Area’s Political Hired Guns Load Up for Future Battles

The polling machines have been tucked away for another year, candidates have dropped out of sight and the heated campaign rhetoric, like an unruly fire in a furnace, has been dampened to a slow burn. ‘Tis the season to be nonpolitical.

But political consultants, as with retailers and mailmen, are just getting busy again. “This is the season when everybody’s signing up (for next year),” says veteran Covina consultant Robert Gouty, who has already booked a state senatorial candidate, a would-be San Bernardino County sheriff and a challenger for state controller. “This is when it all starts.”

With its patchwork of small communities, the San Gabriel Valley has not been, until recent years, prime territory for behind-the-scenes strategists such as Gouty, who has worked out of a Covina office for the last 24 years. Politics in the region tend to focus on mayoral and city council elections, consultants say, and the money isn’t there.

“There are many more consultants in the San Fernando Valley (most of which is part of the city of Los Angeles),” said Pasadena consultant Nat Read. “On the Westside, there are layers of them.”

But the political pros are, of necessity, beginning to take a closer look at the San Gabriel Valley, with its rich lode of 650,000 voters. Some of the old assumptions about the region--as a homogenous enclave of blue-collar homeowners who are of secondary concern to the glamour candidates for state office--are beginning to die, consultants say.

“Think of it,” said George Pla, campaign manager for Democratic elected officials, such as U.S. Rep. Matthew Martinez (D-Montebello) and state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), from heavily Latino communities along the Pomona Freeway. “Tom Bradley lost the gubernatorial election in 1984 by 140,000 votes. If he had campaigned in the San Gabriel Valley, he would have been governor.”

The political pros who operate in the region are a varied bunch, street-smart and instinctive for all of their reliance on polls and voting data, and undaunted by big challenges.

Few enjoy the battle as much as Gouty, 59, a short, round man with a thatch of gray hair and an instinct for the jugular, who has guided many of the region’s conservative Republican legislators into office.

It was Gouty who counseled Rep. David Dreier (R-La Verne), in his first successful congressional campaign in 1980, to pound Democratic incumbent Jim Lloyd for alleged ties to a controversial landfill in the district. In 1978, Gouty drew up a withering attack on John L. E. (Bud) Collier, the elderly Republican incumbent in the 42nd Assembly District, ultimately capturing the seat for Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia). Gouty’s direct-mail campaign in 1966 for William Campbell (now a state senator, then a candidate for the Assembly) forced Democratic incumbent Philip Soto into damaging verbal flubs.

Those who have been Gouty’s targets have called him a “smear artist” or a “dirty trickster.”

“He’s basically done attack campaigns,” said Pla, who beat Gouty the only time the two went head to head, in a 1982 congressional campaign won by Martinez. “Just put mud all over somebody, and sometimes you’ll beat him.”

But supporters of Gouty, a specialist in direct mail whose clients have included former Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, can’t say enough about his political instincts. “He’s probably one of the most talented people around,” said Mountjoy, who continues to employ Gouty in his Assembly campaigns. “He’s a guy who wants to win more than he wants the money.”

Next year will be a busy one, says Gouty, whose modest office is adorned with framed pictures of gorillas. (“You’ve got to see something beautiful once in a while,” he said playfully.)

In 1990, Gouty will be working for, among others, Matthew Fong, Secretary of State March Fong Eu’s son, who is running as a Republican for state controller; San Bernardino County Undersheriff Dick Williams, who is running for sheriff, and Diamond Bar Councilman Gary Miller, one of a slew of potential candidates for Campbell’s state Senate seat.

In person, Gouty is far from a solemn ideologue. He even takes swipe or two at politicians who introduce high-minded causes into political campaigns (“Aristotle never could have gotten through a primary.”). He tells a few battle stories, then pauses to take a call from a Republican official.

“We got to talk,” Gouty said energetically into the telephone. “We’ve got problems. Bad things. It’s let’s-kill-each-other time, you know? Slaughter the children and all of that. Let’s get together.”

As do other political consultants, Gouty sees the San Gabriel Valley as undergoing seismic demographic changes, with middle-class Latinos taking control of the politics of the southern cities and Asians five or six years away from having a major impact.

“By 1992, I think there will be another (Latino) congressman between East Los Angeles and the southern corridor (of the San Gabriel Valley),” he said.

But, he adds happily, there’s still a bedrock of Republican strength along the foothills--”from Glendale to Claremont.”

These are Republicans by registration, Gouty cautions, but not necessarily voters who dutifully push the Republican levers year after year. “They’re hard-working people, homeowners,” he said. “Their homes are a big prize to them. The economy looks good to them, and they’re making long-term plans.”

A lot of them are yuppies, Gouty added. “The yuppie dynamic is playing a part in San Gabriel Valley politics. People want to live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, put their kids in child-care centers, pay for those (BMWs).”

But they don’t abide by much of the classic conservative program, he says.

For one thing, many of the region’s Republicans respond to environmental concerns, even at the cost of alienating Big Business. When conservative politicians such as Dreier, a leader in the campaign to close down the BKK landfill, began talking like card-carrying members of the Sierra Club, some “hard-line conservatives” were shocked, Gouty says.

“That was from the time when things were all black and white, and environmentalists were seen as just a bunch of tree-huggers and daisy-sniffers,” he said. “Cliches are fine, but you’ve got to go out and relate to people too.”

Gouty’s pragmatism tells him to avoid extreme positions and extremists, such as abortion rights activist Randall Terry. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “conservatives don’t like people raising hell and getting carted off by the police. It reminds them of the Vietnam War and the hippies.”

Born in St. Louis, Gouty has led a peripatetic life, working in a variety of newspaper and radio jobs in the South and the Midwest. “I was fired from most of my jobs,” he said. “I had to go to work for myself, because nobody could tolerate me.”

Gouty has been through three divorces and an annulment, which he ascribes not to politics but to his own orneriness. In the mid-1960s he stumbled accidentally into Covina. “I came out here to do some film writing,” he said. “I saw a house I liked and bought it.”

He discovered an area full of politicians, many of them trained in the municipal governments of the San Gabriel Valley’s little cities, many in need of advisers who could teach them how to win the big elections.

Despite the funny stories he tells, such as the one about Campbell attacking an opponent for supporting legislation that permitted baby chicks to be dyed, Gouty takes a harsh view of his profession.

“Politics is not a place for shrinking violets,” he contends. “You got to get in there and do what you have to do. You’re not out there to make friends. Every time you beat somebody, you make an enemy.”

Gouty himself has never been bitten with the candidate bug. The idea of running for office, he says, is repugnant to him. “There’s an old saying: ‘If you need a bartender, hire a Mormon,’ ” he said. “Never put someone who likes the stuff in charge of the bar.”