Meet Mr. Nobody: Political junkie Norman Sommer

By Margaria Fichtner, mfichtner@herald.com

Source: Miami Herald, July 26, 2004.

OK, pal, so Norman Sommer has one for you.

'The story goes that it's Kol Nidre. The rabbi is praying, `Oh, God, you're so powerful. Before you I'm a nobody.' The cantor overhears and repeats the same thing: 'Before you I'm a nobody.' Then here comes the shammes. They call him the caretaker. He follows the rabbi and the cantor. Same prayer. When the cantor hears this, he nudges the rabbi: 'Hey, look who wants to be a nobody.' ''

The chuckle this wilted old joke provokes swirls around Sommer's big round head like a wreath of spun sunshine. Norman Sommer, aka Norman Nobody ''because that's what I consider myself,'' may be the angriest guy you ever will meet (``I've been so mad and frustrated I could chew nails''), but he tends to navigate the world on a froth of almost perpetual optimism. If everything is going to hell, cue Norman for the laugh track..

FUNNY GUY

''Oh, his sense of humor,'' says Sommer's radiant second wife, Kitty. Almost 20 years together, and ``we're still, you know, back and forth, like Mutt and Jeff. . . . ''

Yet these days, the 78-year-old Sommer knows he will need more than a belly full of hardy-har or scalding outrage to retune the rhythms of the universe. Especially now, given the pesky stenosis that has messed up his spinal cord, put him on a walker and dealt a cruel end to his tennis game. And, tell the truth, also given his fixed income, iffy health (''On March 1 we were having dinner . . . , and I wasn't feeling well, and Kitty reached over and took my pulse, and there was no pulse'') and penchant for solitary combat: ``I'm a voice in the wilderness. I've been working a-lone.''

Still, almost six years ago, Sommer -- yeah, that Norman Sommer -- had become a piquant footnote to the Clinton impeachment mess when he leaked the news to Salon.com that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde once had indulged in an affair of his own. Sommer had heard the dirt -- fooling around with another man's wife -- from one of his tennis partners, the cuckolded husband himself. And even though the Republican leadership lashed out at Democratic White House worker bees for besmirching the white-maned Hyde, the besieged Clintonites were not to blame. Sommer was.

Within two days crews from major networks and a German newsmagazine show had elbowed their way into his small Aventura apartment, ''and then there were all kinds of radio interviews, and then the newspapers. . . . I had 15 minutes of fame.'' Long enough. If you check the index to Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, which devotes part of a chapter to those tumultuous days, you will find 27 references to Hyde, Henry but also three for Sommer, Norman.

Now, guess what. Mr. Nobody is at it again, this time gamely hoping to jerk his country, this land of the brave, home of the free, etc., etc., back to the left side of the political pigsty, away from what he calls, in the letter he will happily send you even if he has to use his own stamp, the far right's ''weave of nefarious programs, with pernicious outcomes'' that is sucking us all up into a . . . . Well, never mind. It is enough to know that Sommer, who tends to pronounce ''Rush Limbaugh'' with the same quiet grace he would use to utter ''spit wad,'' has a plan, a new nonprofit, nonpartisan, noncandidate, hopelessly nonlyrical initiative: The Umbrella Movement To Counteract The Right.

''I sent out 2,500 letters to people. . . . Anybody who I thought was anti- or non-right, I sent them a package,'' Sommer says. ''Cost me a buck apiece.'' Pete Seeger and Ed Asner wrote back. Janet Reno phoned. Kurt Vonnegut sent a note and $100.

''I grit my teeth,'' says Kitty. ``But he enjoys it.''

''He sends these kind of manifestos,'' says Alan Bisbort, political columnist for The Hartford Advocate, an alternative weekly. ''I guess I get these things all the time, but there was something totally Americana-original about this one. . . .I guess it was the sort of thing that most jaded political columnists and editors would instantly toss in the trash.'' Bisbort, however, did not toss it. He wrote a column about Norman Nobody. Then he wrote another, and he mentioned Sommer's quixotic efforts in a couple of other pieces. ''He's a very persuasive and persistent individual,'' Bisbort says from his house in Cheshire, Conn. ``Persistent to a fault, I guess, but in a good sense.''

So forget this summer's big-party political conventions with their gassy speeches, same-old, same-old faces and mind-numbing folderol. Who wants to be in Boston or New York to rubberstamp the upcoming dirty little war between Sen. Blurry and Prezident Mush, not to forget that stealth scrapper, Mr. Nadir? You want to make change? You want to make waves? You want to unstatus the quo? You got to start small, low to the ground, down among the grass roots with the earthworms and ants. With Norman.

`THE EARFUL'

Anybody who spends a couple of hours in Sommer's presence is sure to be handed a super-size load of what he calls ''the earful,'' a well-honed monologue that traces his life from his youthful brushes with anti-Semitism, through his bumpy sales career and the tragedy of the son lost to drugs, to the divorce that brought him to South Florida in 1984. Philosophically, Sommer is a garage sale, a little of this, a lot of that, a quote from Margaret Mead; a Groucho Marx punch line; the lyrics to The Impossible Dream and My Way. Take him or leave him, he offers himself to you the only way he can: as is.

As a young man, he had received his political baptism as a delegate to the 1948 Progressive Party convention that nominated Henry Wallace for the presidency Harry Truman won. ''It taught me a valuable lesson. It taught me that it's almost impossible to have more than two parties. Not only is it wasted energy, but the harm it could do . . . . '' Two decades later, Sommer stood up after a Ralph Nader lecture and asked the consumer champion, ' `Why don't you run for public office?' He said, 'It's because I could do more outside the system.' So when he announced four years ago, I wrote him, I pleaded with him. I reminded him of what he said. Of course, the rest is history.''

So there you have it. Conservatives may claim as their shining knight the resplendent media baron Richard Mellon Scaife, who has tossed many millions of his inherited fortune into the right-wing political and intellectual infrastructure. Over here in this corner, battling for the country's liberal soul in a pair of light blue shorts with a frayed-shoestring budget, a 1,000-name mailing list and a top single donation of $10,000, is Norman Nobody. His Umbrella Movement hopes to hold its first convention in the fall with an agenda 'to plan, coordinate and execute programs to attain equity . . . wherever the `Right' rules.'' Ed Asner has promised to speak, if his schedule permits.

''A lot of people think the way Norman does,'' Sommer's longtime friend Seymour Kaufman of Aventura says by phone. ``This is just the beginning.''

ENERGY APLENTY

''He's got a lot of get up and go, this guy,'' says another friend, 96-year-old Ted Yecies of Sunny Isles. ''With no money he's getting very, very good, experienced people.'' One of them is Yecies, a high-school dropout who made his fortune in the air conditioning-distributor business years ago back in Jersey and has a long history of success as a charity volunteer and fundraiser. Yecies, who still drives, can read the phone book without glasses and has a few things to say, may deliver the convention's keynote address. ''My fees,'' he says in a phone interview, ``are reasonable.''

When Norman Sommer is being reasonable, he admits that the odds are not rosy that his movement will rev up to the momentum of the high-flying days of the Howard Dean campaign. After all, it took him seven months and 57 attempts to interest various media outlets, including The Herald, before Salon.com listened to him on Henry Hyde.

''I'm very frank with the people who are working with me,'' he says. ''None of them are operating under the delusion that we're going to be successful, but everything we do is a step in the right'' -- meaning, of course, correct -- ``direction.''

Sommer always says he does not like to drop names and then delivers them -- ''Then I called Norman Lear . . . '' -- so they float gently downward like feathers, but just between us, another target of his mail campaign was the distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky graciously wrote back: ``Nobody is a nobody, Norman.''

This time, no joke.

© 2004 Knight Ridder
reprinted from Miami Herald, July 26, 2004