Charges of Complacency in Race Anger McColl

San Diego City Councilwoman Gloria McColl, who was beaten by fellow Republican Carol Bentley in Tuesday’s election for the right to represent the GOP in the 77th Assembly District, reacted angrily Thursday to criticism that she lost the race because of complacency.

“Complacency is not my operation,” McColl said. “You don’t receive the awards I have or been involved in things I have by being complacent. If anyone was overconfident, it was my consultants. . . . Getting their attention was very difficult.”

Reacting to Bentley Comments

McColl, in making her first comments since her defeat at the polls, was reacting to comments made by Bentley and her campaign consultant, David Lewis, that McColl took the election for granted because of her high name recognition, her Republican Establishment connections and her superior fund-raising potential.

Because of that, Lewis said, she didn’t take Bentley, a state legislative aide, seriously and ran a front-runner’s campaign.

McColl, in a telephone interview, bristled at the suggestion that she took the election lightly.

“My personal intuition told me there was a problem,” she said. “But my consultants kept telling me, ‘Why are you worried? You’re just a nervous candidate.’

“But there were problems. When you can’t get a mailer out, that means there are problems. When the candidate has to step in and take over the campaign, like I did, there’s a problem.”

McColl laid much of the blame for the defeat on her Sacramento-based consultant, Huckaby Rodriguez Inc. She said that, not only didn’t the firm identify Bentley’s surge in the district but that she was unable to contact them at all during the last two weeks of the campaign.

Gary Huckaby was unreachable for comment Thursday, but in an interview Wednesday he said much of McColl’s time during the primary was spent doing City Council work. He acknowledged that Bentley’s avalanche of mailers caught the McColl campaign by surprise. As recently as two weeks before the election, internal campaign surveys showed McColl with a commanding lead over Bentley, 46% to 16%, he said.

McColl also took on Bentley. “Carol’s people ran a very intense and hard-hitting campaign against me. They didn’t talk about issues, they talked about me.”

She said that Bentley made a point of publicizing it whenever McColl missed a candidates’ forum, a tactic McColl says she declined to use when Bentley missed a debate.

And Bentley, according to McColl, was perceived as the “underdog,” a fact played up by both Bentley’s campaign and the press. “Frankly, all of it is untrue,” McColl said.

“It really, really irritates me,” McColl said of the impression she said was left by her opponent and the press that she was so confident about victory that she didn’t work hard.