In Prince George's, Many Signs of A Lively Election

To get my vote, many of the candidates in Prince George's County's upcoming Democratic primary have put up campaign posters. Hundreds, no, hundreds of thousands of these red, white and blue bits of cardboard clog median strips and clutter busy intersections. They look like litter on a stick to me, but more than a few office-seekers and hangers-on insist that those signs can mean the difference between victory and defeat.

"It signifies to your workers that the campaign is going full steam," said Rushern Baker, a former state delegate who is running against incumbent Jack Johnson for county executive. "We were on the air early, but it wasn't until we put up the posters that lots of people started saying, 'I see you're running,' and joined the campaign."

Baker was one of dozens of candidates attending a meet-and-greet Sunday at Rosecroft Raceway in Clinton. He had held focus groups to find the most effective poster colors and settled on green and white. (Johnson's posters are black and white with a dash of red.)

Posters are apparently so important that some campaign workers use violence -- and risk going to jail for felony assault -- just to get a choice location. Until last week, I'd never heard of "sandwiching," which means placing your campaign posters directly in front of and behind your opponents' posters so that only yours is visible. But that's what happened the night of Aug. 16, on a sidewalk outside a building at Prince George's Community College in Largo, where a debate was being held between U.S. Rep. Albert R. Wynn and his opponent, lawyer and community activist Donna Edwards.

According to witnesses, Edwards's supporters arrived first and began lining the sidewalk with her campaign posters. Then Wynn's workers showed up and began "sandwiching" the signs. When one of Edwards's workers tried to undo the sandwiching, a Wynn worker allegedly punched him in the eye, and another one hit him again after he fell. (Wynn later released a statement saying his supporters had acted in self-defense. No charges have been filed.)

You'd think this was a contest for high school sergeant-at-arms, not for a seat in Congress.

Astonishingly, even in the aftermath of the assault, the poster madness continued. At Sunday's meet-and-greet, several of Edwards's roadside posters were sandwiched by Wynn signs.

At up to $80 per sign, some of which are near billboard size, a campaign could easily spend $200,000 just on outdoor advertising. Quite frankly, you could probably get more bang for the buck by paying preachers to endorse you from the pulpit.

"Signs don't vote, but they can persuade voters," Del. Obie Patterson, a candidate for Maryland Senate, told me at the meet-and-greet. "Once a person is in the booth and says, 'Well, I don't know who to vote for,' they might remember your sign."

"Might" is right.

The Sept. 12 county Democratic primary features 131 candidates for a multitude of offices -- including 47 for nine seats on the school board. An additional 20 or so are vying for a handful of state offices, including governor and attorney general, along with a seat in Congress.

The sheer number of candidates is itself a sign, and a good one, too: The county has a huge reserve of talent and intelligence, but too many of its best and brightest residents have been content to disengage from civic duty. Public safety is not that much of a concern when your neighborhood is gated; the decline of public schools matters not when your children attend private schools.

The county is no longer dominated by a seasoned, mostly white Democratic political machine, which leaves residents of the new black Prince George's playing a chaotic "every man for himself" brand of electoral politics. Attempts at coalition building leave much to be desired.

"I noticed that some candidates will position their posters close to certain other candidates in hopes of benefiting from the association," Harold Ruston, manager of election operations for the county, told me. "It's like, 'I'm with this person,' or it's a 'We're all together' type of thing. I have to laugh, because then we get complaints from candidates who don't want people thinking that they are all together."

Said Donna Edwards: "I prefer to have my campaign posters placed on lawns. That way neighbors can see that I have been endorsed by people they know. But signs are just part of an overall strategy. Signs get the conversation started, but we do an awful lot of knocking on doors to keep it going."

There were so many campaign posters along the road to the horse track, however, that the names all bled together in a scream: Vote Gobbledegook, they seem to say.

E-mail:milloyc@washpost.com.