Five high-profile frontrunners have all but eclipsed the little-known candidates who campaign out of their kitchens with a staff of one. Most raised so little money for their campaigns that they were exempt from filing reports. They are rarely invited to public debates. But they run anyway.

They say city problems compelled them not to give up, but to step into public life.

Most know they have little chance of winning. Some may not even be able to collect the 2,000 signatures required by July 18 to get on the ballot for the September primary election. So why bother?

Because sometimes you can’t just sit by and wait for change, one candidate said: "No one can save us but us."

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Retired from paid employment in public relations and real estate, Ida Blocker, 65, stays active as a realtor, ANC commissioner, ordained Baptist minister, grandmother and certified microfilm technician.

A 35-year resident of the District, she was diagnosed in 1976 with degenerative rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and spina bifida.

"The doctors thought I’d never get any better," she said.

But after years of using a wheelchair to get around, she made a full recovery. She hasn’t used a wheelchair since 1984.

"You have to have a mind change," she said, describing her recovery. "Now I am running on healing the city. I can make my people aware that they can be raised up, they too can overcome. Just because you have a disability doesn’t mean you have to stay down."

Founder of a tenants’ association in Ward 1 and a citywide religious ministry, she preaches a message of uplift to her constituency: senior citizens, women with children, infants, the disabled, people with HIV and victims of domestic violence—people, she said, who feel like giving up.

"There’s no hope in the people here," she said. "They are just wandering, like in a wilderness.

"I think the people feel confused. Our leaders have not been the best in these last years, and the citizens were lax. We did not take a stand. Now they feel victimized."

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Ricardo Gatlin-Moore, 43, a lifetime District resident, lately has been busy designing plumbing and fire protection for an IBM office building in Bogota, Columbia. But the candidate tries to squeeze in campaign-style meetings with teachers and other public servants.

He, too, is concerned about lack of interest in the mayoral race.

"People in this city are in a survival mode," he said. "They have gotten complacent, they don’t care, they have no trust in their officials. That’s how I was at first."

Education helped him change that. When he was 14, a neighborhood youth program at The Catholic University of America changed his mind, he said.

"It opened my mind to literature, plays, politics," he said. "That’s what opened my mind up."

After service in the military, Gatlin-Moore went back to school. He earned a high school diploma, and through continued training, became a designer draftsman. He works on electrical, plumbing and fire protection design.

But the route he traveled is closed to many young people, he said. He’s angry that the city ended its public vocational education program.

"I’m a product of vocational education," he said. "If it wasn’t for the teachers that took an interest in an impoverished child, I wouldn’t be here today. How are we going to prepare kids for anything more than part-time minimum wage jobs with no benefits?"

"These problems are life-threatening," he said. "We need radical saving changes. It’s going to get deadlier if we don’t get on it."

***

G.E. Maxwell, a master carpenter, lives next door to the proposed convention center in Shaw. He said plans for a huge development with no parking in the middle of a residential neighborhood pushed him to run.

"It’s the first time I’ve been ashamed of the city I was born in," he said.

A D.C. public school substitute teacher with a degree in art and sculpture, Maxwell said he wants to turn around students’ attitudes about taking advantage of educational resources.

"They play computer-based games but have no aspirations to become computer nerds," he said.

Maxwell said he is suing the city for false arrest, after an April 1995 incident in which he was arrested, forceably searched and held overnight on shoplifting charges. Maxwell said police never had any evidence against him. The charges were subsequently dropped.

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Albert Ceccone, a self-employed real estate broker who grew up in Takoma Park, comes to the mayoral race with some political experience. He was a Republican nominee for Montgomery County executive in 1990 and a Republican nominee for Congress in 1984.

After moving across the District line into Maryland and back again, he still isn’t sure if he will file his nominating petitions to officially become a candidate. But he knows he is not happy with things as they are.

"The candidates we read about are part of the problem, not part of the cure," he said. "They avoided their responsibilities."

***

John Gloster, a financial planner and chair of the D.C. Statehood Party, has lived in the District for five years. He hold a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Amherst College and is studying for a law degree from Georgetown University. Gloster, 37, has worked in a variety of business ventures including management of restaurants, payroll and a wholesale produce distributorship. He said he is running because "the status quo leadership is letting down the people of the District, especially the working people."

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"Children get frustrated just like grown people, they just don’t know how to explain it," said Sylvia Robinson-Green. A home day-care provider and former substitute teacher in D.C. public schools, she is running for mayor because she said she worries "there are not going to be any families left in D.C."

She is particularly concerned about children.

"They pick up guns because they want immediate satisfaction," she said. "They think this life that they have right here is it."

Born and raised in Southeast Washington, Robinson-Green was one of nine children born to a woman who cleaned houses and worked in school lunchrooms. In September she will earn an MBA from Strayer College.

She herself was a problem child, she said.

"I was pulled out of school in junior high," she said. "I had to go to a special school."

But as she got older, she said she "latched onto any free education I could." She left her job as a substitute teacher because she was tired of being physically threatened by students, she said.

"I could not believe how disobedient they were. They didn’t have any authority (figures) in their lives."

***

Growing up in Jackson, Miss., in the 1950s, Sameerah Muhammad was acutely aware of what it meant to be black .

"We were given the out-of-date schoolbooks that the white children didn’t use any longer," she said. "It was like being in the race but running with one leg. I think it made me study harder."

By age 13 she was working in the voter registration drives that swept the South during the civil rights movement, registering anyone who could sign an X on a piece of paper.

In 1968 she was recruited from Tougaloo College in Mississippi to attend Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), where she studied political science and was exposed to writings and speeches of outspoken political thinkers.

Most people are shocked when they find out she’s a Republican, she said.

"It’s a party my ancestors were attracted to," she said. "It’s the party of Mr. Lincoln."

She said she agrees with traditional Republican values of smaller government and lower taxes.

"The most important issue facing our country and our city is can we live within our budget?

We have been living beyond our means for far too long."

She also was raised with conservative values, she said.

"My mother only had a sixth grade education, but she used to stand us up and have us say our times tables. She checked our posture and made us pronounce the endings of our words: cat, rat, mat, sat, hat.

"I was taught when you fall down, you get up, dust yourself off and hold your head high. You don’t complain and cry."

She is now working two jobs and finishing her degree in political science at Trinity College.

But the "Grand Old Party," widely viewed as the party of the rich, needs to become more inclusive, she said. "I think I can make a difference."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator