Had the California recall election ballots listed gubernatorial candidates in alphabetical order, Diana Foss and Eric Korevaar (above) would have been numbers 34 and 58, respectively. But like the recall itself, the order on ballots was not necessarily easy to figure out.

HAVE SIGNATURES, WILL RUN

Two Caltech Alumni Face Off Against 133 Candidates in the California Recall Election

By Michael Rogers

The wildly eclectic mix of candidates who ran for governor in California’s recent recall election included one Austrian-born body builder and action-movie hero (now the governor-elect), a child actor, a porn star, a porn peddler, and even one or two career politicians. Somehow escaping the national media spotlight were two Caltech alumni candidates—Diana Foss ’86 and Eric Korevaar ’81—who bucked the conventional wisdom that says smart people have no business running for public office.

The chances that any Caltech alumnus—let alone two—would enter the race were pretty slim. After all, with fewer than 8,000 alumni residing in California, Caltech’s pool of potential candidates was small compared to the 15.3 million registered voters in the state. Several of the 135 candidates did claim to have a background in science or technology, so perhaps that had something to do with it.

“The odds of two Caltech alumni running for governor of California are pretty astronomical,” acknowledged Rod Kiewiet, professor of political science. “On the other hand, my experience from teaching politics here is that one-third of Caltech students are very interested, one-third are moderately interested, and one-third could give a rat’s behind. So maybe this is not that unusual.”

In fact, the election’s real winners could well be researchers like Kiewiet and his Institute colleague Michael Alvarez, professor of political science, who see California’s latest free-for-all as an ideal laboratory for investigating an unprecedented situation in electoral politics. Both were eager to talk about the proposal they were putting together to conduct an in-depth study of why Californians voted the way they did. “It’s just a fascinating opportunity, creating all sorts of research possibilities,” said Alvarez, codirector of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, formed in the wake of the controversial 2000 presidential election. “Plus, you had two Caltech alumni to vote for.” (Actually, Joe Voter could only vote once, but by the crazy-quilt rules of this recall, almost anything was possible.)

By the time this issue of Caltech News reaches readers, the October 7 election may no longer dominate the front pages. Nevertheless, it seems only fair to make an attempt—however futile—to provide balance to the media frenzy surrounding Arnold et al. and report on the Caltech alumni candidates who ran for governor.

THE MAD AS HELL CANDIDATE

As the attempt to recall Governor Gray Davis gained momentum last May, Diana Foss found herself peeved, or, in her words, “pig-biting mad.” She was particularly outraged that U.S. congressman Darrell Issa, a San Diego Republican, had spent about $1.7 million to hire signature gatherers to get the recall on the ballot. Pundits opined that was a lot less than he would likely have spent to run in a regular gubernatorial election. While Foss didn’t think that Davis was doing a great job running California, she also thought that many of the state’s $38 billion deficit woes were inherited from the previous administration or caused by the national recession, and that Davis didn’t deserve to be kicked out of office.

“Gray Davis is a difficult man to like,” said Foss, who studied astronomy at Caltech, received a master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1991, and now lives in San Jose, where she is raising two children with her husband, Jens Alfke ’87, a computer programmer. “But he was elected last November, he hasn’t committed any crimes, and the recall is wrong. I like to think of this campaign as defending the integrity of the office of governor.”

Foss said that she has always been interested in politics—she helped register voters while she was at Caltech—but like most of the candidates on the ballot, she had never run for office. Then last spring, as signatures supporting the recall started to pile up, she began telling family and friends that she would throw her hat in the ring if the recall attempt made the ballot.

“I was already so mad about Issa using the recall to promote his own personal ambition. I said, ‘If that recall is successful, then I’m going to run.’ And suddenly, it was confirmed.”

Foss, a Democrat, spent several days in August gathering signatures to meet the requirements to qualify for the election. Although she needed the signatures of only 65 registered voters from her party, Foss said that it was not easy to find people willing to endorse her candidacy. “Not an attention-seeking person,” she collected a few signatures from family and friends, and then approached the teachers at her daughter’s preschool, some coworkers of her husband and a friend, and even her favorite sushi chef. Still finding herself short, she gathered signatures outside the sushi restaurant, a local farmer’s market, and the San Jose Jazz Festival before finally accumulating enough to register to run and pay the $3,500 filing fee on the last possible day, August 9.

Caltech grad that she is, Foss’s decision to run as an antirecall recall candidate was partly triggered by a hypothesis. She conjectured that if enough governor wanna-bes cluttered the ballot, voters would get confused and disgusted enough to simply vote against the recall. But as election day approached, Foss began having doubts about that strategy. “I don’t think that people will get to the polls and be surprised by the number of candidates,” she said. “It’s now part of the whole gestalt.”

For someone who shuns the spotlight, running for governor had its downside. There were the phone calls, letters, and e-mail messages from various special-interest groups and curious individuals. There was also the immediate flurry of attention from the media, momentarily intrigued by the bevy of candidates with no name recognition and no hope of winning. Foss got the impression that one reporter who pressed to put her on camera with her children was trying to pigeonhole her as the stay-at-home-mom candidate. She turned down those 15 minutes of fame. “The media makes you feel that if you’re not rich or well-connected or a politician, then you’re not serious,” she said.

Foss had no illusions about her election chances, saying she was “more likely to be struck by lightning than get elected governor. My parents will vote for me, but I don’t know if my husband will or even if I will.”

As for a future in politics, Foss said that she might eventually get more involved after her children—now in grade school—get older. “Politics for its own sake is not interesting for me. What’s interesting is if you are in a position to make a change when change needs to be made.” As for solving California’s deficit, Foss offered a bitter pill: “People have to realize that there is no easy solution. There is no big pile of wasteful government spending that can be cut. People have to realize that everybody has to make sacrifices and stop protecting their own turf.”

Foss and Korevaar meet for the first time before appearing with other gubernatorial candidates on The Tonight Show.

FEELING LIKE A WINNER

A week into the start of the recall campaign, Eric Korevaar already had gotten his picture on the front page of the Los Angeles Times—albeit with 62 other prospective candidates—and been interviewed on local television eight times. So, naturally, he was feeling like a winner. He figured that the free publicity alone for causes that he favors had already netted him a healthy return on his $6,000 investment in his campaign.

“When you consider just the fun factor of being on TV, I’ve already gotten my payback,” said Korevaar, a technology consultant who lives in La Jolla, just north of San Diego. “I’ve gotten over my nervousness about talking in front of cameras. There may also be some advantage to me as a consultant, if it leads to an increase in my consulting rate or something like that.”

At the very least, Korevaar could teach Californians something about getting a return on their investments. He is an entrepreneur, who, in 1992, cofounded an optical wireless communications company—AstroTerra Corporation—for $75,000, which he and his two partners sold in 2000 for $100 million. Despite his business experience, Korevaar, like Foss, primarily entered the race as a nullification gesture. “This recall election is bad for California and dangerous for our democratic system of government,” Korevaar wrote in his campaign statement.

In July, when Korevaar first decided to run, he expected few Democrats to cross Davis and enter the race, and figured that there needed to be at least a few Democrats, like himself, on the ballot, in case voters approved the recall. One of the first candidates to file papers, he then watched as a deluge of others, including many Democrats, joined the fray. He decided to stick with it anyway. “Once I decide to do something, then I’m sort of compelled to carry through,” said Korevaar.

Although Korevaar’s consulting business gave him some flexibility in his race for governor, he lost some of his spare time when his wife, Leigh, a biochemistry professor at the University of San Diego, gave birth to the couple’s first child, Kevin, on July 14. Eric and Leigh now trade off watching Kevin, but Eric said—not without a hint of pride—that his wife regarded his fling with the gubernatorial race as a waste of time and money. Besides the $3,500 filing fee, he spent about $2,500 more on his campaign statement, a website, and a post office box. “She thinks there are other things we could be spending our money on, like finishing the patio.”

Friends were also skeptical. When Korevaar first started gathering signatures, he approached fellow members of a business roundtable group. “I got two signatures there, and people laughed because business owners usually aren’t Democrats,” he said. He eventually got enough signatures from his running group and members of his church—along with 10 more, gathered by his mother.

Aside from voicing his opposition to the recall, Korevaar was using his moment in the sun to promote solar energy and other environmentally friendly policies and technologies. “One initiative I would like to attract support for would be to require that at least 50 percent of new homes in the state be equipped with a solar-energy system,” he said. “It’s most cost-effective to do it when the home is being built. You can design the solar panels to be the shingles, and if the system is included in the price of the house and the buyer takes out a 30-year loan, it actually makes sense in terms of payback for the electricity it generates during that time period.” (For the record, Korevaar has solar panels on top of his house, which sits on a picturesque bluff overlooking the Pacific. And—in the interests of full disclosure—he once invested in a local solar-energy company, but he said that he lost all of his money on that deal.)

Korevaar is also interested in water conservation—a huge political issue in California—through the development of methods to recycle wastewater, and he would like to preserve the state’s high-tech job base by encouraging investment in the broadband communications infrastructure. “There are other things that I know less about, but basically the government should be proactive in trying to support all cutting-edge technology,” he said.

Like Foss, Korevaar has never before run for public office, but he did serve as junior-class president at Caltech and was treasurer of the graduate college at Princeton, where he got his PhD in engineering in 1987. A few years ago, as an exercise for the business roundtable group, Korevaar made a time chart predicting his future. He wrote that he could see himself getting involved in local politics at age 60. A liberal definition of “local” puts him about 20 years ahead of the game. And asked how he’d run the state, he had ready answers.

“We keep hearing about the state’s projected $38 billion deficit, but if I won, as a scientist and as a businessman, I’d be putting together my own Excel spread sheets and analyzing all the numbers to see what’s real and what’s just hype,” he said. “Then, if you can see where we really are, you can work from there to get where you need to be. I’ve been hearing for 15 years that California is bad for business and that all these businesses are leaving the state. But logically, it can’t be a true statement. California’s economy is not doing any worse than the rest of the country. So that would be the kind of claim that as a scientist I wouldn’t just accept. I’d want to see the facts.”

The race for California governor may be over, but the candidates’ websites are still up and running. For more information on Foss, go to http://www.cowmoose.org. For a look into Korevaar’s campaign, go to http://www.voteforeric.com. As Caltech News went to press, election results published in the Los Angeles Times showed that Foss received 1,331 votes, and Korevaar 490.