Charlie is going to have to start his campaign by learning to spell Michael. : Charlie Takes a Chance

If the name Charlie Thomas sounds familiar, you are probably one of the 2,614 people who voted for him in the state Senate race seven years ago.

The way Charlie tells it, he got 3% of the vote simply by riding the bus to work and stopping at coffee shops to talk to people. He’s doing the same this year.

Charlie wants to knock off God’s best friend on the Board of Supervisors and slice the county into 22 pieces.

I came to know the Coffee Shop Candidate through a mailer he sent out announcing his intention to run against Supervisor Micheal (sic) Antonovich in the 1988 election.

Sic, by the way, is Latin for that’s the way Charlie wrote it, and is not meant to define the mental stability of the 5th District’s current occupant.

Nevertheless, Charlie is going to have to start his campaign by learning to spell Michael. Not that spelling is necessarily a prerequisite for public office in Los Angeles, but it might be time to upgrade our standards.

Charlie is 48 and works as a $14,000-a-year clerk for the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. He describes himself as a Libertarian-Populist- Communitarian, which is as good as anything I suppose.

He spent a total of $30 running for state Senate in 1980, not counting the filing fee which was paid by the Libertarian Party.

When I asked lightly if the $30 was donated, Charlie replied quite seriously that he does not believe in asking people for money.

“I went to a political rally once, and there was a guy asking for money who spent more for his suit than I spend for food,” Charlie said. “I find that repugnant.”

We were sitting in the living room of his tiny rented house on a dark side street in North Hollywood.

I had one hell of a time finding the place because the street is chopped up into eight different sections within a 15-block area, requiring the same kinds of instinct and patience a rat must posses in order to escape from a maze.

It was worth the trip, however. Isabel, who is Charlie’s wife and is allowing him to run for office only because she is certain he is going to lose, broke out a pint of J & B Scotch and a plastic gallon bottle of water.

“Help yourself,” she said, then left to do something with their large dog, Thor, who was barking at me from another room.

Normally, I don’t drink during interviews, but this was, after all, a political interview. It’s OK to drink while covering politics. In fact, it’s almost a necessity.

I spent years off and on following candidates around the country and discovered after a while that they made considerably more sense after the cocktail hour than they did before the cocktail hour.

Charlie plans to spend maybe a little more than $30 on his campaign this time because the cost of stamps and envelopes has increased. But he is still going to confine his efforts to people he meets on buses (Charlie doesn’t own a car) and in coffee shops.

He is going to try to convince them that Los Angeles is too big and ought to be broken up into 22 sections, with county seats in places like Burbank and Chatsworth.

“I’ll tell them,” Charlie said, “that smaller counties will create more of a sense of community and maybe we can get back where we ought to be.”

He paused to light a cigarette, then added: “If that doesn’t work, I’ll say a vote for me will help beat a Republican, and that usually does it. That’s how I got 3% the last time I ran.”

Charlie doesn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of beating Antonovich, and he knows it. He just wants to get his message out.

“But suppose you win?” I said.

He looked at me as though I had just asked if he had ever committed adultery, which is a question political reporters are required to pose under guidelines established earlier this year.

“If I win?” Charlie said, puzzled. “I’m not going to win. But if I should, it would take two months to recover from the heart attack. Then I’d start trying to chop up the county into 22 different sections.”

A satirist feeds on guys like Charlie Thomas.

What we have here is a seventh-grade dropout who has worked all of his life at menial jobs, who will not get a fraction of the money Antonovich collects from just one of his contractor buddies, and who sends out a first mailer that misspells his opponent’s name.

Handing Charlie over to someone like me is putting a pot roast before a starving man.

But, as I thought about it, I came to admire the guy for doing something about his beliefs other than shouting epithets at the 6 o’clock news.

Charlie is taking a chance.

He’s going to be out there buttonholing people who are going to think he is some kind of nut or who don’t want to hear what he’s trying to say or who move away from him on buses or ignore him in coffee shops.

But at least he has the courage to dare, and by that measure the man sets a standard we all might reflect upon.

So pass the J & B, Isabel, and hold the water. This one’s for you, Charlie.