Perfect 4th of July Dessert- Impeachment Pie

SANTA CRUZ - David Jackman is not one to complicate his restaurant with indiscriminate kitsch.

Yes, there’s the 2003 Thanksgiving Day President Bush Action Figure - a beaming plastic Dubya in a flight jacket, presenting a plastic turkey.

And there’s the caustic collage on one wall of Chocolate, Jackman’s Pacific Avenue bistro, where he showcases favorite satiric images of the president and his administration.

But all decor - and food - must be made, supervised, or selected by Jackman himself.

Impeachment Pie, the single political flourish on Chocolate’s menu, is no exception.

For the third summer, the fussy Santa Cruz restaurateur has offered slices of peach pie for $4.50, and donated 10 percent of proceeds to Democracy Now!, his favorite media outlet.

The pie originates from City Councilwoman Emily Reilly’s Westside bakery, where Jackman says he "taught someone to make a pie crust many years ago."

Peach pie is offered May through September when the fruit is fresh, "But impeachment season," Jackman says, "is all year round."

His restaurant ran out of the popular dessert Thursday night for the first time.

"People come here just for that," says Zeya Schindler, a veteran waiter at the restaurant. "I’m not always sure if it’s because the pie is very good, or because they want to impeach Mr. Bush."

Sometimes, he says, customers beg off dessert, but ask if they can make a donation to the impeachment campaign.

Time magazine sent someone to Chocolate two years ago to do a humor piece about Impeachment Pie, Jackman says. But peach season was over, and the pie was all gone.

Wearing his trademark Panama hat, Jackman smiles coyly when answering questions about the dessert.

But he speaks in measured tones when the subject lies beneath the crust.

He’s not so naive as to expect that a majority-Republican Congress would take up the impeachment cause, he says. It sure would be peachy if they did, though.

The president, he says, "took this country to war on false pretenses."

But there is no direct relationship, he says, between the impeachment pipe dream and the organization that benefits from his small-scale fund-raising campaign.

The Pacifica Radio show, featured on KUSP, fosters "the education of adults in this country," Jackman says. And it is education that will prevent a repetition of voters’ past mistakes, he says.

Though he takes his politics seriously, Jackman wants to stay away from an "everything that’s not Birkenstocks has got to be from the devil" way of thinking.

And what best to counter the seriousness of impeachment? Flaky, fruity, pie.

"It’s not a sin to laugh," Jackman says. "It’s something we need to work on here in Santa Cruz."

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