Amelia the Chicken has emerged as a strong, serious candidate in California's gubernatorial recall.

Partly it's her perky smile and bright eye.

And the engaging laugh.

The campaign slogan ("Only a Chicken Can Straighten out This Mess") is obviously resonating with voters.

And they also like her simple platform: lower taxes, higher wages, universal health insurance, cleaner air, smaller traffic jams, a ban on earthquakes and no more Chicken McNuggets.

But a chicken as a major contender? How can this be? Candidates, campaign managers, pollsters, the media and Republican and Democrat Pooh-bahs in Washington are all scrambling for an answer.

The prevalent theory is that Californians are so fed up with... well, just so fed up with everything, that voting for a chicken is a deafening, blind cry of protest.

Another theory is that all of the major candidates -- movie stars, former child actors, comedians, political hacks, columnists and their hangers-on from Warren Buffet to Bill Clinton -- are all just so predictable, just so business as usual that voters are saying, "Hey, how could a chicken be any worse than this? Dude, a chicken might even be better."

The engine driving Amelia's rapid ascent has been the Internet and a grassroots e-mail campaign that spawned neighborhood Amelia Clubs all across the state. A drive through most any suburban neighborhood or a stroll through a mall reveals numerous children wearing the Amelia baseball cap with the faux sponge rubber rooster's comb wobbling on top.

Amelia's campaign says it has raised more than $12 million so far, all from 250,000 people who visited the Amelia web site, typed in their credit card numbers and donated an average of $50 each. Each $50 brings two Amelia caps by express delivery the following day.

Imagine, children badgering their parents to contribute to a political campaign.

Amelia's name on the list of candidates went almost unnoticed at first. Then the e-mail campaign took hold.

All through August she rose steadily in the polls. By Labor Day she consistently ranked among the top half dozen candidates, right up there with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Simon, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, State Rep. Harold McClintock and Gallagher, the watermelon-smashing comedian.

Gerald Elgin, who runs the Sunshine Poll, thought Amelia was a joke when his staff first noticed her name on the list.

"California's famous for these kinds of political high jinks, like that mule that ran against Reagan," he says. "When you have 140-some candidates and you ask people in a poll who their favorite candidate is, your interviewer can't read them a list. You have to write in their response."

Folks at the Sunshine Poll had a good yuk or two when Amelia's name popped up as a write-in on the first poll after the filing deadline. But by the time results of the third weekly poll were in hand, the yuks had vanished.

"Frankly, we're dismayed," Elgin says. The Sunshine Poll quickly brought in experts to help it frame questions that would delve into the whys and wherefores of the "chicken vote." Particularly the whys.
"It's very challenging," Elgin says. "How do you ask someone why on Earth they are going to vote for a chicken without offending them and skewing your data?"

Even more perplexed are the news media, which have largely chosen to either ignore Amelia or treat her as a college frat boy joke.

"How do you cover a chicken?" asks John Gandolphi, who writes about politics for the Los Angeles Times. "How, I ask you, do you interview a chicken in a meaningful way, other than to interview its, I mean her, campaign manager?"

Ah yes, that brings us to Horace Jamison, Amelia's enigmatic campaign manager. Before Amelia, he was a small time political operative and gadfly in the Los Angeles area who championed the idea of electing animals to public office. He got a mouthy parrot named Sullivan elected to a school board in the San Bernadino area and he maneuvered a retired seeing eye dog onto the Indian Lake city council.

"It's time to let some other species have a go at the governor's job," he says in what has become, in effect, the candidate's stock media interview, since Amelia herself doesn't talk to reporters, or anyone else for that matter. "Humans have a disastrous track record running California -- electricity shortages, deficit spending, collapse of high tech firms, too many freeways, urban sprawl, crime, excessive egg consumption." Consumption of eggs and Chicken McNuggets apparently are of great concern to Amelia.

Amelia's past is even more murky than that of her campaign manager. This much is known:

In June, a San Francisco a television ad campaign depicted a chicken being carried aloft by balloons, although apparently no chicken was actually sent aloft in the creation of the ad. A few days later an unknown prankster obtained a chicken, tied helium-filled balloons to it and launched it.

Later that day, chicken and balloons became entangled in a power line. A police sharpshooter, using a pellet gun, shot out enough of the balloons so that the chicken descended safely and was carted off to an animal shelter.

A local television station, covering the news that matters, ran the story. Next day, hundreds of people filed through the shelter to view the ballooning chicken and began thrusting dollar bills into the cage. At some point, Jamison appeared, made a $1,000 donation to the shelter and adopted the chicken, which shelter workers had named Amelia. Horatio Alger, deja vu.

The idea of Californians electing a chicken governor is absurd. Preposterous. It'll never happen. Surely sanity, or what passes for it in a California election, will prevail in the privacy of the voting booth. Maybe not. Perhaps California voters are drawn to a chicken as governor like moths to a flame.

One thing is certain, no one is treating Amelia the Chicken as a joke any longer. Next week she has a lunch with the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times. (A vegetarian menu is planned.) Jay Leno has booked an appearance and apparently Jamison will be off-stage. What Amelia and Jay will have to say to one another and how the Leno staff will handle Amelia if she has a sudden urge to go to the bathroom on national television hasn't been revealed.

In Beverly Hills, a spokesman for Arnold Schwarzenegger said that the movie star would welcome a debate with Amelia. "Arnold would do quite well debating a chicken," he said.

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