Indictment Shines Spotlight on Clarke : Fiedler Aide Emerges From Backstage Role

Paul Clarke was bored with his life as a suburban insurance salesman until he introduced himself to Bobbi Fiedler at a rally against school busing in 1976.

She was a PTA mother turned activist who wanted to run for public office. Clarke volunteered that he had worked in radio news and knew a friend with political connections who might be able to help her. Fiedler was delighted, so the two greenhorns from the West San Fernando Valley--she a Republican, he a Democrat until recently--forged a team that took her to the podium of the 1984 Republican Convention and made her a serious candidate for the U.S. Senate.

Sometime over the last decade, they also fell in love.

Now that both have been indicted on political bribery charges, public attention is shining brightly for the first time on Clarke’s “career” as the fiercely loyal man behind Bobbi Fiedler, the feisty congresswoman from Northridge who began her public life as a voice against school busing on the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Although Clarke managed to evade the spotlight, he was never far from center stage. His strategy and talent for massaging the media have been a key to Fiedler’s rise, and they are so strongly identified as a team that a Republican insider said, “When you think of Bobbi Fiedler you think of Paul Clarke.”

The Los Angeles County Grand Jury last month accused both Fiedler and Clarke of an obscure crime--offering to pay off $100,000 in campaign debts for state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Valencia) if he would drop out of the Republican U.S. Senate primary.

But it was fiance Clarke, her executive assistant and the unofficial chief of Fiedler’s Senate primary campaign, whom the prosecutors reportedly urged the grand jury to indict.

An overweight chain-smoker, Clarke has become the consummate political animal since he shed his previous life selling insurance policies. Now 39, he learned to appreciate the thrill of victory guiding Fiedler’s 1977 election to the school board and immersing himself in the strategic world of targeted mailings and focus groups.

It’s Always Politics

“I live it, eat it and sleep it,” Clarke acknowledged last week. A friend, Los Angeles School Board member Roberta Weintraub, says: “I don’t think he ever thinks about anything else. I’ve never been out to dinner with them when they didn’t talk politics.”

In interviews with more than 20 past and present associates, Clarke is portrayed as the most loyal of allies. “He is very devoted to Bobbi--100%, even 1,000%,” Weintraub said. “Anybody who has ever been in politics wishes they had somebody like Paul next to them.” Friends say they consider the charges bogus, if for no other reason than that Clarke is too smart to get entangled this way. “Paul is a careful person,” said former school board member Tom Bartman.

But his quick temper and single-minded desire to push Fiedler’s cause has rankled more than a few friends and foes, enough that some past rivals say they are not surprised that Clarke’s loyalty may have gotten him in trouble.

“The perception of us in the business is he would do anything or say anything to help his candidate,” said a Democratic campaign consultant whose candidates have opposed Clarke’s in past elections.

It was Clarke who transformed “Bustop,” the original parent group Fiedler helped start, into a money-making organ of the anti-busing movement. Bustop was deeply in debt when the group decided to retire the name, but Clarke and Fiedler borrowed $3,000 for an experimental mass mailing.

Over the next two years, the frequent appeals for funds, all signed by Fiedler, raised $750,000 and generated a valuable list of San Fernando Valley residents who could later be asked to contribute to Fiedler’s political races.

Most of the money was used to keep a Bustop attorney in court fighting busing. But Clarke’s strong hand stirred a rebellion among the Bustop membership. The bad feelings came to a head in 1978 at a raucous meeting in Glendale when Clarke resigned as president.

“I would describe Paul as being extremely bright and extremely good at what he does but the kind of person you want to see working in the back room because he doesn’t know the first thing about getting along with people,” said Marvin Feldman, a Bustop dissenter at the time who is now a political consultant in Van Nuys.

Not an Obstacle

The Bustop squabble proved no obstacle to the Fiedler-Clarke juggernaut, which managed the campaigns that elected an anti-busing majority to the school board. Clarke, a quick study, provided the strategy, but he also found himself at the center of controversy.

When Fiedler was on the school board, Clarke’s status as her unofficial assistant vexed school district administrators. Clarke had free access to Fiedler’s office, even when she was not there, and his presence caused some assistant superintendents to worry about the confidentiality of student and teacher records.

They also feared that the board was becoming too political, a concern that flourished when Clarke demanded that the district staff prepare and send official certificates of appreciation to Fiedler’s San Fernando Valley political supporters.

Furthered Their Ambitions

Together they used the board post to further their political ambitions. He attended nearly every board meeting because he had become Fiedler’s close personal companion. Along the way, both were divorced. They began a romance that was carried on with a minimum of fanfare.

Clarke’s main job at the board meetings was to stay friendly with the television and newspaper reporters who were covering school desegregation, then the hottest local issue in Los Angeles, and if possible steer the coverage to Fiedler’s benefit.

This he did by cajoling and making sure that the demands of deadlines and fresh angles were met. Clarke had been a radio reporter for ABC and NBC radio affiliates in Chicago, later working for RKO General in Los Angeles, and he knew how to service the needs of the media, especially television.

Understands the Media

“He’s head and shoulders above most in terms of media awareness,” says Arnie Steinberg, a political pollster who has advised all of Fiedler’s campaigns. He and Clarke teamed to run some Assembly primary campaigns for Los Angeles Republicans, and Steinberg got Clarke a job in the 1978 gubernatorial campaign of Evelle J. Younger.

This ability to work the media, Fiedler recalls, was a key reason they teamed up after that first meeting in a packed auditorium at Parkman Junior High School in Woodland Hills. “We were complete novices at the time,” Fiedler said. “He was the only person I knew who had any experience with politics.”

Clarke always insisted that his own name remain out of the news so as to not detract attention from Fiedler. But in time some Los Angeles reporters say they came to distrust Clarke’s information. Several cited instances in which Clarke planted tidbits about Fiedler rivals that proved untrue, and his effectiveness with those reporters diminished.

Last week, for example, Clarke told the Los Angeles Times that the couple had no plans to be married and were living apart in suburban Virginia, Fiedler in a house and Clarke in a rented apartment.

That same day, however, Fiedler told a UPI reporter in Washington that several months earlier they had planned to marry after the current U.S. Senate campaign. She also contradicted Clarke by disclosing that they have been living together in a 19th-Century row house on Capitol Hill that they bought together.

Explanation Offered

Such inconsistency is regarded by their friends as unusual. “He tries so hard to serve Bobbi, he may occasionally do a disservice to himself,” Steinberg said.

He works hard, whether the job is strategy or the mundane demands of licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, Steinberg said, and he can be a thoughtful friend. “He’s gotten a bad rap in many cases. He’s so hot-tempered sometimes that people don’t see that side.”

Clarke acknowledges that he can be blunt. “I don’t think a lot of people are lukewarm on me. People either hate me or they love me. I tell it like it is, which means if you’re an idiot, I tell you you’re an idiot.”

Clarke, who maintains that he is innocent, says his current troubles are the result of misjudging Ed Davis, who caused the grand jury investigation to begin.

‘Evil Intentions’

“The only regret I have is thinking the best of some people that I shouldn’t have,” Clarke said. “I don’t ascribe evil intentions to people as a matter of course, but I feel evil intentions are at play here. Someone who was a friend for a number of years turned out not to be.”