Local Elections : GOP Dark Horse Sees Light in Bates Scandal

As a Democratic incumbent in an overwhelmingly Democratic congressional district, Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) “probably couldn’t lose that seat even if he tried,” a San Diego political consultant said last summer.

“That district always was and always will be a Democratic district,” consultant Nick Johnson said at the time. “For Bates or any other Democrat to lose it is almost unthinkable.”

As the 44th Congressional District race enters its final week, the unthinkable has become thinkable.

A month ago Bates appeared headed for his fourth consecutive landslide victory in the southern San Diego district. Today Bates finds himself embroiled in a hard-fought, sharply negative race centering on sexual harassment allegations lodged against him by former female staffers.

Two former Bates aides have filed formal harassment complaints with a U. S. House ethics panel, and more than a dozen other current or former Bates staffers anonymously complained to a small Washington newspaper in late September that Bates habitually sexually harassed female employees and treated workers cruelly.

Gives Competitor New Hope

Although the House committee is not expected to decide whether to investigate the charges until next year, Bates’ Republican opponent, Rob Butterfield Jr.--whose flagging campaign was on political life support before the bombshell--contends that the allegations are serious enough on their face to give voters a compelling reason to oust Bates.

Bates has conceded occasional “careless behavior” on his part, but disputes most of the charges and accuses the Republicans of “trying to blow up a small thing into the crime of the century.”

Hoping to quell the political storm, Bates has repeatedly apologized over the past month for “flirting and kidding around” in ways that he admits were “sometimes inappropriate and unprofessional.” Gleeful GOP leaders, however, have done their best to keep the issue alive, recognizing it as the most potent weapon in Butterfield’s arsenal.

“A month ago, being realistic about my chances, I expected to lose,” said Butterfield, a 37-year-old lawyer. “Now, I not only think I have a chance--I think I’m going to win.”

Although others are not yet willing to go quite that far, Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the political maelstrom has shaken Bates’ aura of invincibility.

Largely ignored by the press, the race now is commanding substantial coverage--a boon for Butterfield and bane for Bates, because each story repeats the damaging allegations. The controversy also has inspired widespread public jokes and provided easy fodder for editorial cartoonists. Typical of the genre is a recent San Diego Union cartoon that illustrated Bates’ “hands-on experience” with a drawing in which he was shown pinching a startled female aide.

Acknowledging the changed political realities, Bates, who in early September said he planned to run a “bare-bones” $100,000 campaign, now plans to spend nearly $400,000, roughly three times more than Butterfield. Over the past several weeks, Bates has been raising about $10,000 a day, primarily from other Democratic congressmen and political action committees, with much of the money for TV and radio advertising.

“I’m feeling confident but I also realize that I have to run harder now,” Bates said. “A lot harder.”

Butterfield, meanwhile, has benefited from new-found interest from local and national Republican groups. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which was uninvolved in the race before the allegations, has since contributed about $50,000 to Butterfield, including funds used to purchase full-page newspaper ads and for 95,000 pamphlets detailing the sexual harassment charges. The San Diego consulting firm of Johnston & Lewis, known for its hardball politics, also took over Butterfield’s race in mid-October.

“Before, I couldn’t find an audience or get any attention,” Butterfield said. “Now, it’s like I’m running for president. . . Anything can happen now.”

Campaign Turned Negative

One thing that has already happened is that the race has become stridently negative, with both sides seemingly trying to outdo the other in sarcasm and name-calling.

Over the past week alone, Butterfield, besides keeping up his daily drumbeat on the harassment charges, accused Bates of receiving stolen property when the Democrat obtained a copy of a Butterfield brochure before it was mailed. In response, Bates called Butterfield a liar and, in his own mailers, described the GOP nominee as “the Dan Quayle of San Diego” and as having “more angles on the truth than a used-car salesman.”

Beyond the acrimony, an important distinction showing how the race’s dynamics have changed is that, before the sexual harassment charges surfaced, “everyone knew Jim Bates was the winner,” consultant Johnson explained,

“Now, they think he’s going to win,” said Johnson, who is working on Bates’ campaign. “I personally think he’s going to be OK. But there’s a small element of doubt that wasn’t there before.”

The only recent polls on the race have been conducted by the competing camps, prompting justifiable skepticism about the reported results. With that caveat in mind, Butterfield’s strategists say a poll taken three weeks ago showed him trailing Bates by only a 39%-34% margin. Bates said that his own poll last week showed him ahead of Butterfield, 53%-27%, though he conceded, “We know that’s going to tighten up.”

That Bates’ political future appears even marginally uncertain is a reflection of the magnitude of the controversy in the 44th District, which covers downtown and southern San Diego, extending from Linda Vista south to Otay, and also includes Lemon Grove, National City and Chula Vista.

Expressly carved out to be a “safe” Democratic seat by the Democratic legislators who controlled reapportionment after the 1980 census, the 44th District includes large concentrations of blacks, Latinos and other minorities who have given the Democrats a commanding 55%-32% edge among registered voters.

That demographic makeup has provided a safe political haven for Bates, a 47-year-old former San Diego city councilman and county supervisor who has never received less than 64% of the vote since capturing the seat in 1982.

By all conventional political yardsticks, this fall’s race was shaping up as another one-sided Bates victory, with Butterfield raising little money, doing limited campaigning and, in interviews and speeches, all but conceding defeat. A third candidate, Libertarian Dennis Thompson, also is on the ballot.

The complexion of the race changed overnight after a Sept. 26 front-page story in Roll Call, a weekly paper that specializes in Capitol Hill issues, alleged that Bates routinely sexually harassed and verbally abused his aides.

Bates either disputes or insists that he cannot recall most of the alleged incidents, and argues that other charges were exaggerated or misconstrued.

Calling the allegations “absolutely the worst thing I’ve had to go through” in a public career that began in the early 1970s, Bates has faulted himself for “doing the kind of kidding and joking that can be misunderstood.”

“I tend to be a person who has a sort of sarcastic sense of humor, who sometimes says or does things just to be different or shocking without really meaning anything by it,” Bates said. “In public life, you can’t do that and shouldn’t do that.”

Butterfield, however, has dismissed Bates’ apology and explanation as “just a political attempt to minimize the damage.”

“Jim Bates is trying to evoke sympathy by saying these were just surface things that were taken the wrong way,” Butterfield said. “But this is a pattern of behavior going back more than 15 years. It’s a little hard to believe that all these people (who made the allegations) are wrong and Jim Bates is the only one who’s right.”

Bates and his allies also have suggested that the charges are politically motivated, noting that, although they deal with incidents that allegedly occurred months or even years ago, they surfaced only six weeks before the Nov. 8 election. That theory was spurred in part by comments that Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) made at a Butterfield fund-raiser--held two weeks before the Roll Call story appeared--intimating that stories damaging to Bates would soon be forthcoming.

“If these things were so terrible, why wasn’t anything said at the time or immediately after they left the staff?” Bates asks. The answer, Butterfield argues, is that Bates’ former staffers feared negative repercussions even after they left his office for other Capitol Hill jobs or to work elsewhere.

Offering another perspective, consultant Johnson argues that Bates’ well-documented toughness toward his staff also helps explain why--and when--the allegations surfaced.

“I worked for Jim for a year and a half, and I’ll be the first to admit that he can be a very, very, very hard taskmaster,” Johnson said. “He demands 110% every day, and there are a lot of times when even that’s not enough. Jim Bates goes through employees like some people go through Kleenex. There were bound to be some people just waiting for a chance to pay him back. If you want to hurt a politician, what better time than just before an election?”

There are major differences between Bates and Butterfield in--in philosophy, background and policy goals, with Bates generally holding more moderate views on a wide variety of social, defense, environmental and economic issues. Those distinctions have been obscured, however, by the sexual harassment charges, which have thoroughly dominated debate and recent news coverage to the exclusion of all other issues--largely through Butterfield’s efforts.

“We’ve made no secret that this is the issue,” Butterfield consultant David Lewis said. “It goes to Jim Bates’ character and integrity, and whether he possesses the qualities that a congressman should have. Obviously, we think this shows that he lacks those qualities. So, yes, we’ve focused attention on that, and will continue to do that right through the election.”

An eight-page Butterfield mailer sent to voters last week recounts the sexual harassment allegations under the headline, “This newspaper is about another politician we trusted who has embarrassed us: Jim Bates.” Several anti-Bates editorial cartoons that have appeared in the San Diego Union and Tribune also are reprinted in the mailer below a headline reading, “If we elect Jim Bates again, the joke’s on us.”

After his campaign obtained an advance copy of the mailer from an unidentified source, Bates complained that it was “full of distortions, false information and outright lies.”

“How can he claim to have integrity when he lies like this?” asked Bates, who charged that the brochure distorted his voting record on a variety of high-profile issues ranging from the death penalty to congressional pay raises.

Butterfield, meanwhile, was more interested in questioning how Bates got the early copy of the brochure. Butterfield reported a theft to San Diego police and accused Bates of receiving stolen property, and Bates’ attorney sent Lewis a letter threatening legal action if the “false and defamatory material” were sent to voters.

In the last week, Bates sent three mailers of his own to voters, one of which features pro-Bates testimonials from six people--four of them women, including the president of the San Diego chapter of the National Organization for Women. The two other mailers are considerably harder-hitting. One shows numerous muddy footprints under the heading: “Rob Butterfield would rather sling mud than discuss the issues . . . “ The other brochure caustically attacks Butterfield’s purported shift in positions on a number of issues, saying: “Flip! Flop! Flip! Flop! Flip! Flop! That’s not the rain. That’s the sound of Rob Butterfield changing his positions again.”

Rallied Supporters

Although the monthlong controversy over the harassment charges has given rise to Republican optimism in the 44th District, it also has rallied Bates’ supporters.

“Now, we assume nothing, and maybe that’s not so bad,” said San Diego Democratic Party Chairwoman Irma Munoz. “Jim Bates has always been there for us, and now we’re going to be there for him. Before, some people might have thought, ‘Oh, he’s in, he doesn’t need us.’ But this guarantees that we’re going to work harder than ever for him.”

Similarly, last spring, the Sierra Club, a politically potent group that has always staunchly backed Bates, announced plans to target his race. Given Bates’ political security at the time, the offer seemed a bit like offering a $100 loan to Donald Trump. Now, however, the additional precinct walkers--a number that club officials say has grown, not decreased, amid the controversy--have risen in value.

Bates also has drawn support from a somewhat unlikely source: Libertarian candidate Thompson, who has labeled the harassment charges “unproven allegations” that should be taken “with a grain of salt.” However, Thompson’s impact in either shaping the debate over the charges or on the race’s outcome, appears negligible at best. When he ran in the 44th District in 1986, Thompson, the 49-year-old president of a local computer time-sharing company, received 1% of the vote, a showing that is not expected to substantially improve this year.

Trying to put the issue in perspective, Bates has repeatedly professed confidence that voters “won’t let this one thing . . . wipe out all the hard work I’ve done for the district.”

“I’ve done a lot over the past six years,” Bates said. “The voters will have to weigh this one thing against all those other things. . . As painful as this has been, I’ve learned from it and will be a better congressman and person as a result. I think most people will see it the same way.”

Not surprisingly, Butterfield offers a different perspective.

“I don’t think his record is anything to brag about to begin with, but, even if it were, these charges put it in a new light,” Butterfield said. “There are some issues that are so important that they do override everything else. To me, character and integrity are those kind of issues. If the voters agree, that’s bad news for Jim Bates.”