‘WE OUGHTA RUN GARY COLEMAN’
It only took $3,500 and 65 signatures for the East Bay Express to get the actor on the ballot and add to the farcical endeavor
Chris Thompson walked into his editor’s office one day in 2003 after realizing that all it took to run in California’s gubernatorial recall election was 65 signatures and $3,500 in filing fees.
The threshold was so low, it would be easy to poke fun at the process by running a candidate.
The stunt appealed to East Bay Express Editor Stephen Buel. They talked it over. Then a name was blurted out.
“We oughta run Gary Coleman,” Buel recalled. “I was thinking about Arnold. Who is the opposite of Arnold?”
The 2003 campaign to recall Gov. Gray Davis was a political circus, with B-list celebrities, adult entertainers and third-party gadflies throwing their names into the ring. By the filing deadline, the ballot included 135 candidates, inlcuding Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, a Libertarian cigarette retailer, a Green Party custom denture manufacturer, a retired meat packer, a middleweight sumo wrestler, comedian Leo Gallagher, Arianna Huffington and adult film
actress Mary Carey.
As California braces for a similar spectacle with the campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — which last week secured enough signatures to go before California voters, and has already attracted a similarly motley slate of potential candidates — former East Bay Express staffers reflected back on the part they played 18 years ago, when the altweekly ran Coleman as a replacement candidate.
At the time Buel and Thompson floated Coleman, it was known Arnold Schwarzenegger would run, although he had not officially announced it. That the bodybuilding movie star from Austria, a Republican, was the favorite to replace Davis seemed absurd to the staff of the East Bay Express, said former editors who worked in the newsroom. The alt-weekly, in those days, had an editorial staff of 18 and a budget to entertain wild ideas.
Then-managing editor Michael Mechanic, now a senior editor at Mother Jones, remembered an editorial meeting where the discussion turned to the upcoming recall. Buel had floated Coleman’s name, based on his wide appeal and because he was physically and professionally the opposite of Schwarzenegger.
In this case, Arnold from the TV sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes” versus Arnold the action movie star.
“We were saying this seems like a ridiculous process, how can we underscore the absurdity of this whole thing?” Mechanic said recently. “The alt-weeklies, it was a very fun, snarky atmosphere. So Steve pursued this. I don’t know how he got Gary Coleman.”
Buel got spending approval, a bare-bones allowance but nothing the Bay Area’s alt-weekly owners today would approve. He phoned Coleman’s agent, Hal Stalmaster. He laid out the terms: If the “Diff’rent Strokes” child actor agreed, the Express would collect the necessary signatures, pay the filing fees and run the campaign. They wouldn’t raise any money or accept campaign contributions.
“A few days later,” Mechanic recalled, Buel “excitedly calls me to his office and said, ‘you gotta hear this.’” It was a voicemail from Coleman, calling while stuck in traffic: “I am probably the most unqualified person to run for governor, but I’m willing to do it as a goof if you are.” The stunt was on. Buel collected signatures at an Oakland A’s game and paid the $3,500 filing fee. They arranged a photo shoot for Coleman in Los Angeles.
On Aug. 6, 2003, the Express headline screamed, “Gary For Governor!” “We Put Gary Coleman on the October 7 Ballot. Seriously.,” it read. The story spread around the world.
“My phone starts blowing up,” Buel recalled. “It’s Japanese television. The moment I get off the phone, it’s French radio. Then it’s CNN. I was stunned by how much global interest there was in this. I expected a tongue-in-cheek story in the Sacramento Bee.”
Nora Sohnen, who had just been hired as the weekly’s editorial coordinator, took several of those press calls and began functioning as a scheduler for Coleman. The actor hadn’t worked in show business consistently since he made headlines in 1998 for being arrested for assault while working as a security guard.
Coleman died at age 42 in 2010. Thompson, who was an Express staff writer from 1998 to 2007, died in 2016 at age 46.
“I was not ready for it at all,” Sohnen said. “I did my best to get him out there and get him a lot of interviews. About a week in it became apparent it was overload. We accidentally double-booked him and I was trying to schedule around his dialysis appointments.”
“He chewed me out on the phone once,” Sohnen recalled. “I was like, ‘OK, this is not my job. I went along with the joke.’”
As campaign manager, Buel said he never spoke to Coleman. Everything went through Stalmaster, the actor’s agent, or by email. Reached at his home in the San Fernando Valley, Stalmaster said he did not recall much from those days, but that any work Coleman did outside of show business was “extracurricular activities” that he didn’t monitor closely.
Sohnen said that when she looks back, she can’t help but cringe at some of the coverage, including Thompson writing that Coleman’s “got the Black vote tied up in October.”
“It wasn’t very thoughtful, it wasn’t very nuanced, it does make me cringe now,” Sohnen said. “I don’t want to say it’s different times and that excuses it but things were a bit different back then. People were perhaps not as thoughtful about what they wrote.”
J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, writing in the Berkeley Daily Planet on Aug. 15, 2003, immediately took issue with the Express using Coleman as a candidate for governor.
“My problem comes with their choice of a Black individual to use as their object of ridicule. Two centuries after our arrival in California, no African-American has served as governor of this state and only one has come close to winning — former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who lost in 1982 and 1986,” he wrote. “This is not because no African-American has been qualified to serve as governor in the (153) years since California became a state. It is because a majority of white Californians have not yet demonstrated that they will vote for a black candidate for governor.”
Allen-Taylor went on to say the staff of the Express, who he at the time considered friends, were not bigots but the Coleman “caper gave a lot of aid and comfort to people who are.”
Buel left the Express only to return years later as publisher, until he resigned in 2018 after removing two blog posts from the publication’s website and using the N-word in front of staffers.
Coleman’s moment in 2003 did not last long. On the night the East Bay Express’s cover story hit stands, Schwarzenegger appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, officially entering the race. Coleman threw his support behind the action star, telling CNN he would vote for Schwarzenegger. “Now that Arnold is in the race, there is no race,” he said. “Gray Davis needs to pack his bags. I’m going to stay in the race, but I’m not going to campaign.”
On election night, the newsroom was not in touch with its candidate. Coleman finished eighth with 14,235 votes, just behind Flynt. Winning was never the point, Buel said. But even now he’s not sure if the goal of mocking the recall was achieved, and never found out if Coleman regarded the campaign as a success.
“But I never heard any complaints either,” he said. “I wouldn’t do this again, fun though as it was.”