ELECTIONS : 37TH ASSEMBLY DISTRICT : Wright, Braly Make Last House Calls : Incumbent: The lawmaker canvasses Simi Valley neighborhoods in an effort to counteract a controversy over her intervention on behalf of her daughter’s driving record.

“Hi, I’m Assemblywoman Cathie Wright,” the politician said, reaching to shake the hand of a woman planting marigolds and petunias in her front yard.

“Cathie Wright!” said Elena Koenka, her face lighting up in recognition. When Wright had delivered her spiel and moved on to the next Simi Valley house, Koenka said she recognized the assemblywoman’s name from the controversy.

“Her daughter has been in the news lately,” she said. “It makes her name stick in my mind.”

Koenka, an undecided Republican voter, said she wasn’t sure whether Wright’s attempts to intervene with law enforcement authorities on her daughter’s behalf were enough to sway her vote one way or another.

“I’m a mother; I don’t know,” she said. “I might help my kids the best way I could, as long as I didn’t break any laws. . . . It was nice to see that she cares enough to stop by.”

Wright (R-Simi Valley) took her reelection campaign to the voters’ doorsteps Saturday in an attempt to overcome the lingering controversy over contacting authorities about her daughter’s poor driving record.

Wright has been walking precincts for the past six weekends of her campaign. An inveterate schmoozer, each personal contact appeared to bolster the spirits of the assemblywoman, who faces the strongest primary election challenge since she won her 37th Assembly District seat in 1980.

Hunt Braly, an aide to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), has hammered Wright over the ethics of a public official contacting authorities in an effort to help her daughter, who ran up 27 traffic tickets--24 for speeding--over seven years.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Wright said, setting her jaw and walking up another driveway. “In the political arena, you live in a fishbowl.”

She is unapologetic about her protective behavior that launched an investigation by Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury. In the end, Bradbury ended his investigation, saying she had committed no prosecutable offenses.

“For me as a mother, I would have done it whether I was in political office or not,” Wright said.

The assemblywoman is betting that voters won’t hold it against her. Just to make sure, she is going door-to-door to solicit voters to return her to Sacramento.

“I once lost an election to the Simi Valley City Council by 25 votes,” she said. “When you lose by 25 votes, you don’t leave anything to chance.”

About 50 supporters joined Wright on Saturday to canvass Simi Valley neighborhoods, hand out campaign brochures and assure each Republican voter that Cathie Wright’s assistance in Sacramento is only a phone call away.

Wright said she has been walking precincts for years. And her staff has refined door-to-door campaigning to a fine art: Each team of volunteers is handed a list of names and addresses for a specific precinct. All names on the list are registered Republicans. Next to each name is a notation on whether the voter is a Wright supporter, a Braly supporter or undecided.

“Here’s an undecided,” Wright tells a staff member, pointing at the list. “I take this one. You hit the other three.”

Roger Lundenburg, a General Motors employee, meets her at the front door of his Simi Valley home in his stocking feet. Arms crossed over his chest, he doesn’t appear impressed that his assemblywoman has taken the trouble to meet him.

Later, he explained his cynicism. “If things were going her way and she didn’t face any problems, I doubt she’d be out banging on doors,” Lundenburg said. He said that he has followed the controversy over Wright and her daughter and that he is still undecided on his vote.

“I can’t believe that a normal person like me could get away with something like that,” he said. “But I have to wonder. If it was my child, I might have done the same. Or, I might have thrown them to the wolves to teach them a lesson.”

Around the corner, Wright is invited into the house of a 25-year acquaintance, Elaine Reason, who is preparing fruit salad with a friend, Lois Graham, for a Hawaiian luau planned for Saturday evening.

They engage Wright in a spirited kitchen debate on the assemblywoman’s opposition to abortion and the trouble with kids these days, before getting around the topic of the campaign of Wright’s challenger.

“He sure has picked on me enough,” Wright tells her friend.

“He sure had,” Reason said.

“He’s kept your name in the paper, that’s for sure,” Graham adds. “But you know what they say, ‘As long as they spell your name right.’ ”