Ed Clark, the 1980 Libertarian Party presidential nominee, turns 90 years old on May 4. Now that Rep. Justin Amash has thrown his hat into the ring for the 2020 nomination, I thought I’d offer some reminiscences about the earlier campaign.
In my misguided youth I was a teenage Young Democrat, a College Republican, and a young adult Libertarian Party activist, before I gave up politics for ideas and policy. In 1978, a few years out of college, I left my conservative job to become co-manager of Ed Clark’s campaign for Governor of California on the Libertarian ticket. (He was actually on the ballot as an independent because it was much easier to get ballot status that way.)
As I wrote in the Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, Clark was a corporate attorney in New York and Los Angeles. He opposed the Vietnam War while remaining a Republican, but when President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in 1971, he joined the Libertarian Party and quickly became a member of its national committee and California State Chair. As one of the most successful and articulate professionals in the fledgling party, he was persuaded to run for governor in 1978.
A political campaign with co-managers sounds like a recipe for disaster. It wasn’t, for two reasons: because libertarian impresario Ed Crane hovered over the campaign as Chairman and guiding light, and because the two managers had entirely different skills. I was the words-and-policy guy, and Bob Costello was the people-and-organization guy, and even in a two-desk office we actually managed to stay out of each other’s way.
Clark spent two months campaigning, with Bob and me scrambling to set up schedules. Mostly he stayed in the big cities of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, plus one trip through Bakersfield, Fresno, and Stockton in the Central Valley. We had enough money for radio ads. They were very policy-oriented, addressing school choice, busing, victimless crimes, the antigay Briggs Initiative, and the tax-cutting Proposition 13, which only Clark of all the gubernatorial candidates had supported enthusiastically before it passed overwhelmingly. We also got enough last-minute money to run some full-page newspaper ads and put together a half-hour interview (with then-Reason columnist Tom Hazlett) that ran in major markets. (I wrote recently on Facebook about how I also directed actor Orson Bean in a couple of Clark commercials.)
In the end Clark got 5.46 percent of the vote, which we thought was pretty good for a candidate no one had heard of before the campaign and who had minimal money. We got the most votes in populous Los Angeles and Orange counties, but Clark’s percentages in both counties were below the state average. He did best in rural Nevada County, where there was a strong local organization, and in Kern County, where the Bakersfield Californian endorsed him and then actually ran news stories about him for a week — as newspapers always do for the Republican and Democratic candidates. And even one on-the-trail feature story, which began (if I recall) “He has the charisma of John F. Kennedy and the verbal agility of Bill Buckley.” Which might just be a description that no candidate could live up to. With that minimal coverage he got almost twice his statewide average in Kern County. Good thing we made that one trip to Bakersfield, where he met with the paper’s editorial board. He also did well in the San Francisco suburbs and in the northern counties of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity — known as the “Emerald Triangle” for their widespread pot growing. Probably should have taken a campaign swing up that way.
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