Consultants Won't Pull Punches

By PETER M. WARREN

June 12, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

Two new local political consulting shops run by state Sen. John R. Lewis and his chief of staff, Chris Jones, threw the sharpest and what some call the dirtiest punches recently in their first efforts at managing candidates.

Several politicians who opposed Lewis and Jones candidates in last week’s primary elections are crying foul, saying that last-minute attacks mailed to voters were false and unethical. Even one winner complained.

Jones, in fact, was censured by the Orange County Republican Party after he sent two low-ball mailers that accused a GOP opponent of “ties to a convicted child molester.”

But Lewis (R-Orange) and Jones defend the tactics they use in their separate businesses as political hardball, not dirty tricks, and say the mailers are good, clean election hits.

Such late-arriving campaign ploys, which leave no time for response, are designed to undermine an opponent’s reputation and scare away voters. At issue is what to do when a candidate turns to 11th-hour smears to blow past an opponent to victory.

“A lot of sleazy things are done by campaigns,” said Roy Behr, a Democratic consultant based in Los Angeles. “Fortunately, most voters are able to see through those kind of tactics, and most of the time, they don’t succeed.”

The low road, however, remains well traveled because it sometimes leads to victory. And that gives ethics a severe test when critical decisions are made by novice candidates under fierce pressure.

“This is the place where if you want to you can get away with anything because there are no controls; it is literally between the campaign and the printer,” said GOP consultant Gene Raper of Sacramento.

Voters are left wondering how to assess slick appeals written by campaigns free to bend the truth. Mailers sent by clients of Jones and Lewis illustrate that dilemma.

The sleaziness of some mailers caused the county GOP some years ago to create a procedure to investigate complaints in Republican primaries. It led two weeks ago to the censure of Jones and the Assembly candidate who hired him, John C. Kellogg.

The procedure, said Chuck Devore, chair of the GOP Ethics Committee, is aimed at keeping Republicans from savaging each other unfairly and “to produce stronger candidates in the general election” against Democrats.

The ultimate arbiter, however, is the public.

In his first election as a consultant, Lewis worked for three campaigns. He was retained by Mike Carona, who won the sheriff’s race, and Lisa Hughes and Eric H. Woolery, who lost, respectively, congressional and supervisorial races. Jones’ main client was Kellogg.

To be sure, the campaigns run by Lewis and Jones weren’t the only ones that produced outcries about false political mail. But all four campaigns they handled in Orange County led to angry charges.

Lewis, a two-term state senator known for his political savvy and inventiveness, also has a well-earned reputation for stretching political propriety.

Lewis and others were sued for their alleged roles in the 1988 posting of security guards at Santa Ana polling places in an effort to discourage Latino turnout. He denied any role in the scheme. The suit was settled for $480,000.

In 1986, he was indicted for forgery for placing then-President Ronald Reagan’s signature on 480,000 fake White House letters attacking Democrats running for state Assembly. An appeals court dismissed the indictment after finding he had not deprived the voters of money or property, elements needed for a criminal charge.

The incident was so notorious that the Legislature passed a law in 1990 making such forgery a felony. The bill was endorsed by Reagan.

Lewis’ history wasn’t lost on Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters, who lost a bitter race for sheriff to Lewis’ candidate Carona.

“We knew what kind of person Lewis was going into it, and we decided we were going to stick to the truth,” Walters said. “There were things done that were ethically and legally wrong.”

He’s so angry over two late hits that he is considering filing a lawsuit and says he will run against Carona in four years.

Lewis defended the mail. “I am waiting for someone to show me a factual error,” he said.

One mailer quoted a supposed “Citizens’ Committee” stating it found that Walters “is unfit for public office” and “is bought & paid for by union bosses.” It called him “dishonest” and claimed he was “running a dirty campaign.”

Campaign reporting documents show that the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs gave $2,300 to Walters’ campaign directly. It spent almost $85,000 on independent expenditures supporting his election.

“The reason this hurt us so badly was that it came out when two-thirds of the voters were undecided,” said Walters consultant Eileen Padberg.

The second mailing contended a judge’s ruling “last week” stopped the deputy sheriffs union from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on “a smear campaign against” Carona.

But the mailer failed to mention that an appeals court quickly overruled the decision and lifted the temporary restraining order.

Lewis was reluctant to discuss the individual mailers. “The primary is over,” he said. “I don’t want to keep controversies going.”

To Walters and his attorney, Mark Edwards, that is part of the problem.

“The core ethical question is how do we run our politics,” Edwards said. “Paul Walters was not willing to do things that would cross the line to get the office. I think that is admirable.”

Former Rep. Robert K. Dornan, who won his primary, filed a complaint with the GOP ethics panel about late hits by lawyer Hughes, one of his three GOP opponents in the 46th Congressional District.

But the ethics panel was forced Wednesday to ignore the complaint because neither Hughes nor Lewis had signed the ethics pledge.

Dornan had complained that Hughes, in her campaign literature, accused him of “spouting more venom against Democrats, women, Latinos.”

Among other things, mail sent by Hughes to Republicans contended Dornan was “censured and expelled from the House floor” and failed to get any law passed during 18 years in Congress.

Dornan calls both statements “flat-out lies.”

As a former House member, Dornan has floor privileges but was barred for several months while the House weighed his challenge to the election of Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove).

Though no bill he sponsored was signed into law, Dornan takes credit for a number of amendments, including those that ended abortions in the military and federal prisons, increased military pay and eventually saved the B-1 bomber.

Lewis defended the contentions. “I don’t think there were any lies in any of that,” he said. Dornan was “kicked off the House floor,” he said.

Even Lewis, however, said Jones “made a mistake” with mail sent on behalf of Kellogg in the 68th Assembly District.

The two mailers stated truthfully that opponent Kenneth W. Maddox paid $2,800 to have his name added to a slate mailer put out by a political consultant, who was convicted in 1992 of child molestation.

But the Kellogg-Jones hit caused a furor among Republican leaders, leading some to pull their endorsements of Kellogg. They pointed out that many GOP candidates were on the same slate and perhaps knew little of the consultant’s criminal history.

Devore said his committee ruled the mailers offensive even though they were factually accurate.

“The front of the mailer said he had ties to a child molester,” said Devore. “The stretch was linking a candidate with a child molester and making it look like they were out producing movies together.”

Lewis said he knew nothing of the child-molester mailer and “was not professionally involved” with the Kellogg campaign, though he loaned the campaign $20,000.

In retrospect, Jones wonders about the effectiveness but not the ethics of that mailer.

“You probably could call it a bean ball,” he said. “It was accurate, but it wasn’t worth the public relations headaches for the minimal impact.”

Maddox won the GOP primary; Kellogg was a distant third.