Griset Tries a New Medium for Campaign Message

During the five-minute monologue, a man describes in quiet tones how his father instructed him about self-respect when he was a child. As the man tells a joke, there’s laughter and applause.

The man begins to talk about President Reagan and restoring pride in America, and of ridding local neighborhoods of trash. The sounds of an orchestra playing “America the Beautiful” swell in the background.

It’s Democrat Dan Griset, mayor of Santa Ana, doing what his campaign manager admits is a “hokey” Garrison Keillor imitation on 30,000 audio cassette tapes distributed to voters in central Orange County’s 72nd Assembly District.

“I listened to it and stood at attention,” joked Richard Longshore, a retired Navy lieutenant commander who is Griset’s Republican opponent in the Assembly race. “Other than that, I’m speechless.”

Orange County voters are usually inundated with pot holders, phone stickers that display emergency numbers and note pads imprinted with campaign logos in the closing weeks of a political season, but both sides in the Assembly contest said they believe that this is the first use of audio cassettes.

‘Untried Technique’

“I have to admit, it’s an untried technique, and we have no idea whether it will work,” said Gail Kaufman, Griset’s campaign manager. “We wanted to break through the deluge of slick mail that voters receive around this time by doing something different.”

Kaufman said there is some concern within the campaign that people may record music over the taped message before listening to it.

“I’d have a more serious concern,” Longshore said. “I wonder how many people who receive the thing have a tape machine on which to play it.”

About 25,000 of the district’s residents live in poverty, the largest concentration of low-income people in the county.

Kaufman said the tapes are being delivered--at a cost of about 40 cents each--only to specially targeted Democratic and Republican households with a high propensity for participating in elections.

Kaufman said: “We got one new campaign volunteer out of it already, just this morning.”