CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS ASSEMBLY DISTRICT 37 : Pugnacious Wright Faces Toughest Reelection Fight

A few years back, Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) displayed a poster in her Sacramento office that summed up her pugnacious political style with terse eloquence:

“It’s Better to Be a Stomper,” it proclaimed, “Than a Stompee.”

In her five terms in the Legislature, the 60-year-old Wright--a car mechanic’s daughter from the hard-coal country of eastern Pennsylvania--has earned a reputation as an aggressive, blunt-spoken conservative who rarely retreats from a political street fight.

Now Wright is trying to stomp out the strongest primary election challenger she has faced since winning her 37th Assembly District seat in 1980: Hunt Braly. The 35-year-old Braly is a top aide to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), a longtime Wright antagonist.

The Wright-Braly battle has emerged as one of California’s few hotly contested legislative primaries this year.

Braly has made ethics a central theme of his campaign, spotlighting Wright’s well-publicized efforts to intervene with law enforcement authorities on behalf of her daughter, Victoria. The younger Wright faced jail or loss of her driver’s license after running up 27 traffic tickets--24 for speeding--over seven years.

Braly also has tried to portray Wright as having political ties to liberal Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco)--the campaign equivalent of accusing someone of devil-worship in Wright’s conservative, GOP-dominated district, which sprawls from northwestern Los Angeles County to Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Braly launched his campaign last year not long after Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury concluded, following a 10-week investigation, that Wright had engaged in a “clear pattern” of trying to obtain special treatment for her daughter and herself with local police, judges and state Department of Motor Vehicles officials. However, the district attorney said Wright did not commit any prosecutable offenses.

Not surprisingly, Wright and Braly have sharply differing interpretations of whether her actions were ethical.

Wright says she did not commit any ethical violations because she gained nothing material by trying to help her daughter.

“I think the way the voters see ethics is whether or not we’re being influenced or whether we’re putting money in our pockets, based on the special interests that come before the Legislature. . . . I am ethical. I’ve never taken money,” she said.

But Braly says Wright acted as if she were “above aspects of the law and social norms the rest of us have to abide by.”

He added, “The sole problem I have is that she hasn’t recognized what she did was improper and said she won’t do it again. We don’t need back-room politicians making deals with judges to settle legal cases.”

The candidates’ personalities present almost as much contrast as their disagreement on ethics.

Bespectacled and small-framed, Braly is the product of an upper-middle-class San Diego family that built a thriving business as distributors of vending, water-softening and washing machines. A USC and Loyola Law School graduate, he is known as a bright legislative technician, cool and lawyerly in style.

But associates also describe him as aloof and disinclined to engage in the schmoozing that lubricates politics.

By contrast, Wright is a mingler extraordinaire, a glad-hander who haunts political potlucks and installation dinners from one end of her far-flung district to the other.

Braly’s hammering at the ethics issue clearly has touched a nerve with the incumbent. “He’s an annoyance. God, is he an annoyance,” she said.

Braly, meanwhile, has found the ethics theme can be a double-edged sword. He also has battled allegations he claims are being orchestrated by Wright.

In March, Stephen R. Frank, a Simi Valley public affairs consultant and avowed Wright supporter, accused Braly of advocating the legalization of marijuana in 1980 when he headed a college Republicans group. Braly denies the allegation.

Last month, another Wright supporter, Carl Olson, said Braly was involved in a GOP youth organization that co-sponsored a 1978 Los Angeles rally to drum up opposition to a failed ballot measure that would have banned homosexuals from teaching jobs. Braly said he had “nothing to do with” the rally, although he opposed the initiative.

Wright said her campaign had nothing to do with the allegations, and Frank and Olson denied they were acting on her behalf.

But Braly described them as “surrogates” for Wright, whom he accused of instigating a “slimy smear campaign” against him.

“She thinks if she can convince the voters that we’re both no-good sons of bitches, they’ll vote to keep in the son of a bitch they know better,” he said.

Although both candidates view themselves as conservatives, Braly has taken positions on some high-profile issues that would please many moderates and liberals.

For example, Braly supports abortion rights, while Wright does not. Wright voted against a recent bill imposing a 15-day waiting period on the purchases of rifles, but Braly said he supports such delays, designed to allow background checks for criminal records or mental problems.

Despite the fact that he is challenging a GOP incumbent, Braly has fared reasonably well in his fund-raising efforts, drumming up $123,000 between the beginning of 1989 and the campaign reporting period that ended March 17. But Wright still maintains a heavy edge, taking in $277,000 in the same period.