Bird Adopts a Temperate Tone, Says She Rues Attack on Meese

Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, sounding a temperate tone in her uphill struggle for reelection, said Thursday that she was sorry for an “inartful” personal attack on U.S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and volunteered that she may have erred from the start of her judicial career by not explaining and defending herself to the general public.

In an interview with The Times, Bird indicated that she will try to focus her campaign on loftier if more complex themes, not the least of which is why voters should tolerate judicial leaders they disagree with.

“It’s important to win but it’s also important to do it in a proper manner,” she said.

Diversity Important

“I think what we need to do is establish a dialogue with the people of California about the importance of our institution, why we have a third branch of government, why it is important to have some diversity in that branch--not everyone in lock step--why it is important to have a branch of government that is not tied to special interests, that makes decisions that are sometimes unpopular because we need an umpire or a referee within the system to make sure that the process is fair and impartial.”

In a round of news interviews last November, a decidedly more aggressive Bird lashed out at her critics as “bully boys” and the “progeny . . . (of) Eddie Meese.” Even some of her strongest supporters winced at what appeared to be an escalation of campaign name-calling.

On Thursday, Bird sought to lower the temperature of the debate.

“I was trying to make an analogy originally, and perhaps did it inartfully, to the situation with the U.S. Supreme Court under an attack by the attorney general,” she said. “That court is perceived now as a conservative court. We’re perceived as a progressive court. We’re both under attack by very similar people. So it doesn’t make any difference whether or not you are conservative or progressive. That’s not the issue.

“The issue is whether you pass a particular litmus test and have preconceived notions about decisions before you come to them. And that’s the point I was trying to make then. So, that’s a point not so much about the attorney general of the United States, but a comment about a process that is going on right now.”

Does that mean she is sorry for her choice of words?

“I was sorry to the extent that they emphasized colorful language as opposed to the substance of what I was saying. . . . I should have phrased it more precisely and less personally,” she replied.

Bird attributed the flap to the painful and unusual position she has found herself in as the first Supreme Court justice in California history in peril of being ousted from office.

She conceded bluntly that the smart money in political circles is being wagered against her as polls show her to be opposed by three of five voters.

“I suppose that if you looked at it from point of view of typical political campaign you’d say its down the tubes--write it off.”

Not the Gambling Type

But she added that she is not a gambling kind of person. And she took comfort in recalling “polls where a governor is the most popular and (then) the most unpopular within a six-months period of time.”

Bird also reflected on important public relations omissions in her stormy career, beginning with the very day in 1977 when she was appointed California’s first woman justice by then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. She recalled that her critics were more easily accessible than she was on that first day.

“We had no experience with the press at all,” she said. “I had no press people. My own view was that if you did anything worthwhile people would eventually see it and write about it. I didn’t like the PR side of government. That perhaps, in retrospect, could be a weakness because you don’t get out (information of) what you have done.”

Then she observed that the critics never were quieted and have waged a professionally run, $3-million campaign against her.

“I have been under attack for nine years now. The opposition has had the field to itself. We have not come out and defended over a period of time what we’ve done. Perhaps that was a mistake.”

Nevertheless, she said, she still is uncomfortable with using standard political weaponry to defend herself.

“I think political consultants see things through a political prism that doesn’t fit very well with the judicial process,” said Bird, who has hired and parted company with several such consultants.

Bird could point to only a single remaining campaign adviser--spokesman Steven M. Glazer. And she smiled in response to questions about how she would use her $1-million campaign treasury to present her case for reelection.

“I was a pretty good trial attorney and . . . you don’t let out your strategy before you do it.”

Bird and five other justices of the seven-member court will be on the ballot in November for a “yes” or “no” vote. Nothing has fueled the campaign against Bird as much as her record of voting against the state’s death penalty 55 times in a row, and never voting for it.

“I can appreciate the frustration of those who believe in the death penalty, that they would like to see executions,” she said, but added, “I would hope that the people would appreciate that before someone is executed by the state, that that person has received a fair trial under a constitutional law.

“I would hope that they don’t simply want to see numbers on a scoreboard. I don’t think you would really feel comfortable if after the fact you looked back and saw a series of executions in which you wondered if (justices) voted for them because it was good for them politically, because it might help them in some political election process in which they had been placed.

“I don’t think anybody would feel good about that.”

Bird was in Southern California to speak to women’s business organizations in Irvine and Los Angeles. She urged her audiences to define success as more than the pursuit of material gratification.

Speaking before 200 businesswomen at Los Angeles’ Hyatt Regency Hotel, Bird said women have “a special understanding of the unfairness of economic injustice” because they all “have experienced discrimination based on their sex.”

“That is a universal and unifying experience, and it makes women all the more sensitive to the problems facing other individuals who have also been treated unfairly.”