Bobbi Fiedler--She Won’t Be Counted Out

A press conference is about to begin and a woman rearranges furniture to provide a better camera angle for television. She directs a camera crew where to place equipment. She explains when and how a visual prop will be introduced. And then she relaxes and joins in some newsroom gossip about the TV business in Los Angeles.

Bobbi Fiedler, Northridge congresswoman and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, is comfortably at work in the final weeks before the June 3 primary.

You could say that Fiedler is a modern-day broadcast media politician. And you’d be right. Sure, all the candidates bunched in the crowded field know the power of paid broadcast advertising. But nobody understands the Southern California airwaves like 49-year-old Fiedler. She knows them like a cat knows the alleys.

When terrorists attack, Fiedler is on standby in Washington to give radio stations at home pithy on-the-air comments. At press conferences, she knows how a patient smile to the camera will help defuse a tough question. She knows news crews by their names, and can speak in their vernacular of “bites” and “actualities” and “cut-aways.” When she talks about her own appearance, like the onset of gray in her pageboy, she reaches up and worries about “these few hairs, here, on my crown that look like Brillo on television.”

Most of all, she knows to get right to her point because she figures Southern Californians have little time to indulge Washington windbags.

“I can speak to people in a way they can understand me. People don’t have the time today with their busy lives to work out the spider web of problems in the federal government. They want to know who you are and what you mean,” she says. Next question.

KABC radio’s popular talk show host Michael Jackson says that among Republicans, “she is by far the most astute in using radio. . . . She is savvy.”

A media politician, yes, and also a combative suburban populist. Given the twists of her life, it is no wonder.

As a youngster in the 1940s, Bobbi Fiedler was restrained by leg braces because she was severely pigeon-toed. She felt she was picked on because she was Jewish. Later, wistfully free and single in the 1950s, her hair in a duck-tail and the collar turned up on her leather jacket, Fiedler cut quite a figure in Santa Monica in her bright pink stick-shift Buick, which she dubbed the “Pink Pig.” In the 1960s, she was a San Fernando Valley housewife behind the counter at the two pharmacies she ran with her ex-husband.

In the 1970s, along came the idea of busing schoolchildren to achieve racial mixing and Bobbi Fiedler plunged into politics as a leader of a group called Bustop.

From there it was on to a seat on the Los Angeles Board of Education and three terms in Congress in the 1980s.

‘Housewife Who Got Elected’

“She’s indeed the housewife who got elected,” says Paul Clarke, her good-natured fiance, campaign manager, former congressional administrative assistant and one-time radio news reporter who taught her a thing or two about handling broadcasters.

Clarke also went to the dock with her in January when a grand jury accused the two of trying to bribe rival San Fernando Valley-area candidate state Sen. Ed Davis out of the U.S. Senate race with an offer of $100,000 to help cover Davis’ campaign debt.

A judge threw out the indictments as groundless 33 days later. Today, it remains a matter of guesswork how “the incident,” as it is called in the Fiedler camp, changed the complex chemistry of a 12-man, one-woman Republican field which is campaigning for the June 3 primary and the right to challenge Democratic incumbent Sen. Alan Cranston in the November general election.

‘A Net Plus’

“I think it was a net plus,” insists Fiedler. By her reasoning, her loyal old friends in the anti-busing movement are outraged and have redoubled their efforts on her behalf, while some women in the state have been drawn to feel sympathetic toward her plight.

The other view, of course, is that Fiedler’s fund-raising has been hampered and public suspicions raised about her character.

The Los Angeles Times Poll in March found that Fiedler was the only contender in the race who was viewed more unfavorably by GOP voters than favorably. The margin was 3 to 2.

“If she’s still in the race, think how strong she would be if she hadn’t run into this trouble,” says I. A. Lewis, director of the Times poll.

Fiedler’s negatives are nothing new, to hear her tell it. “I’m not the kind of person people feel neutral about. They either like me, or they don’t,” she says.

And, as for being a contender, few knowledgeable Californians dare count Fiedler out in these final weeks, never mind her brush with the authorities.

Fiedler figures she can win with something just over 20% of the votes cast. If the turnout is in the range of 50%, which would be in line with past primaries, the winner reasonably could be determined by 10% or so of the total registered Republicans. With 4.6 million registered Republicans in California, a candidate could be victorious by this formula with half a million votes, or an electoral bloc smaller than the population of San Jose alone.

Fiedler figures her formula for victory is her high profile among Southern Californians, her skill at generating news interest in her campaign, her modest budget for television commercials, and her residual grass-roots political organization left over from her days in the anti-busing movement. And, certainly not least, she hopes women will rally behind her.

“I teasingly say, I was my father’s son. . . . It’s long since time women had a larger voice in their government,” she tells women in an audience.

Working on her behalf, women volunteers are urging other women to forget that they are Democrats or that they agree more with a rival candidate. Join Fiedler in sisterhood on June 3, they say. California has never elected a woman to the U.S. Senate, and only two serve there now.

Nevertheless, Fiedler says it is a “decided asset” these days to be a woman in politics. And if she suspects someone is implying otherwise, she is quick to react. A male reporter once described her as having ice water in her veins. A man, she complained, would have been characterized as cool under fire.

A media politician, a suburban populist, a woman appealing to women, Fiedler is something more still, as anyone who follows her career knows.

She is pugnacious, quarrelsome, hard-edged--the daughter of a one-time prizefighter who loves the battle of politics. “Heavy combat,” she cheerfully calls it. Some find that side downright mean.

“Bobbi hates wimps,” explains campaign press secretary Judy Ridgeway.

She slices into her opponents like a clear-cutter into timber. Forget the GOP’s 11th commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. She speaks ill of them all. One is too liberal, another too conservative. One doesn’t know what he stands for, another is too rigid in his beliefs. One is “out in left field somewhere.”

Yes, she feels victimized by the indictment. But it hasn’t stopped her from filing complaints with federal authorities against two of her rivals, Davis and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich. She reportedly accused them of campaign financing irregularities. No public action against Davis or Antonovich has been taken.

And there’s a maddening side of Fiedler in which she sometimes seems to bend circumstance neatly to fit a point. She infuriated Los Angeles transit officials last year, for instance, when she implied in testimony that citizens had voted overwhelmingly against the proposed Metro Rail subway. In fact, the vote was to insulate homeowners along the route from higher taxes, and had been encouraged by some Metro Rail supporters.

“You’d like us to go from A to B to C to D. But when you’re trying to get your message down to 20 or 30 seconds, you sometimes have to go from A to D without worrying about B and C,” explains Clarke.

Fiedler considers herself a specialist at coming from behind to squash entrenched liberals, having done it twice--beating Robert L. Docter for the Los Angeles school board in 1977 and James C. Corman for Congress in 1980.

“I have a track record in this regard,” she says dryly.

Going at Rivals

She also has a track record for battling a couple of causes important to liberals and the Establishment. Although thousands of people were part of the cause, Fiedler gets the credit for stopping school busing in Los Angeles. And she has been instrumental, even when it sometimes seemed it was her against everyone else, in mounting the resistance to Metro Rail and an earlier downtown Los Angeles transit proposal.

On the other hand, she quietly confronts conservatives from time to time. Along with some other Republican women in the House of Representatives, she was active in pushing the White House to adopt more reassuring policies for women, including new sanctions against fathers who skip child support. She also supports a woman’s right to have an abortion. And when President Reagan wanted to cut funds for the handicapped, she fought him, recalling her days in leg braces.

“I am many things,” she says. “That’s why people don’t know me, they see only little pieces.”