California Looks Golden to Consultants : Politics: The people who run campaigns see a busy and profitable year for their profession.

LAS VEGAS —  Gathered together in this neon-gilded gambling mecca, the nation’s top political consultants considered California’s fortunes last week and concluded that, for their profession at least, things are looking up.

Sure, the quake-shaken, recession-weary Golden State is filled with despair, said George Gorton, Gov. Pete Wilson’s campaign manager. Its voters are “hard-core disgruntled,” said Roy Behr, policy director for state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, who wants Wilson’s job. “California,” said Darry Sragow, who is managing Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi’s campaign for governor, “is in a hell of a mess.”

But to many of the 200 men and women who attended the American Assn. of Political Consultants’ two-day winter conference at Bally’s Casino Resort, all that sounded potentially heavenly. Forget Keno or craps, said the expert handlers and advertising gurus whose livelihoods depend on hard-fought elections. When it comes to making money in 1994, they said, California offers their profession better odds.

“This will probably become the most expensive political year in the history of the state--easily in excess of $100 million will be spent,” said Joe Cerrell, a Los Angeles-based consultant who is the association’s chairman emeritus. It is “a full-employment year for political consultants.”

The gubernatorial race is only the beginning. So far, in addition to its three contenders, 29 candidates are running for eight other statewide offices, including the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Dianne Feinstein. There will be battles for 80 Assembly offices, 52 congressional seats, 20 state Senate positions and four Board of Equalization posts.

Things could get ugly and, for those who deal in spin and strategy, that will mean a pretty profit.

This year, said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York consultant who has worked on 40 California campaigns in the last decade, “15 to 20 cents of every dollar spent in the U.S. for political races will be spent in California.” To put it another way: if California were a country, its slice of the political money pie would be bigger than that of any other nation except the United States.

No wonder so many conference participants showed up for a special California election preview panel on Thursday afternoon. There, campaign strategists for the Republican governor and his two Democratic challengers swapped barbs, often doubling up two against one. Predictably, the Brown and Garamendi camps joined to zing Wilson. More telling, however, were the moments when Garamendi’s and Wilson’s front men ganged up on Brown--an alliance that added credence to the buzz that Brown could be the one to beat.

Gorton, Wilson’s campaign manager, professed to love a recent “60 Minutes” television piece, a glowing profile of Brown that Gorton conceded made the daughter and sister of two former governors appear likable.

“This is not a year when (voters) are going to walk in the booth and say, ‘Who’s likable?’ ” he said, artfully trying to turn his boss’ sometimes stone-faced demeanor into an attribute. “This is a tough year. It’s not a Kathleen Brown year.”

Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, was quick to pile on, casting Brown as a waffler on important issues and laying down a challenge: “John is prepared to debate Kathleen Brown any time, any place”--before the June 7 primary, that is. Garamendi didn’t even need to know the topic in advance, Sragow said.

Behr, Brown’s policy director, shot back: “I guarantee there’ll be more debates than when Garamendi ran for insurance commissioner.” (In that campaign, Garamendi was accused of avoiding public encounters with his three rivals.)

Cerrell, who moderated this panel, had seen enough. “This,” he proclaimed, “is going to be a good campaign!”

The bulk of the conference was devoted to campaigns that revolve around issues, not candidates. Especially in odd-numbered years, when candidates are usually not on the ballot, these referendums, initiatives and corporate public relations campaigns are consultants’ bread and butter.

Consultants argued over such things as whether it pays to use celebrities in issue-related commercials. They reviewed new lobbying regulations, pondered how to use polls and speculated about the future interactive capabilities of the so-called information superhighway.

Direct mail video got a fair bit of attention as well. Republican media consultant Tom Edmonds, who has produced several targeted videotapes for clients, said video is an increasingly popular weapon in the battle to win over voters. The reason: Americans have trouble throwing videotapes away. Maybe it’s because rental shops charge such high fees, Edmonds suggested. When the mail carrier delivers an unsolicited cassette, even people who routinely jettison junk mail will often stop and take a look.

At the conference, several vendors promoted video campaigning technology, including one Los Angeles company, West Coast Video Duplicating, which lured customers with the promise that their product allows campaigns to “drop by 30,000 homes for a five-minute chat without having to drink 60,000 cups of coffee.”

One conference event, confirming that there are few limits to conduct in a political contest, was a luncheon that focused on Nevada’s favorite industry (what political consultants politely call “gaming”). The luncheon, which addressed how to “sell” propositions to legalize gambling to voters, featured a slide show narrated by George Hardie, general manager of the Bicycle Club card casino in Bell Gardens.

Hardie thinks gambling is good, clean fun. But he has orchestrated 18 anti-gambling campaigns to keep competitors from siphoning off his customers. Color slides of his advertisements shed light on why Hardie often wins.

“Card Rooms Bring Strangers,” says one ad, which shows a man in a ski mask pointing a handgun straight at the camera. “This is mild,” Hardie said, moving on to more images that linked gambling to drugs, pornography, perversion and pandering.

One ad featured what Hardie called his “standard prostitution shot”: a woman in hot pants leaning suggestively into a car parked outside a casino. Another ad, printed on yellow paper and sent to voters in West Hollywood to combat a proposition seeking to legalize some forms of gambling, said: “Prop. D means Asian gambling in West Hollywood.”

“Our business is 60% Asian, and we love the Asian community,” he said. “We did this piece, though, and we were accused of racism.”

After Hardie spoke, one prominent political consultant muttered under his breath, “I want to go take a shower.”