GOP Rivals Wind Up Campaigns With Spate of Poison-Pen Mailers

Candidates in the most hard-fought Republican Assembly and congressional primary races in recent South Bay history threw their final punches this weekend, flooding the mail with last-minute appeals and a new round of attacks.

The eleventh-hour campaigning was particularly intense in the 51st Assembly District, where incumbent Assemblyman Gerald N. Felando (R-San Pedro) is up against a well-financed challenge from Deane Dana III, son of the Los Angeles County supervisor.

Ties to Commercial Fishing

Felando and Dana blitzed Republican households in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Lomita and the Palos Verdes Peninsula with mailers seeking the advantage in a race that both sides call very close.

Staffers from Assembly Republican offices in Sacramento were sent to Torrance to walk precincts on Felando’s behalf. Meanwhile, a group of sportfishermen who object to Felando’s longstanding ties to commercial fishing interests handed out leaflets in the beach cities that attacked the assemblyman for supporting gill-netting off Southern California.

The volume of late political mail was so heavy that it slowed delivery Saturday. A supervisor at the Palos Verdes Peninsula post office said the amount of mail was double the norm. “It’s literally flooded us the latter part of the week, and we have serious concerns about Monday,” the official said.

Households in the area received multiple mailers Saturday from both the Felando and Dana campaigns.

Felando continued to hammer at his opponent, saying in a mailer that Supervisor Dana is trying to buy his son a job with a “$1-million smear campaign.” Dana responded with a new mailer that says Felando has taken $1.5 million from corporations and other special interests during his 10 years in the Assembly.

Defense to Recall Threat

Last-minute mail was also generating controversy in the 42nd Congressional District, which runs from Torrance around the Palos Verdes Peninsula across a strip of Long Beach to northwestern Orange County.

Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, a leading contender for the congressional seat, angered her rivals by using funds from her county campaign committee instead of her congressional campaign to send a mailer to voters in her supervisorial district.

The four-page piece offers her defense to a threatened recall effort by Orange County slow-growth advocates, who are angered over her votes for development projects this year. Her support for development has become an issue in the congressional race.

The recall is “shameful and it’s wrong,” Wieder’s mailer states. “And this is one public figure who is not going to tolerate it any longer.”

But Stephen Horn, former president of Cal State Long Beach, filed a lawsuit Friday and filed complaints with the state Fair Political Practices Commission and the Federal Election Commission, questioning Wieder’s campaign finances.

“The only thing shameful and wrong in this campaign is the absolute fraud being perpetrated by Supervisor Harriett Wieder,” Horn said.

In the lawsuit filed Friday in Westminster Municipal Court, Horn sought a court order to force Wieder to make a “full disclosure of campaign expenditures and contributions” before the election. Horn contends that Wieder is using funds raised for the county supervisorial elections to benefit her congressional campaign.

Jeff Wallack, Wieder’s campaign manager, said the failure to report some expenditures was “a simple clerical error” by her county campaign committee.

Two other major candidates in the race, former White House advance man Andrew Littlefair of Torrance and ex-presidential speech writer Dana Rohrabacher, were sharply critical of Wieder’s use of money from her county campaign committee to send a mailer just before the primary balloting.

Littlefair said voters receiving the mailer will assume that it is related to her congressional campaign.

“It’s a tricky, deceitful piece of mail,” he said. “You know that Harriett Wieder is running for Congress. You would think this just one more campaign piece.”

But Littlefair conceded that sending out the anti-recall mailer was “very clever,” particularly because the recall petitions are not in circulation yet.

Rohrabacher said anti-recall piece was clearly designed with the congressional race in mind. “The timing obviously indicates that the intent of this piece is to affect the outcome of the congressional race,” he said. “Otherwise, she would have waited until after Tuesday.”

He said Wieder’s use of county campaign money was “clearly an attempt to circumvent the (federal) law” that prohibits corporate money in congressional campaigns. Corporate contributions are illegal in federal elections, but California places no limit on corporate donations in state and local races.

“I just look at it as a ploy to evade the law,” Rohrabacher said. “If it doesn’t violate the letter of the law, it violates the spirit of the law that prevents use of corporate money.”

Political consultant Harvey Englander, who is running Wieder’s defense against the recall, said the mailer was sent to 101,000 households in her supervisorial district, including registered voters of all parties. Under the law, Wieder may use her supervisor’s campaign fund to defend herself against a recall, he said.

Englander said the mailer cost about $20,000 and is labeled on the back as being paid for by her supervisorial committee.

“If our goal was to impact the congressional election, why didn’t we send it (only) to Republican households and save a lot of money?” Englander said.

Englander added that there was an attempt to time the letter to Tuesday’s election because there had been rumors that recall organizers were going to collect signatures for their petition at polling sites.