph Nader for President” bumper stickers, touting his new book on socially responsible investing (with introductions written by both Nader and a former Reagan administration official) and taking potshots at the political establishment.

On an Oracle official’s handing a $25,000 campaign contribution to Davis’ director of e-government in a bar: “If he’s going to engage in corruption, he should at least do it right. It should be in unmarked bills.”

On the prevalence of religion in politics: “If it was really true that people turn over in their graves, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would be sources of perpetual energy.”

Camejo says he is under no illusions that he will become California’s next governor--”my wife would kill me”--but relishes the threat his candidacy could pose to Davis by peeling off liberal voters. And he says he is unconcerned about the possibility that, if the race tightens, he could tip the election to the conservative underdog Simon, far further from Camejo ideologically than Davis.

“You can’t solve problems gradually and peacefully,” Camejo said. “You have to make it an explosion.”

Democrats say they’re not worried. “Since most voters don’t take them seriously, we don’t,” state party strategist Bob Mulholland said of the Greens. He noted that after 10 years as an official party, Greens compose a little less than 1% of California’s registered voters. “There’s no more solid evidence of their inability to get any base in the state of California.”

The 146,251 registered California Greens lag far behind the state’s 5.3 million registered Republicans and 6.8 million Democrats. The Greens racked up nearly 40,000 new California members in 2000 during Nader’s presidential run but barely added any voters in the last year, according to state statistics.

In most California elections, 4% to 5% of the voters abandon the two major parties to back other candidates, but no single party has been able to consolidate that wayward segment of the electorate. Nader pulled 3.8% of California voters during the 2000 presidential election, but analysts attribute that relatively robust showing partly to his celebrity.

That means that the only effect Camejo is likely to have on the governor’s race is to take votes from Davis in a tight contest, a scenario that clearly pleases the Simon campaign. The other third-party candidates--on the American Independent, Libertarian and Natural Law tickets--can also only hope to peel a relatively few votes from the two main parties.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, said it’s too early to tell whether Camejo will be a spoiler. “There will be leftists who will take a look at the Greens,” Cain said. “It would certainly be a help to the Democrats if the guy was a total kook.”

Business and Leftist Politics

After 45 minutes of speaking to six UC Santa Cruz students recently about the need to legalize gay marriage, ban the death penalty, implement a $10.50 statewide minimum wage and save California’s remaining old-growth forests, Camejo scrunched into a supporter’s hybrid gas-electric car and grabbed his cellular phone.

“Tell me what happened at the close?” he asked after exchanging pleasantries with the caller, a hedge fund manager. “What are the futures doing now? Did they continue down at the close?”

The Camejo campaign is full of such intersections of 21st century capitalism and 1960s radicalism. He laces his talks with standard leftist applause lines--condemning U.S. aggression during the war on terrorism, or talking about how corporations need to be reined in.

But moments later, he gleefully rattles off terms like “Triple-A Muni at 10%” while excitedly talking about a new business venture to structure loans to help homeowners install solar energy. He argues that California’s taxes are too high and that money is wasted on giveaways to both corporations and public sector unions.

On the stump, Camejo takes on the demeanor of an irascible college lecturer who has always harbored dreams of becoming a stand-up comic. In a jacket and slacks with a crown of wiry hair, he skips from one point to another, hands bouncing, frequently interrupting himself to make some acidic wisecrack or fulminate about the world’s injustices.

One staple is for him to brandish a paper graph of the price of natural gas in California over the last several years. During a renewable-energy forum at a library outside Santa Cruz, Camejo traced the prices as he asked when Davis chose to ink $43 billion in energy contracts.

“Here?” His finger moved up the curve. “Here? No, here!” He pointed at the peak. “I can see any time now, they’ll announce the worst trade in the history of humanity,” Camejo fumed. “This is three standard deviations off a trend line!”

Camejo’s blend of business sense and left-wing politics brings him full circle. He was born in New York to one of Venezuela’s wealthiest families; his father, Daniel Camejo, is a prosperous resort developer.

It was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he enrolled in 1958, that Peter Camejo caught the activism bug. He dropped out to march for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. and, later, to organize against the Vietnam War. A staunch anticommunist, Daniel Camejo looked askance at his son’s politics, but the two remained close; they sailed together in the 1960 Olympics for Venezuela.

Like many radicals during the 1960s, Peter Camejo found his way to Berkeley. His role in campus activism there led then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to brand him “one of the most dangerous men in America.” In the fall of 1967, as he ran on an activist slate for a position in student government, police arrested Camejo the night before the election, apparently for speaking at an unauthorized rally. He was not charged with a crime, he recalled, but was expelled after winning the election.

Though he recalls that he remained “pretty square” in personal demeanor--close-cropped hair, no drugs--Camejo remained something of a perpetual activism machine for the next decade. He traveled throughout Latin America trying to free political prisoners. He was deported from Mexico while trying to liberate his activist brother, who was at the time imprisoned in Mexico City. Back in the United States, Camejo in 1976 ran for president on the Socialist ticket. “We got on the ballot in 18 states,” he recalled proudly, and he won 91,314 votes.

Throughout the decade, Daniel Camejo recalled fretting about his son’s future. “It was an honor to have a son doing what he was doing,” said the elder Camejo. But, he added, “we tried to induce him to do something for himself.”

As the rollicking ‘70s moved into the more staid ‘80s, the younger Camejo came to a realization: He was unemployed and broke, and did not even have a college degree. He applied for a job with the post office in California.

A friend warned that postal work would aggravate Camejo’s bad back. “Go work in one of the brokerage houses,” the friend advised. “They like people who talk real fast.”

Camejo landed at Merrill Lynch and began working as a broker. But he did not lose his political edge. In 1987, when the firm rejected his proposal to create an individual retirement account that gave money to AIDS groups, Camejo could not compromise. He formed Progressive Asset Management, a company in the Bay Area city of Concord that steers clients’ money into companies that follow certain social criteria--declining to use sweatshop labor, sell firearms and so on.

Throughout his business years, Camejo has kept a toe in leftist politics. He was one of the original U.S. Green Party members when the party registered in 1991. He became a trustee of Contra Costa County’s pension fund and led a movement to have it push the companies it invests in to act progressively.

In 1998, the California Green Party began to cast about for candidates for statewide office. Former Rep. Dan Hamburg agreed to run for governor, and Camejo was poised to put his name on the ticket for a lower office. But Camejo pulled out at the last minute to fend off a Wall Street firm’s raid on his brokerage.

This year there is nothing holding him back. Next month he will step down from his position on the Contra Costa County pension board to free himself up to spend more time campaigning.

Campaign Has Small War Chest

The campaign has raised about $20,000 in contributions, usually netted in small increments at fund-raisers like one held at a brew pub near UC Davis during the Whole Earth festival. (The campaign saves money by having the candidate--who said he made $306,000 last year and is worth “under $2 million”--pay his own travel expenses.) In contrast, Davis has more than $30 million in the bank and Simon more than $5 million to communicate with voters via television, radio and mailings.

Devoting so much time to such an impractical pursuit amuses some of Camejo’s friends, like business colleague Joe Sturdivant. “To be honest, that is a puzzle,” said Sturdivant, a self-described conservative who has been friends with Camejo for 15 years. “He’s fit into the capitalistic system quite well, but he still cares about some of the social issues.”

The effort makes sense to the candidate. He says he sees it as a chance to bring more Latinos and other ethnic minorities to the Green Party and publicize proposed voting reforms that would allow a run-off should one candidate fail to get the majority of votes--a method that he argues would break the two major parties’ grip on the electorate.

Camejo says he has changed since he ran for president. “I’ve re-evaluated my views about how to achieve things,” he said over a late lunch at the Cheesecake Factory in Marina del Rey. “There’s less nuttiness.”

Later that day, Camejo braved a traffic-choked, 21/2-hour drive to North Hills to speak to about 35 people at a progressive church. To pass the time until the main speaker arrived, various members of the crowd took turns addressing the graying audience on the threats of corporations selling water and the merits of complex, European-style voting systems.

Camejo gave his standard hourlong talk, taking swipes at Sen. Barbara Boxer and U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland)--the only member of Congress to vote against a motion giving President Bush leeway to retaliate for Sept.11--for saying positive things about the president’s war on terror. After the gathering disbanded, Terrie Brady approached Camejo and softly said that she thought it was counterproductive to attack Boxer, one of the nation’s most liberal senators.

Camejo launched into a rapid-fire debate with Brady, tossing out the names of Bay Area politicians he believed had betrayed their beliefs. “I don’t know the situation,” Brady protested.

“Well,” Camejo replied in a steely tone, “I’m trying to tell you something.... If you enter politics, you can choose to tell the truth, or you can lie.”

There was a long silence, then Brady and Camejo parted.