McCarthy Aide Predicts Lagging Race to Get ‘Second Beginning’

It has not been a good month for Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy’s U.S. Senate campaign, and McCarthy’s chief media strategist, Robert Shrum, reacting to a gloomy batch of poll results, told reporters Wednesday that the campaign is looking forward to “a second beginning.”

“The first beginning was created by Wilson,” Shrum said of the Republican senator. “But I think the race has a second starting point.”

For McCarthy, springtime will surely come by autumn, Shrum said. It will come after a long summer of presidential politics has diverted public attention from Wilson. By then, Shrum said, McCarthy will have enough money to do what he has not been able to do in the early going, counter Wilson’s expensive television ad campaign.

“I think this summer of presidential conventions and the drama that will surround who Bush is going to pick (as a running mate) and the drama that will surround the Democratic convention is basically going to create a second beginning for the Senate race,” Shrum said.

Shrum ought to know about new beginnings. Some would say he and his partner, David Doak, wrote the book on them, or at least, the campaign commercial. It was their television spot that breathed new life into Richard Gephardt’s anemic presidential campaign last fall and led him to victory in the Iowa caucuses in February.

It was the miracle of Gephardt that Shrum invoked when reporters pressed him to justify his optimism about the McCarthy campaign.

“Last December, I just stopped saying to people, ‘Look, we’re going to win in Iowa,’ because they looked at me like I was from another planet.”

Once again, Shrum is predicting victory but not without acknowledging the obstacles that must be overcome, namely, Wilson’s financial advantages ($2.3 million on hand, compared to McCarthy’s $750,000) his widening lead in the polls and McCarthy’s shaky first leg on the campaign trail.

The most recent poll shows that Wilson had doubled his lead from 7 to 14 percentage points since February, and that McCarthy’s support among fellow Democrats had sagged from 69% to 55%.

Shrum blamed the poll results on a steady stream of campaign commercials that Wilson has been airing in major cities around the state since early March.

But McCarthy’s problems have not all been of Wilson’s making. During the last couple of weeks, the McCarthy campaign at times has appeared to be in a state of suspended pratfall.

First came the April 7 fund-raiser for him at which McCarthy was moved to disavow the comments of the featured speaker, peace activist Helen Caldicott, who likened Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Jesus Christ. In the same week, McCarthy, who is assiduously courting environmentalists, let Wilson beat him to an endorsement of a ballot measure to block oil drilling on Los Angeles beaches.

Then, there was the disclosure that McCarthy, who likes to refer to Wilson as a “country club Republican,” owns a pair of condominiums worth more than $500,000 overlooking the golf course at one of the country’s tonier resorts, La Costa Hotel & Spa.

Feinstein Backs Off

Most recently, there was the announcement from San Francisco that former Mayor Dianne Feinstein, one of the state’s best known Democrats, refused to endorse McCarthy because he opposes her plan to make San Francisco the home port of the battleship Missouri.

But Shrum said the campaign is right on target. He said he is confident that McCarthy will meet his fall goal of $9 million, even though only $2.4 million has been raised thus far.

While Shrum said that he is not troubled by the campaign’s failure to take to the airways at this stage in the race, others in the McCarthy camp are frustrated by their inability to respond to what they see as Wilson’s deceptive TV advertising.

They are particularly angry about a recent commercial that lauds Wilson’s role in Congressional efforts to combat drug crime.

The commercial focuses on legislation that was passed two years ago, following the cocaine-related death of college basketball star Len Bias.

Many Senators Helped

Among its many provisions, the sweeping law set harsher penalties for drug pushers and authorized $1.7 billion for law enforcement agencies and drug treatment programs. The legislation was made up of contributions from dozens of members of Congress.

Wilson’s commercial, however, focuses on four provisions of the legislation and refers to it at one point as “his new law.”

The ad depicts Wilson striding purposefully down the steps of a government building as a narrator intones:

“The drug criminals don’t get the breaks here anymore,” the ad says, “because one senator made good his promise.”

Aides to U.S. Sen. Robert Dole, who coordinated the work of Republican senators on the legislation, said Wilson’s staff wrote one of the four provisions mentioned in the commercial--a ban on selling drug paraphernalia through the mail--and assisted in two other areas.

No Substantive Role

But Wilson’s ad also talks about a provision of the law--imposing tougher penalties on drug offenders--with which the senator did not play a substantive role, according to Dole’s staff and to the person on Wilson’s staff, Ira Goldman, who worked most closely with the anti-drug legislation.

The ad does not say that Wilson wrote the provision. But by mentioning it immediately after using Wilson’s name, McCarthy aides said, the ad insinuates authorship.

“The ad was clearly designed to imply that he wrote this provision. That is demonstrably and unequivocally false,” says a critique of the ad written by a McCarthy staff member.

Bill Livingston, Wilson’s Washington-based press secretary, said he was not familiar with the campaign commercial but said that Wilson was extensively involved in shaping the drug law and could claim a share of the credit for it.