Trying to Go to Head of the Class

SALINAS, Calif. — Al Checchi is bouncing along the back roads of California in a bus--a shiny rented yellow school bus. It is his symbolic twist on the traditional campaign finish.

The bus illustrates his campaign priority--education. But for a man who is rich enough to do all of this with private jets and limousines, he has chosen to travel the way the students do--in a bumpy, hot, noisy, diesel-rattling school bus with all of the leg room needed for a 6-year-old.

The medium is part of his message, and the symbolic point of this one is that he gets it. He is not just a rich guy trying to buy an office. He is the grandson of hard-working Italian immigrants whose quest for public service was shaped by another rich Democrat with compassion for the poor--John F. Kennedy.

With just four days left in his two-year effort to leap from corporate wonder boy to California governor, Checchi is frustrated that too many people still think him an overly ambitious millionaire who does not understand the lives of ordinary Californians. That frustration bubbled up Thursday when he vented his fears that his failure to erase that perception might cost him the race.

“The [campaign] dialogue shifted from ‘He’s independent’ to ‘He’s rich’--and suddenly rich meant that he’s different from us,” Checchi reflected in an interview, stretching his legs along one of the brown vinyl bus benches.

“It creates a stereotype,” he said. “If I haven’t gotten the message across, it’s my fault. I wasn’t resource-constrained. I had plenty of time. I started this process 2 1/2 years ago. . . . But the other guys did a great job . . . of diverting the discussion from the future and the substantive issues of the state. . . . They outfoxed us.”

Yet this was not a eulogy for the campaign. In fact, even with a realistic sense of their longshot hopes, Checchi and his entourage were taking their fortunes lightly Thursday.

Once, at a Bakersfield elementary school, the candidate even summed up the moment with an impromptu verse of Frank Sinatra. “That’s life,” he crooned. “That’s life. That’s what all the people say. You’re riding high on Monday, shot down in May. But I, I ain’t never gonna change my tune, when I’m back on top in the month of June.”

Checchi told reporters that the polls might still turn around. But instead of searching for crowds of voters, he has chosen in these final days to try to communicate that missing message one last time.

In San Francisco on Wednesday, he debated with one school’s faculty his plan for teacher training and testing. Later, he was swarmed like a rock star at a magnet high school in San Jose and a grade school in Salinas.

He even signed his autograph for one student on a stick of beef jerky. “That’s a first,” he said later.

But most of those who heard his speeches were too young to vote. And the local reporters who showed up were often more interested in his slim chances than in his education platform.

Instead, his bus tour showcased a candidate with compassion and a former corporate tycoon willing to eat soggy school-cafeteria tuna sandwiches and slap high fives with a crowd of teenagers.

In Salinas, the Checchi school bus turned off U.S. 101 into a notorious gangland, past threadbare homes with bars on the windows and sometimes cars on the lawns.

Checchi, along with his wife, Kathy, and college-age son, Adam, stepped out to a celebrity welcome at Sherwood Elementary School. Inside, he was surrounded and then mobbed by mostly Latino students who shouted mispronunciations of his name--”Cheeecheee!”--and pressed for his autograph until they were finally pushed back by a trio of teachers.

When they were seated on the asphalt playground, the candidate bent over, placed his hands on his knees and asked for their questions. “Did you work in the fields?” one child asked.

No, said the former co-chairman of Northwest Airlines. He said he had bused tables at a restaurant and dug ditches with a pickax, and “then I had some office jobs.”

“Did you ever fail a class?” Once, almost, said the Harvard MBA. Math.

“Where did you grow up?” In Boston and Washington and then all over, he said.

Later, in the school library decorated with pictures of Latino achievers from Cesar Chavez to golfer Lee Trevino, Checchi discussed his school policy in a round-table talk with parents and teachers. One mother, speaking in Spanish that was translated by Checchi’s bilingual wife, asked what he might do to stop the discrimination California has encouraged in racially charged ballot measures such as Proposition 227, the June initiative to virtually end bilingual education. “Now they’re coming after our children,” she said.

Checchi’s response about his own family’s struggle as immigrants from Italy moved the woman to tears. She promised later to write his name on pieces of paper and pass them to her friends throughout the neighborhood with a plea to give him their vote.

Back on the bus, Checchi beamed. “That is what you see at my campaign events,” he said.