Nava Makes Mayoral Bid a Nationwide Phone Drive

Julian Nava, the most prominent Latino in the Los Angeles mayor’s race, plans to fuel his dark-horse campaign with money raised from Latinos throughout the nation via an 800 phone number.

The 65-year-old Cal State Northridge professor and former ambassador to Mexico confirmed Tuesday the broad outlines of his innovative campaign to make his candidacy a national, Latino cause.

“I think there’s an enormous number of Hispanic-Americans nationwide who would be attracted as a matter of cultural pride to electing the first Hispanic-American mayor to Los Angeles since 1848,” said Nava, who likes to call his life the saga of “barrio kid to Harvard Ph.D.”

His campaign will also include a TV advertising campaign, with Spanish-language commercials, to promote the toll-free 800 number, Nava said.

“We see an enormous potential to raise modest individual contributions this way,” Nava said of the phone campaign, which he sees as a way out of the $1,000-a-plate hotel dinner syndrome that is the city’s political standard.

Nava, the first Latino elected to the Los Angeles school board and a resident of Northridge, would not be the first of the current crop of mayoral candidates to capitalize on their ethnicity to reach outside Los Angeles for money and support.

Michael Woo, the mayoral field’s most prominent Asian-American candidate, has traveled to Houston, Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco to take his fund-raising campaign to Asian-American communities nationwide.

Although Nava would be the first Los Angeles city candidate to use the 800 phone-number technology to raise money, his campaign would borrow from several national examples.

Maverick Democratic presidential candidate Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. reportedly raised more than $6 million with his 800 drive.

Like Brown, Nava and his followers see the toll-free telephone campaign as a grass-roots effort that will enable them to tap the pocketbooks of traditional non-givers and circumvent the developers, contractors and others who make up the lion’s share of contributors to city campaigns.

“We want to run a campaign that’s free from the fat cats, the political machines and the millionaires,” Nava said. “I want to have as few strings as possible tying me down.”

“It gets to the grass roots, to the nickels and dimes,” added Michael Collins, Nava’s campaign treasurer.

But Nava’s plan was viewed with some skepticism by other political operators.

“Julian Nava is no Jerry Brown,” Los Angeles political consultant Rick Taylor said. “For a 1-800 number to work, you have to be a known quantity. Julian Nava is an old-fashioned liberal who’s been out of circulation and out of office for nearly 15 years.

“You’ve got to have true believers behind you for these to work, or a big budget for advertising,” Taylor said.

Vicki Rideout, Woo’s campaign manager, said, “If it works, I’ll copy it.”

Rideout said several purveyors of toll-free numbers had approached her with programs for Woo. “But you have to have a campaign built around the number. You have to invest in it,” she said. “We’ve chosen to spend our money otherwise.”

There have been some reports that as much as $1 in every $3 contributed to such a campaign must be used to cover the costs of running the phone banks, but others have disputed such estimates as too high.

Nava declined to say how much money his campaign was preparing to invest in such an effort. Media consultant Jack McGrath, who sold Nava his 800 phone number (1-800-LA4-NAVA), said the campaign will be kicked off next week with dissemination of about 500 small yard signs displaying the number throughout the city’s Latino areas.

Callers to the Nava number will be able to make contributions with their credit cards, or if they are not ready to give money they can receive literature about Nava and a pledge card in the mail, McGrath said.