Poll Results Cast Gloom on Fund-Raiser for Bird

They came to praise Rose Bird, not to bury her.

But the mood at a small campaign fund-raiser here Tuesday evening was so somber that it might as well have been a wake for the uphill effort to protect California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird against being ousted from her seat on the court.

“If she loses as bad as some of the polls indicate, it would be very bad for our positions, for progressive causes,” Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, told a gathering of about 60 people at the home of liberal activist Vic Kamber. “It gets to be no fun losing again and again.”

Although Bird was scheduled to appear at the unusual Washington fund-raiser for her reelection campaign, she canceled at the last minute. That left Smeal, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Rep. Don Edwards (D-San Jose) to explain to the group why liberals should be defending Bird instead of abandoning her in the face of an organized campaign to unseat her, based largely around her stance on capital punishment.

“Professional Democrats are all backing away from her,” Nader said. “You never advance when you’re backing away.”

Many prominent Democrats, such as Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who is campaigning for governor, have avoided taking a position on the Bird reelection fight. A handful of California Democratic lawmakers, however, agreed to join the list of supporters handed out at the fund-raiser. These included Reps. Howard L. Berman of Panorama City, George Brown Jr. of Riverside, Barbara Boxer of Greenbrae and Mel Levine of Santa Monica.

As Nader explained it, the focus of Bird’s opponents on her failure to affirm a death penalty verdict during her nine years as Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court is merely a smoke screen for what he called the “corporate assault on the court.”

Contending that major agribusiness groups, the insurance industry and big banks are largely financing the opposition to Bird and two other liberals on the court, Nader argued that Bird’s defeat would send a signal to judges elsewhere that they will face similar campaigns if they ever try to “discipline the abuse of corporate power.”

To Nader, the stakes in Bird’s reelection battle are immense. “What’s going to be the message for the rest of the country if Rose Bird loses?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s that the victory goes to those with the most money. If that happens, our democracy is gone, just gone.”

The event, which raised an estimated $25,000 for the Bird campaign, was organized by several former Bird law clerks.

Although there was a glimmer of hope among some of the activists that the attempt to unseat Bird might fail, those at the fund-raiser were clearly discouraged, seeing her simply as one more liberal at risk of succumbing to the conservative onslaught that began six years ago when President Reagan was elected to office.