Once High, Mighty Political Guru Lies Low : Stung by Defeats, Arch-Conservative Consultant Follows Quieter Path

In his day, he was a political prince of the city, an arch-conservative, rough-and-tumble campaign consultant at the top of the heap in San Diego.

He first made his mark locally in 1979, lifting a political neophyte from electoral obscurity to a convincing victory in the race for San Diego City Council. Other coups soon followed. In a world where success breeds success, Jack Orr was rocketing skyward.

But like so many others, Orr eventually came tumbling down. The cowboy consultant’s campaign practices--the acid-tongued hit-piece mailers, the innuendo-laden assaults bordering on red-baiting--earned him a reputation with suit-and-tie insiders as a political bad boy.

When his man for mayor, then-Councilman Bill Cleator, finished a disappointing third in the 1983 primary, Orr’s reign in San Diego had ended. He went into virtual self-exile, shuffling off to his comfortable home in Cardiff-by-the-Sea to forget about his slide into disfavor, wiling away days on the shores of a scenic coastal lagoon.

A political season passed in San Diego, and then another, and another, and Jack Orr was nowhere to be seen. Now a new springtime of campaigning looms on the local front, with a mayor to be elected and three posts on the county Board of Supervisors to be filled, yet Orr remains a consultant without a candidate in his own hometown.

Infamous Newsletters

That suits him just fine.

Today, Orr has etched a niche as the guru of rent-control opponents in California, running a spate of campaigns in cities up and down the state while providing day-to-day political advice to a large Bay Area apartment owners association. He has also launched another business specializing in direct mail for various campaigns.

Still an avid observer of the local political scene, he periodically dispatches his infamous Orr-grams--crafty newsletters chock full of pithy insights on who’s hot and who’s not--to San Diego journalists and politicos.

Breaking a cardinal rule of campaign consultants, the 49-year-old political dynamo has even tried his hand as a candidate. In 1986, he ran for the City Council of the newly incorporating municipality of Encinitas, finishing just out of the money for one of the five slots. It was a tough loss, but Orr quickly moved on to new challenges.

Yes, Jack Orr seems to be doing just dandy, thank you. Though he abhors defeat, the feisty, 5-foot-6 chain smoker knows that the only way to ease the pain is to seek out a new way to win. It also helps that the skin gets thick after a lifetime in politics.

Never one to shirk when a good story can be told, Orr says it this way: “I’ve got a rhinoceros suit I put on each day. In the morning, I take that thing out and pull it up over my head and put that big horn out in the front. That’s a campaign consultant. Essentially, he’s lower than a used car salesman. A campaign consultant is the type that, if God won’t work, you call us.”

As both friend and foe tell it, Orr is an American original, an unwavering advocate of the take-no-prisoners approach to political campaigns.

“I think his phrase was, you get into campaigns to kick ass and take names and let the chips fall where they may,” said Phil Conner, an attorney who crossed swords with an Orr candidate during an unsuccessful City Hall run in 1981. “Jack told me once that his goal is to leave his opponent with his guts hanging out on the battlefield. Those were four-martini comments.”

‘Whore and Slanderson’

In virtually every campaign Orr has been associated with, the tactics have rarely varied. Working as always behind the scenes, Orr gathers damning details about an opponent, leaks it to the press and then follows up with glossy, mailed brochures to absolutely insure the point is made with the voters.

Indeed, during the heyday of the consulting business Orr shared with erstwhile partner Larry Sanderson, the firm was known far and wide, by opponents and supporters alike, as “Whore and Slanderson.”

When Orr directed the campaign against a 1981 proposal to elect council members in San Diego by district instead of citywide, he yelped long and hard about the effort being the first step in a conspiracy by liberal Democrat Assemblyman Tom Hayden, his actress wife Jane Fonda and their Campaign for Economic Democracy to usurp the powers-that-be at City Hall. Although initially well ahead in the polls, the district election concept was defeated handily by Orr’s troops.

Two years later, while Orr served as chief strategist for Cleator’s mayoral campaign, the consultant again invoked Hayden’s name, pointing an accusatory finger at Roger Hedgecock, who was also seeking the seat vacated by Pete Wilson. Orr said Hedgecock was “closely tied politically to CED causes and activists” and therefore to Hayden himself.

Hedgecock, who declines to comment on Orr these days, in a 1983 interview called the consultant a “liar” and “smear artist” using “guilt by association.” The remarks were “a classic Jack Orr smear campaign,” Hedgecock declared in the interview.

Such brouhahas find a cozy corner in the recesses of Orr’s memory. Indeed, the Jack Orr Political Hall of Fame is filled with great scrapes past.

Like the time former Councilman Bill Mitchell, an Orr opponent, was plagued by a controversy over his use of a city credit card. Orr produced a television commercial featuring a Mitchell look-alike holding up an American Express card and uttering those immortal words: “Do you know who I am?” The commercial never ran because Orr’s candidate decided not to press the issue.

Vintage Story Teller

And the time Orr used his newsletter to lambaste candidate Bob Filner during his race against Councilwoman Gloria McColl in 1983. Orr talked about Filner ties to Hayden (Filner’s former wife had been active in a local branch of Hayden’s group). He also reported that Filner, a professor at San Diego State, published articles in left-leaning scholarly journals. Filner lost the campaign.

Orr hardly looks the part of a political assassin. The nose and ears are ample, but a twinkle seems perpetually in the eyes and a smile invariably creases the fleshy jowls. Huckleberry Finn blond hair tops it all.

The laugh, which comes frequently, is a cackle. Since Orr suffered a heart attack last May, he’s cut back to a pack of cigarettes a day from his normal three packs, and drinks now only when in a party mood. Friends say he is a joy to be around, a master of the one liner, a vintage story teller.

He got into politics almost on a whim. Bored with his studies in a graduate program in literature at USC, Orr in 1968 got a job with a Los Angeles-based Republican political consultant he had met while editor of his college paper during the Reagan gubernatorial campaign two years earlier.

Though unabashedly apolitical until then, Orr quickly embraced the tenets of the Republican party. (“It would have been just as easy to have become a Democrat as a Republican,” Orr says today. “I had no politics at all.”) During the next decade, he handled a slew of national campaigns, from California to Texas to Illinois.

In 1979, Orr moved to San Diego County, and within months was tapped for the fledgling council campaign of political novice Bill Cleator.

Though Cleator’s campaign was faltering when Orr first jumped aboard, the consultant helped turn it around and the first-time candidate won big. “He was very close to me at a time when I needed somebody to almost be my paid shrink,” Cleator recalls. “He helped me learn the ropes.”

A Hot Commodity

That victory begat other campaigns. Suddenly, Orr was a hot commodity in the world of San Diego politics. But the prosperity soured nearly as quickly. A series of defeats began to dog Orr. Even the tried-and-tested campaign ploys started to grate.

When Orr used the Tom Hayden angle against Hedgecock during the 1983 mayoral primary, it aroused anger among friends and opponents. Cleator says he was troubled by the tactics, which drew charges of McCarthyism from Hedgecock, and by the fact that Orr and Sanderson went $50,000 over the alloted budget.

Today, Orr says charges of red-baiting during the 1983 campaign are “nonsense,” but acknowledges that the mayoral campaign “was a bad one because it got me in a fight with a very powerful, very mean SOB”--Hedgecock.

“People in our own campaign didn’t like the tactics,” Orr says. “It wasn’t gentlemanly. It exceeded the existing standards in San Diego.” Still, Orr says he would do the same thing today, although he would spend more time “educating my troops” as to the need for such a frontal assault.

In the midst of the mayoral campaign, Orr and his partner decided to dissolve their firm. “It was out of the blue,” Orr recalls. “He approached me the Friday before the election and said, ‘I can’t take it anymore. You’re acting like a madman. I’m drinking two bottles of Maalox a day. We’re not going to win.’

“It was like a divorce. It was worse than a divorce.”

His kingdom in tatters, his reputation shredded, his partnership dissolved, Orr hunkered down at his Cardiff home for several months, spending time with his young daughter and wife, Nancy.

The vacation didn’t last long. Within months, Orr was back to work on several rent control campaigns. He’s now on his 16th anti-rent control campaign--and has yet to lose.

Orr spends a lot more time at home these days, operating his business out of a crowded upstairs study stuffed with file boxes and desk-top computer equipment. In the past few years, Orr has also invested a great deal of time helping coach his daughter’s soccer team.

He strayed from work briefly to volunteer his services to pro-incorporation forces in Encinitas during the 1986 campaign--and to make a run for council. Orr spent $35,000 (some of it contributions from rival campaign consultants), but still finished in sixth place, 299 votes away from victory.

Marked by Controversy

As usual, his campaign was marked by controversy. Many residents were angered when Orr attacked rival Gerald Steel, who was subsequently elected to the council.

“I think Jack would be the first to admit he absolutely blew it,” said Bob Bonde, a leading proponent of the incorporation movement and a fast friend of Orr. “It was kind of a negative campaign instead of a positive one. His literature just point-blank stated that Gerry Steel was not the person to vote for. People in the community were not ready for that type of politics.”

Orr says Steel was one of his primary motivations for entering the race. He recalls a conversation with Steel that convinced him the Leucadia resident was “nothing more than a Berkeley radical from the ‘60s who has never grown up.”

Steel, meanwhile, says he enjoys Orr as a person, but feels the consultant is “threatened by my ideas.”

The defeat irked Orr. “I hate to lose,” he said. “I despise losing. It’s a terrible thing. Most people live gray lives, without the possibility of saying ‘This was a win’ or ‘That was a loss.’ Politics gives you that opportunity to win. Unfortunately, it also makes possible the depths of despair.”

Although Orr has steered clear of campaigns in San Diego, some local political junkies say they will not be surprised if the self-described “hardheaded little Dutchman” surfaces again some time in the future.

“With the talent he’s got, I think he could still be doing campaigns down here if he really wanted,” said Mike McDade, a San Diego attorney and former Hedgecock ally. “There’s a real shortage of top political minds, and he knows the game.”

Jan Anton, a long-time Republican stalwart and friend of Orr, agreed.

“I think Jack is one of the brightest political guys on the scene,” Anton said. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so he’s quick to call people lame brains sometimes. But he’s a straight-forward, honest guy and I think well-respected in the profession.”

Orr, meanwhile, says his greatest asset is “I’m tough. You have to be tough to survive in this business. And survival is what it’s all about. Longevity is always a hallmark of a successful corporation.”