Environmentalist Studies Future After Loss : Politics: Kevin Sweeney moves to L.A. after his defeat in the June congressional primary. He may still play a role in the battle over water sources in Ventura.

The chief strategist of environmental politics in Ventura County in recent years doesn’t want to give the impression that he has completely lost interest in county affairs.

But Kevin Sweeney has quietly moved out of his Ventura apartment to settle in with his girlfriend in Los Angeles, passing the closing weeks of summer by reflecting on his future.

In the aftermath of a solid defeat in his first run at elective office, Sweeney is looking for some new directions in his life.

The former chief spokesman for Patagonia Inc. says he may still play a role in Ventura’s upcoming decision on tapping into state water, but that is the only specific county issue that he seems eager to jump in on.

For much of the past several weeks, Sweeney has been on a self-imposed retreat in the high Sierra he loves so much--hiking, fishing and, most important, reflecting inwardly on his life’s course that at one time was on a heady road toward the White House.

Fly-fishing for trout in the isolation of the high mountain country has revitalized the tall, lean 33-year-old Sweeney. The gleam is back in his blue eyes. The words spill out again, quick and sharp.

He talks more like a survivor than a victim who was handed a stunning defeat by Democratic voters in the 23rd Congressional District, which includes most of Ventura County. He says he is no longer distraught by Anita Perez Ferguson’s landslide 63% victory margin.

For now, he says, he is returning to his comfortable standbys: cooking, refinishing furniture and looking for a job, even if it means working as a waiter again.

Still, before anyone concludes that the election defeat was his last hurrah in Ventura County, Sweeney said he is planning to play a role in a water issue on the Ventura city ballot this fall. And if the right job surfaces he said he will move back to the area in an instant.

“It’s important to let the dust settle,” Sweeney said recently in his first interview since his defeat. “A lot of people go on and do the obvious things. I don’t want to burn out. I don’t want to do politics for a living.”

As for his election loss, he said, “The year of the woman was one big reason.” He points out that in addition to winning two U. S. Senate primaries in California, female candidates won 16 of the 20 congressional primaries they entered in the state.

Sweeney talked of writing--he has been working on a screenplay about baseball--of cooking, and of restoring furniture in his girlfriend’s garage.

All of this is well and good for the philosophical Sweeney, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1980 with a degree in political science. But the pragmatic Sweeney also must enter the picture. He is not a wealthy person, so when he says he is now free to “think about something like waiting on tables,” he means it.

Indeed, five years ago he did just that.

At the time, Sweeney was chief press secretary to then-Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, the front-running Democratic candidate for President. Then came the Miami Herald story about Hart’s night with Donna Rice. Careers and ambitions were instantly shattered.

A couple of months later, Sweeney was wearing a long blue apron, stacking teacups and balancing trays as a waiter at Lily’s Cafe, a San Francisco bistro.

A short time later, he moved to Ventura to accept a job as public affairs director of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing manufacturer.

Sweeney’s environmental activism brought new excitement to Ventura County, say his supporters.

“Kevin, of all people I’ve been involved with, tried to define what the county environmental movement would be,” said Paul Tebbel, Patagonia’s environmental affairs director.

Sweeney, who resigned from Patagonia in January, worked closely with Tebbel. They pushed an environmental agenda and successfully worked to elect local candidates sympathetic to Patagonia’s causes.

Tebbel says Sweeney’s election loss and subsequent departure represent a big loss for the county.

“The environmental movement in this county has been leaderless, a menagerie of small organizations looking out for their specific concerns,” he said. “Kevin would have been able to galvanize those relationships and bring many of them together.

“He was finally a person who was going to fight for their causes in the House of Representatives. We’ve never had that before.”

His opponents, though, are gleeful that his primary defeat could spell the end of his political influence in the county.

Longtime Ventura City Councilman Jim Monahan saw Sweeney’s slow-growth pitch as strangling the area’s economy.

Monahan is still angry over Sweeney’s successful efforts to sidetrack the building of a California State University campus on the Taylor Ranch site on a bluff overlooking the Pacific west of Ventura.

“His agenda was to shut Ventura down, to make it a little one-horse, do-nothing town,” Monahan said. “We don’t feel we’re a cow town. The largest thing he achieved was to kill the university.”

Sweeney’s defeat notwithstanding, Monahan isn’t sure that the environmental activist won’t be back.

For his part, Sweeney said he has plans to help out on an advisory measure on the Ventura ballot in November asking voters whether the city should import state water or build a desalination plant.

“I want to help the desal side,” he said.

Sweeney has made a strong impression on many environmentalists in the area. Russ Baggerly, a leading environmentalist in the county and an aide to Supervisor Maria VanderKolk, described working on Sweeney’s campaign as a unique experience.

“Kevin was a very special candidate because staff people didn’t determine his agenda or his issues,” Baggerly said. “He ran on what he believed and said what he believed.”

To be sure, in the end it was Sweeney--not his aides--who set the tone of his campaign.

It was his original intention, he said, to take the high road and talk about issues while eschewing attacks on his opponent. But a letter drafted by the Perez Ferguson organization early in the campaign attacking Sweeney’s character forced him to defend himself, he said.

It brought a sharp exchange between Perez Ferguson and Sweeney during a debate in Camarillo and lent an unsavory flavor to the campaign that embarrassed some Democrats.

“It’s personally frustrating to try to clarify the record and have it characterized as a negative campaign,” Sweeney said about a Times story describing the exchange.

Shortly afterward, however, Sweeney went on the attack. He filed charges against Perez Ferguson with the watchdog Federal Election Commission in Washington, alleging that she had broken a number of campaign laws.

In retrospect, Sweeney said, that was “a big mistake. What I wish I had done differently was never once mentioning her name.”

Then, in Sweeney’s words, came his “very liberating moment.”

About six weeks before the election, Sweeney wrote what he described as “a great negative hit piece” on Perez Ferguson. He said that “a circle of friends and advisers said, ‘Yes, of course, you’ve got to do it. That’s how you win.’ ”

But Sweeney tossed out their advice. Instead, he mailed four positive campaign letters that focused on himself and the issues and did not mention Perez Ferguson. Sweeney is proud of his decision and has no regrets.

“We did a lot of things right,” he wrote to a campaign supporter in New York City after his defeat. “I know we gave many people a reason to believe there are candidates who will speak the truth. I know we even showed some that a campaign can help make our country better even if it does not achieve victory on election day.”

In her one mailer, sent to voters in the last days of the campaign, Perez Ferguson slammed Sweeney, branding him an opportunist, a kind of “political hobo.”

Actually, the label was of Sweeney’s own making--a self-deprecatory remark about himself in an interview with The Times a few years ago to describe someone just passing through Ventura on his way to the next presidential election.

But now the characterization touches a nerve.

“It adds up to an image which is vastly inaccurate and unfair,” he said.

So sensitive is Sweeney to this image that he was, at first, reluctant to grant a post-election interview; and he was particularly adamant that there be no pictures of him moving out of his Ventura apartment.

“The last thing he wants is a story saying he’s gone,” Tebbel said. “Even though he is not physically living here he still wants to be involved in different issues in this county.”

In a sense, Sweeney sees himself in a fortunate position. He is not married. He has no children to support. He has but one mission: to revitalize himself.

And, to refute allegations that he is a political junkie, he said he never really liked politics in the first place.

“I put up with politics because I like the ideas and the words; that’s what matters to me. I’m not drawn to political conventions. It’s not something I crave.”

Still, when asked if he would run again for public office, he didn’t hesitate.

“Sure,” he said.

For now, though, Sweeney talks about a peaceful silence in his life that has emerged from the electoral disaster.

“That silence allows me to think creatively. It allows me to hear other things that I wouldn’t have heard otherwise.”

Suddenly, Sweeney’s life, as he puts it, is uncluttered. He has returned, he said, to what he calls “traditional values” of a simpler life of an environmentalist and intellectual seeker of truth.

“It’s the way I want this country to be,” he said. “It’s also what I need to be in order to find that spiritual center or that fulfillment that I want for myself and for my country.”

Soon thereafter he was once again in the mountains fishing for trout.