How to Win by Simply Staying Quiet

Sometimes in politics, you can win by keeping quiet.

That’s the story of the surprise approval by Los Angeles County voters last month of Proposition C, increasing the sales tax from 6 1/2% to 7%. The increase, which goes into effect April 1, is expected to bring in more than $400 million a year for commuter rail lines, bus service and highway improvements.

You may not have been aware that Proposition C was a tax increase until you looked at the ballot in the polling place. If so, you were a victim of the campaigners’ strategy: Campaign managers usually beg for news coverage. Here, the game was just the opposite.

The tax increase itself was hatched in the Los Angeles City Hall office of Mayor Tom Bradley. Bradley took the proposal to the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which voted in August to put it on the November ballot. It went on the ballot clearly labeled tax increase. But that’s just about the only time you saw that ugly phrase.

Credit the campaign strategy team of Paul Mandabach and Richard Maullin for that.

Maullin, a pollster, is the political radar for Neil Peterson, executive director of the transportation commission. Peterson hires Maullin to sample public opinion before he makes an important move. For instance, Maullin’s polls showing that the public was worried about security helped persuade Peterson to use sheriff’s deputies, rather than the Rapid Transit District police, to guard the new Long Beach-to-Los Angeles Blue Line.

Maullin began in politics with Jerry Brown’s campaign for governor in 1974. He was a mysterious presence then, lurking the background, avoiding the press, one of the conspiratorial young Brownies who felt the best thing to do with reporters was mislead them.

Mandabach is comfortable with that approach. He’s an advocate of the new “no coverage” school of campaign management. No press conferences. No phone calls to reporters, cajoling them to write a story. No publicity handouts.

If there had been press conferences, Mandabach explained to me this week, “in every story, the reporter would have mentioned it was a tax increase.”

The long, cluttered ballot helped, as did the absence of any substantial organized opposition. Mandabach and Maullin anticipated, correctly, that the press wouldn’t have the time, the space or the resources to give the Proposition C campaign much attention. Instead, they conveyed their campaign message through television commercials that didn’t mention taxes.

“By voting yes on Proposition C, we’ll soon have over 300 miles of passenger rail,” one ad proclaimed. It then flashed a map showing rail lines extending into the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, traditional havens of anti-government spending sentiment.

Rather than calling up her old political reporter pals, campaign publicist Bobbie Metzger worked up articles for the newsletters of organizations backing Proposition C, such as the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Such newsletters are important in today’s low-turnout elections, when victory often goes to those who get their supporters to the polls. That was certainly true with Proposition C, which won by just 14,502 votes.

It’s expensive campaigning, but business was happy to supply most of the $1.5 million raised for the effort. Among the donors were the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads. They had hundreds of miles of rights of way they wanted to sell to the transportation commission for commuter rail lines. And they had large landholdings around the rights of way, bound to increase in value because of commuter rails. Also contributing were corporations downtown that needed to bring workers in from distant suburbia.

The “no coverage” strategy wasn’t the only reason for Proposition C’s victory. A similar measure was approved by a substantial margin in Orange County, indicating voters are sick of gridlock. But looking at the closeness of the Los Angeles County vote, it’s hard to argue that the quiet that enveloped the campaign didn’t make the difference.

I know this won’t be much consolation to you when you start paying the higher tax in April. I’m sure you would have liked to have had the information before the election. If you had understood the Maullin-Mandabach team, you might have voted against Proposition C.

But I couldn’t write a column about this before the election. They fooled me, too. You see, there were so many other races, so much to write about, all those ballot measures. . . .

And nobody from Proposition C ever called me. How was I to know?