Party Politics Playing a Bigger Role in County’s City Elections

At a recent Fullerton City Council meeting, discussion was opened for something that often is considered routine: nominations for the largely ceremonial post of mayor.

Council members Chris Norby and Linda LeQuire simultaneously called out the names of their respective nominees: Molly McClanahan and Richard C. Ackerman.

The council voted 3 to 2 for Ackerman, bypassing McClanahan in her second consecutive run for mayor and prompting boos from her supporters in the packed council chambers. McClanahan, the only Democrat on the five-member council in the conservative, heavily Republican city, charged that she was being blackballed because of her party affiliation, and that the council majority was turning the nonpartisan city council into “a political arena.”

‘Slap in the Face’

Norby, a Republican who supported McClanahan, called Ackerman’s victory “a slap in the face” to Fullerton voters who had reelected the councilwoman on Nov. 4 by the highest numbers in the city’s history.

Nonpartisan elections--in which candidates carry no party designation and political parties are barred from running candidates--are the legacy of a progressive reform movement that swept the nation in the early part of this century. They are an attempt to keep the big political parties out of local government.

In Orange County, however, many say it is an ideal that is being seriously eroded.

Some Republicans and Democrats say the ideal is being undermined, in part, by aggressive GOP leaders reputedly intent on eliminating the last Democrats in public office. Others blame ignorance of local issues on the part of a public that can be touched by appeals to conservatism in the Republican-dominated county.

Others say Democrats have tried to jockey for partisan advantage at the local level, but that Republicans have been more successful in recent years as the number of GOP voters has soared.

GOP ‘Has Everything’

“They have everything, so the only thing they have left to go after is city council and school board races,” Orange County Democratic Party Executive Director George Urch said of local Republicans. “It’s sort of (a) ‘kill them (Democrats) in the crib’ ” strategy.

In Stanton, the City Council remains bitterly divided over one councilman’s contention that county Democrats tried to persuade him to give up the mayor’s post last spring to help another councilman running for higher--and partisan--office. In other Orange County cities, including Orange and Anaheim, many council members complain that intense partisanship affected both the tone of campaigns and the outcome of some of the Nov. 4 city council elections.

Former Anaheim Councilman E. Llewellyn Overholt Jr., a lifelong Republican, blamed his defeat last Nov. 4 on the campaign literature of another councilman, victorious mayoral candidate Ben Bay, who “painted me with the tarred brush of the liberal majority, which was totally inconsistent with my political philosophy.”

In Orange, “We had Republican candidates running and they were not afraid to let people know they were Republicans,” said unsuccessful council candidate Timothy F. Smith, who termed the election campaign the “dirtiest race I could recall in this city.

“It’s not against the law, but it’s against the principle of a nonpartisan election,” said Smith, who has vowed to draft a “code of ethics” for future city elections.

Leaders of both major political parties in Orange County insist that party machinery was not involved in the local council races.

But many candidates in cities across the county included their party affiliation in campaign literature and trumpeted endorsements from influential Republican officeholders, and some received financial and volunteer support from party activists. Even the county’s GOP chairman, Thomas A. Fuentes, who in an interview said Democrats running for nonpartisan offices are “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” personally endorsed some candidates.

Partisanship Not New

Partisanship in nonpartisan city races is not new. Despite the reforms, political parties have continued to influence local elections, especially in big cities with powerful mayors such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, where Mayor Richard J. Daley ran one of the most successful ward-level Democratic political machines in history from 1955 to the mid-1970s.

But in the 26 largely suburban cities of Orange County, where elected city councils delegate authority to appointed, professional city managers, the focus traditionally has been on solving local issues like water, trash, roads and sewers that know no partisan boundaries.

Political experts, however, say partisanship in municipal contests now may be greater in Orange County than elsewhere in the state now that Republicans are 54.3% of the registered voters compared to the Democrats’ 35.5%.

“I think that you find the ‘partisanizing’ of nonpartisan races to be probably a little greater in Orange County than in others simply because of the Republican stronghold here,” political consultant Frank G. Caterinicchio said.

In a county that has one of the nation’s most conservative Republican voting records and also is among the wealthiest, political experts like Caterinicchio and others say that not to align their local candidates with the GOP, or at least the party’s conservative philosophy, would be foolish.

“The strength of ‘partisanizing’ a nonpartisan race comes in just letting the Republican voters know who the Republican candidate is,” Caterinicchio said, adding that this is done by way of endorsements from prominent Republicans, and campaign speeches and literature that emphasize conservative stands on issues.

“It is a very important part of campaign strategy at a local level to let voters know--especially in a nonpartisan race--when there is a Republican versus a Democrat.

“We are talking about Orange County now. What I’m saying does not necessarily apply everywhere in the state of California. It applies to Orange County especially because the registration is so overwhelming Republican,” said the consultant, who masterminded Anaheim City Councilman Bay’s victorious mayoral race.

Balance of Support

But Democratic political consultant Dennis DeSnoo said candidates in city elections need to have a balance of support that transcends political party affiliation, otherwise they “automatically alienate some segment of the population.”

DeSnoo and other Democrats point to last June, when 55% of the state’s voters supported Proposition 49, which prohibited a political party from endorsing candidates in nonpartisan races, negating a state court ruling that permitted political parties to endorse candidates in local elections.

County Democratic Party Chairman John R. Hanna contended that voters and municipal office-holders generally reject partisanship in nonpartisan races. But in local races where party politics have been involved in recent elections, Hanna blamed the influence of local GOP elected officials, party stalwarts and his Republican counterpart, Fuentes, who has said that “every Democrat elected to local office has a potential to be a Democratic candidate in partisan office. . . .”

“They’ve done it with the encouragement of partisan Republicans on the county level,” Hanna said. “They heard the word from Fuentes and other Republican activists.”

But Fuentes, a longtime spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Orange and aide to former county Supervisor Ronald W. Caspers, rejected the charges.

Democrats Use Office

It is the Democrats who use nonpartisan offices as stepping stones to higher office and “dollar-raising bases,” Fuentes contended.

“A Republican can run proudly carrying the banner of Republican either in a nonpartisan race or partisan race and there is no downside liability,” Fuentes said. “A candidate would have liability to declare himself a Democrat in Orange County.

“So what do (Democratic) candidates do? They run for nonpartisan offices rather than partisan office, so they can be wolves in sheep clothing,” Fuentes said.

Fuentes denies that the county Republican Party has targeted all Democrats holding nonpartisan posts. But critics in both parties cite the June, 1985, ouster of former Santa Ana Mayor Daniel E. Griset from the Orange County Transit District and his position as chairman of the county’s Transportation Commission as the local GOP’s opening salvo.

Ostensibly, a group of disgruntled officials from many cities wanted Griset out because of his support for rail transit and a failed 1984 ballot measure that would have imposed a 1-cent sales tax increase for transportation in 1984. But several council members, some of them Republicans, said that the move was the result of a behind-the-scenes battle waged by GOP party leaders, who wanted to prevent Griset from using the powerful transportation posts as platforms for an expected race as a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly.

While overt partisanship may be frowned upon at the local level, the reality is that both political parties must find and develop future leaders. And one of the best hunting grounds is the municipal government level.

“One of the (political) party’s functions is to find and nurture potential candidates for national positions,” said P. Lee Johnson, a former vice mayor of Santa Ana and a Republican who lost his reelection bid in November.

Traditionally, Johnson said, political parties are supposed to stay out of nonpartisan races. “But they (actually) don’t. There’s a lot of under-the-surface movement. A lot of it depends on how politically active the candidate was,” he said.

Some call such political activity “networking.” Others call it a blatant effort to bring partisanship into local races.

But Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) contends it is simply that political activists from both parties make it their business to “find out the party affiliation of anyone running for water district or library district or school board or city council or board of supervisors or any of the nonpartisan offices.

“We have a strong tradition of nonpartisanship in California,” said the conservative Republican. “But I’m not going to insult anybody’s intelligence by saying the party affiliation of a candidate is not material. It is material to those political activists in any county who work for either side of the political spectrum.”

Some candidates in the City of Orange were angry that endorsements from Dannemeyer, along with prominent Republican state Sen. John Seymour of Anaheim and Republican Assemblyman John R. Lewis of Orange, were used by former mayor Bob Hoyt in his election bid.

A Hoyt campaign letter sent to registered GOP voters in Orange and signed by Dannemeyer, Seymour and Lewis, said: “We know you share conservative ideals with us. . . . That you understand the importance of electing those who also share these conservative views at every level of government. That is why we are writing to endorse Bob Hoyt for Mayor. . . . His major opponent in the race, Jess F. Perez, is a lifelong Democrat with liberal views on the role of government.”

Issues Remain Paramount

Seymour, a former Anaheim mayor who also endorsed long-time acquaintances Ben Bay in Anaheim and Don Smith in Orange, acknowledged that partisanship does enter into local races, but that the issues remain paramount. “They will still have to speak to the issues,” he said.

Perez, who won the mayor’s post by a bare margin of 456 votes, said, however, “I believe had not the partisanship issue (emerged), my margin would have been significantly higher.”

But Dannemeyer, who said he also endorsed A. B. (Buck) Catlin for reelection in Fullerton because both Catlin and Hoyt are longtime acquaintances, defended his right to publicly support a candidate.

“You’re dealing with issues of free speech and all that entails in our political system,” Dannemeyer said.

Endorsements Not Illegal

Indeed, there is nothing improper or illegal about such endorsements provided they are not accompanied by the active support of the party itself, said Oliver S. Cox, an attorney with the elections division of the Office of Secretary of State. Everyone, regardless of his or her position in a party, has the right to endorse candidates, Cox said.

“If there is a line it is a very difficult line to distinguish, because we are dealing with basic First Amendment rights,” Cox said.

And if those endorsements of municipal officials are very often from prominent GOP officeholders at the state or national level, it’s because virtually all of Orange County’s partisan elected officials are Republicans, said GOP chairman Fuentes.

In Huntington Beach, John Erskine--who had Fuentes’ endorsement, among others, and won his second bid for city council--said he didn’t believe partisan politics or endorsements played a key role in his victory on Nov. 4.

“It’s a matter of timing. When partisanship is important is in a (presidential election) year like 1984,” Erskine said. “It’s almost irrelevant in 1986.”

But in Anaheim, several council candidates blamed partisan politics for their defeat.

In an expensive race for the mayor, Anaheim Councilman Irv Pickler, a Democrat who lost the mayor’s job to Bay, a registered Republican, said “there is no question” that partisanship contributed to his defeat.

Overholt, a longtime Republican, was defeated for reelection altogether and criticized what he called Bay’s efforts to make himself appear to be aligned with Republicans while associating Overholt with liberal policies and Democrats.

Caterinicchio, who ran Bay’s campaign, said the linking of his candidate to the Republican party did not violate the spirit of nonpartisan elections.

“As a consultant, I would try to give the voters the best reasons I can to help them decide that my candidate is the best person to represent them,” he said. “One way is by informing them that my candidate (is of) a like-mind with them . . . and the simplest way for me to do that is to say to a Republican, he is a Republican like you, he voted for Ronald Reagan like you, he supports free enterprise like you.”

Voters Blamed

But Caterinicchio blamed voters who are not well-informed about “the real issues” in their cities. Instead, voters find a sense of security, he said, in voting for someone who they at least know belongs to the same political party.

Republicans say Democrats still maneuver for partisan advantage, too.

Stanton City Councilman Michael Pace, a Republican who was mayor last year, said he was approached last spring by former Stanton City Manager Kevin O’Rourke. Pace said O’Rourke asked him to step down as mayor and let the post go to Councilman Sal Sapien, who was in the running to be the Democratic nominee for the 32nd State Senate District against GOP incumbent Ed Royce.

“The offer was that whoever I wanted, I could choose (the next) council person. I told him I wasn’t interested because that’s not my job,” Pace said. “In effect, you are offering me a buy-out and I’m not going with the program.”

Acting on Behalf of Democrats

Pace said he believed that O’Rourke, now the city manager of Buena Park and a former member of the Democratic Central Committee, was acting on behalf of the county Democratic organization. O’Rourke did not return repeated telephone calls.

But if O’Rourke did call Pace, Sapien said he had not authorized him or any campaign consultants to contact Pace or “make any offers to the guy.”

In the end, Pace retained the mayor’s post, and Sapien lost to Royce on Nov. 4. However, Sapien ultimately became mayor in late November on a 4-1 vote, with Pace casting the ‘no’ vote.

In Fullerton, bitter feelings remain among McClanahan supporters who believe that partisan politics cost her the coveted mayor’s job, and those like Ackerman and Catlin who insist that it didn’t.

But Hoyt, who failed in his comeback bid to rejoin the Orange City Council despite the endorsements of so-called “heavyweight” Republicans, said negativity toward partisan influences may be in the eye of the beholder.

“I guess it’s just a philosophy about how you feel about the elections,” Hoyt said. “There are some who agree with partisan elections and others who disagree with nonpartisan politics. I heard a guy who said once, ‘There is no such thing as a nonpartisan race.’ I don’t know if that’s true.”

For nuts-and-bolts political strategists, it hardly matters.

Those who would complain of partisanship in local races are “purists in a political sense,” argued Caterinicchio. “As a consultant, I would try to give the voters the best reasons I can to help them decide that my candidate is the best person to represent them.”