Decision ’94 / SPECIAL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA’S ELECTIONS : Truth or Fiction

“Any charge that pops up late (in a campaign) and is particularly personal or outrageous is indeed suspect.” --Sagrow

“More often than not, the opinion as to whether something is true or false . . . is based on which candidate is being gored.” --Hoffenblum

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Allan Hoffenblum and Darry Sragow are longtime California political consultants. That means they know by trade all the tricks of political persuasion at election time. The Times asked Hoffenblum, who works for Republicans, and Sragow, who works for Democrats, to warn us about what voters should watch for as the election approaches.

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HOFFENBLUM: OK, Darry, it’s 10 days before the election and the candidates’ campaign managers and media advisers are looking at polling data indicating they are behind. It is desperation time. Can voters expect to see a barrage of last-minute deceptive advertising?

SRAGOW: I don’t know about you, Allan, but none of my candidates would engage in those tactics. But I do warn them to expect it from the Republicans.

HOFFENBLUM: Come on, one’s party affiliation doesn’t determine one’s ethics. And more often than not, the opinion as to whether something is true or false, right or wrong, is based on which candidate is being gored . . . yours or your opponent.

SRAGOW: The most common trick is to take one teeny piece of information about an opponent and totally distort it.

HOFFENBLUM: You mean the half-truth.

SRAGOW: I’m not even getting to the “half” truth yet. One typical Republican ploy is to create a new organization that issues ratings of officeholders. The statement that the “National Taxpayers Alliance” says my Democratic candidate has an 8 rating out of 100 in cutting spending may well raise questions in the minds of the voters, yet the National Taxpayers Alliance may be the creation of a Republican political consultant who computes ratings that are totally misleading.

HOFFENBLUM: OK. But I’ve seen campaigns where the Democrat consultant just turns around and creates his or her own phony group to do the same thing. The biggest problem we Republicans have is that several organizations that purport to be nonpartisan are actually run by partisan Democrats who tout the liberal agenda and are able and willing to send out mailers that often totally distort the record of the Republican incumbent or candidate. Environmentalists and education groups are the worst offenders.

SRAGOW: So what you’re saying is that groups that endorse Democrats have a bias. I’m saying that a lot of Republican endorsement groups don’t even exist.

HOFFENBLUM: Just because the message comes from a real group, or even a well-known person, doesn’t mean the facts are truthful, especially when it arrives at the last minute. Let me give you an example.

A few years back, I was managing a tough campaign for the state Assembly, and just days before the election, a vote-gram arrived in the mailboxes of voters over the age of 60, attacking my candidate. Now this is an important group. The vote-gram was supposedly signed by Claude Pepper, who was a highly influential member of Congress noted for supporting issues important to seniors. One week after the election, we discovered that Mr. Pepper knew nothing about the mailer. We lost that election.

SRAGOW: Earlier this year, I was the consultant to a strongly pro-environment legislative candidate who was challenging a longtime incumbent with a record on the environment that was worse than Exxon’s. My candidate was a member of the Sierra Club, and was strongly endorsed by the club. In the closing days of the race, the incumbent dropped a piece of mail implying that he was endorsed by the Sierra Club. That false statement clearly hurt the challenger in strongly pro-environment coastal precincts.

HOFFENBLUM: I can top that. I remember being involved in a tough Republican primary, and again, in the closing days of the election, my candidate’s opponent sent out a mailer which loudly proclaimed on the face of the envelope “Reagan Endorsement Enclosed.” If the voter bothered to open the envelope to read the message, they would have found out that it was the local candidate who had endorsed Ronald Reagan, not the other way around.

SRAGOW: An incumbent’s votes on specific bills are fertile ground for deception. Particularly in Congress, votes are cast on very complex bills. Take, for example, aid to Israel. An up-or-down vote on aid to Israel is highly unusual. Those funds are one line in huge, multibillion-dollar, multipurpose bills. A member of Congress who votes against the entire bill could be accused of voting against Israel, even though aid to Israel is a very small piece of the bill, and the member’s reason may having nothing to do with Israel.

Or there might be several votes on a particular topic. For example, there were two versions of legislation to investigate the current post office scandal in Congress. A candidate who voted “yes” on one of them and “no” on the other for entirely legitimate policy reasons could be falsely accused in a last-minute mailer of voting to stop the investigation.

HOFFENBLUM: But again, that’s done by both sides. We are really saying that voters should be highly skeptical of any charges made against a candidate--regardless of the purported source--in the closing days of the campaign. If the facts are true, a candidate wants to get on top of the highest mountain with the loudest bullhorn and repeat the charges as early and as often as possible. Charges made at the last moment are in almost all cases suspect.

SRAGOW: I agree with that. It’s tough to get a message across to voters in this gigantic state. If I have the goods on an opponent, I will certainly make the charge early and repeat it often. Any charge that pops up late and is particularly personal or outrageous is indeed suspect, all the more so if it comes from a source other than the opposition campaign. Anonymous flyers are illegal and I think most voters know that if a charge is made anonymously--or if it’s not clear who sent it--the allegation should be discounted.

HOFFENBLUM: The more obscure the source, the more suspicious the voter should be.

SRAGOW: One of the great mysteries of California politics are the so-called “slate cards,” or voter guides. They invariably flood our mailboxes in the closing days of the campaigns (and, to the chagrin of some candidates, after the election). I’ve never figured out which slate card to trust. Each looks official or purports to come from a political party. The truth is that most of these cards are profit-making enterprises that sell space to the highest bidder. My advice is to ignore all of them.

HOFFENBLUM: As one who produces one of the more established slate cards for Republican voters, I have to take exception to that. Voters should approach slate cards and voters guides like any other piece of campaign literature. Some are phony and deceptive, others are not. The voters should look very closely to see who sent the slate card. If they can’t tell, then throw it away.

SRAGOW: But I’d like to get beyond practices that are literally deceptive and talk about practices that may be truthful, but are misleading. You Republicans are especially adept at manipulating emotional symbols. When you’ve run out of anything else to talk about, you fall back on fear. Willie Horton, black and white news footage of people scurrying across the I-5, film of a terrorist throwing a body of an executed hostage onto the Tarmac. These powerful visual symbols are dredged up whenever you have an unpopular candidate or a lousy economy and your party can’t win on its own merits.

Much of the debate in a campaign is not about particular issues, it is about which issue the voter ought to have uppermost in his or her mind when they cast their ballot. If crime is the top issue, Republicans will do better. If education is the top issue, Democrats will do better. That is because of voters’ preconceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the two political parties.

So I would urge undecided voters to avoid being drawn in by the emotion-laden symbols they will see in Republican ads during the remaining days of the campaign.

HOFFENBLUM: Give me a break. That is nothing more than partisan, elitist drivel. When a conservative attempts to have a rational debate on governmental policies pertaining to education or senior citizens or welfare reform, what do we hear from your candidates? Not debate, but baseless charges that we are anti-education, anti-seniors and insensitive to the problems of the disadvantaged.

SRAGOW: You said it. I didn’t. In any case, I don’t think we have found scare symbols to match Willie Horton. We just appeal to the voters’ better instincts.

HOFFENBLUM: I can go tit for tat with you, if you want, on truthful political advertising that has an emotional impact. Democrats use the same techniques.

SRAGOW: Let me tell you what I think the key problem is. In a state this big, voters have no hope of talking directly with the candidates. They have to rely on bits and pieces of information that appear fleetingly on TV or radio or in their mailbox. Most of those pieces of information are paid for by the candidates. You and I are confirming that those advertisements are often suspect. So the question is, what information can a voter trust?

In the long term, I’m convinced that we need to force the broadcast industry, which, after all, uses the public airways to make a profit, to provide us with more direct access to candidates. But in the next 10 days, I can only confirm that the basic rule is “voter beware.”

HOFFENBLUM: Amen.