Managers for Bradley, Ferraro Share Joy of Campaign ‘Combat’

In many ways, Tom Quinn and Ron Smith are alike.

Not politically. Quinn is a Democrat and the campaign chairman for Mayor Tom Bradley. Smith, a Republican, manages the campaign of Bradley’s main rival, City Councilman John Ferraro.

But the last three months have revealed similarities between the rivals and how their qualities have shaped the campaign, giving a surprisingly sharp tone to what appears to be a one-sided contest.

Both are of the same generation: Smith is 42; Quinn, 41. Both are friendly men who frequently smile and laugh and are unfailingly courteous to visitors.

Like most people in the uncertain business of managing political campaigns, both travel lightly, knowing that a couple of defeats can turn a winner into a loser who finds it difficult to pay his overhead.

Quinn can be found behind an unmarked office door on the fourth floor of that elegant survivor of old Los Angeles, the Bradbury Building at 3rd and Spring streets. The filing cabinets, the carpets, the furniture, the tiny television set, all look second-hand.

Smith’s office is in a more prestigious neighborhood, on the third floor of a Sunset Boulevard building on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

The furniture is new, the carpets thick. But there are only two rooms, with none of the expensive sculptures or paintings that some of the other tenants in the building display to announce their success.

What really makes Smith and Quinn brothers is the joyous ruthlessness each brings to campaign managing.

That love of all-out combat has meshed well with the desires of their candidates, explaining to some extent the bitter tone of the campaign.

Bradley and Ferraro each have a gentlemanly image. But underneath, both are highly combative, still imbued with the competitiveness that made them top intercollegiate athletes at rival schools--Ferraro at USC, Bradley at UCLA.

An example of how things meshed came a month ago when Bradley blew up over Ferraro’s attacks on him.

Quinn had been assembling information he believed raised questions about the propriety of condominium purchases by Ferraro and his wife in a development which Ferraro supported when it came before the council for approval.

Bradley telephoned Ferraro and warned him that he would release the information if the councilman did not cool off his attacks.

Quinn produced a television commercial detailing the charges.

While the commercial has not been shown, Quinn previewed it to the press, giving the attack wide exposure on television and in newspapers.

Ferraro objected that the commercial was an unfair attack on his wife.

Quinn expressed no regrets over the unhappiness the commercial brought to the Ferraro family. His only second thoughts were about the quality of the commercial.

‘It Didn’t Work’

“I thought the idea of the ad was good, it was just the execution,” he said. “I thought it was a very good way to present the message. But it didn’t work. It tested well (in showings before groups assembled in shopping centers). If we had gone with the tests, not my instincts, we would have run it. The ad worked very well, but not to me.”

That same hard-headed commitment to winning was evident in Smith as he discussed the most controversial aired commercial of the campaign.

That commercial attacks Bradley for what Ferraro considers administration delays in cleaning up the Capri dump in East Los Angeles. It ends with a small girl, covered with goo, complaining to her mother that she has trouble breathing. “Mommy, I can’t breathe,” the girl says.

In private conversation, Ferraro often talks tough about rivals. But he hates public combat. Smith offered Ferraro the means to go public with his private anger.

Did he have any regrets about the ad?

“Yeah, I think it was a little soft,” Smith said.

Tactical Exercises

While Bradley takes Smith’s attacks personally, Smith merely looks at them as tactical exercises.

He said that as the campaign began, his polling showed that voters had a high regard for Bradley.

Because of that, he said, he decided to abandon the traditional campaign approach of first building up his candidate and then, in the final weeks, tearing down the opponent.

“We had to lower Bradley’s positives before anyone would pay attention to John Ferraro,” Smith said. “That is why we reversed the traditional campaign strategy. If we had run a Ferraro biography at the beginning of the campaign, everyone would have fallen asleep.”

Smith said his polling shows a recent sharp drop in Bradley’s approval rating. However, even if that is true, Bradley will be hard to catch. A Los Angeles Times Poll taken three weeks ago found that 76% of voters sampled had a favorable opinion of the mayor.

Smith said that he has now dropped the Capri commercial and is spending $164,000 to buy air time for a biographical ad built around the theme that Ferraro is “a classic American success story.”

Quinn said that Smith’s strategy represented a Republican attempt to tear Bradley down--in case the mayor wants to run for governor again--rather than build up Ferraro.

“It may have accomplished Ron Smith’s purposes, but not Ferraro’s,” Quinn said. “He hired a campaign manager who did not have his best interests at heart and let the campaign manager run the thing without interfering with him,” Quinn said.

“Absolutely not,” replied Smith. “It’s logical but it’s not true. There is absolutely nothing of that nature, none whatsoever. There are not any motives (like that) on my part or on John’s part.”

Working Background

Smith began his working life as a copy boy for the Los Angeles Times, but gave that up after a month to go to work for the Republican Associates, working on Republican campaigns while attending Stanford. After graduation, he took part in President Reagan’s first campaign for governor, and in 1971 opened his own campaign management firm in San Francisco.

He had winners and losers in the north. He handled Dianne Feinstein’s first and losing campaign for mayor and, most recently, Republican Becky Morgan’s victory for a state Senate seat in San Mateo County.

In this area, he is best known for the campaign that brought unknown Deane Dana to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

Like Ferraro, Dana was far behind at the outset, trailing the incumbent, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who had been appointed to the job. But Dana forced Burke into a runoff, and in the final weeks pulled ahead with a slashing campaign that sought to portray Burke, who is black, as an advocate of mandatory busing, which she opposed. Although Dana ran as a conservative, once in office, he took Smith’s advice and moved to the center, becoming the most moderate of the Board of Supervisors conservative three-member majority. His job performance helped defuse opposition and, with Smith running his reelection campaign, he won easily.

Dominant Voice

Quinn, while the dominant voice in the Bradley campaign, works on it part time, leaving full-time daily management to Mike Gage, a former Democratic assemblyman, and David Townsend, a campaign consultant whose candidate lost to the Smith-managed Morgan in San Mateo County.

Quinn is the majority stockholder in City News Service, which furnishes news items to newspapers and broadcast stations in Southern California, and in Americom, which owns a radio station in the Reno-Lake Tahoe area and is buying two stations in Fresno.

He is best known as the main strategist of former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s early political career, and was especially influential in Brown’s first campaign for governor. Afterward, Quinn became chairman of the State Air Resources Board and earned a reputation as a vigorous advocate of toughening regulations governing industry and motor vehicle air pollution. He managed the beginning of Brown’s 1980 presidential campaign, but quit when Brown refused his advice to withdraw after finishing third in the Maine caucuses.