Bernhardt Fighting an Uphill Battle : Recall: The councilwoman is struggling to survive a recall election. If she fails, one of seven council hopefuls on the ballot will replace her.

As she enters the final month of a recall campaign that few expect her to survive, San Diego City Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt is hoping to galvanize her supporters--and, more important, soften up her opponents--with a plaintive plea for fairness.

Characterizing her April 9 election as an uphill though winnable battle, Bernhardt is staking her political future on two problematical assumptions: that voters will buy her request “for simple decency and fairness” and that she can outsmart her opponents in identifying likely supporters.

The problem with the former assumption, political consultants argue, is that what Bernhardt’s opponents dismiss as her “Poor Me Speech” strikes critics as an evasive response to the controversies at the heart of the recall.

Even more formidable obstacles loom in the path of Bernhardt’s hopes. Scripps Ranch, which played a major role in Bernhardt’s 1989 victory, turned on her with a vengeance after she backed a controversial redistricting plan that shifted the community to another council district, eroding a significant portion of her political base.

Moreover, in a race in which no more than 15,000 votes are expected to be cast, recall leaders began the campaign with a list--to which Bernhardt does not have access--of 11,289 people who signed the petitions that qualified the issue for the ballot.

“If we even get most of the people who signed the petitions to vote, this ballgame is over,” said Bob Trettin, a consultant to the Recall Bernhardt Committee. “We know where our people are. All Linda knows is that a lot of the people who voted for her last time are against her this time.”

Bernhardt, however, professes confidence that her impassioned pleas for fairness will strike a responsive chord with enough voters to enable her to avoid the ignominy of a forced departure from City Hall.

Bernhardt hopes to persuade voters that she is being unfairly victimized by the same pro-development interests that opposed her when she won the 5th District seat by defeating two-term incumbent Ed Struiksma in 1989. Not content to wait until she faces reelection in 1993, her opponents have “manipulated and twisted the political process” in an attempt to oust her only 16 months into her term, Bernhardt argues.

“Fairness is the issue, and I think it’s one most people can relate to,” the 31-year-old Bernhardt said in an interview. “If people don’t like me, they can try to knock me off when I run again. That’s how the system is supposed to work, not trying to get rid of someone in the middle of a term that was won fair and square.

“The question is, what is so different about Linda Bernhardt? What have I done that is so different from the mayor, (Councilmen) Bruce Henderson, Bob Filner or any other elected official, past or present, so bad that it would merit a recall? When you ask average voters, they can’t answer that question.”

A simple majority vote will determine Bernhardt’s political fate in next month’s election. If she receives more than 50% of the vote, Bernhardt retains her post, rendering the outcome of a tandem election on possible successors moot. However, if Bernhardt is ousted, the candidate drawing the most votes in the other race--in which Bernhardt is ineligible--would serve the remainder of her four-year term that expires in December, 1993.

The seven candidates competing for that right include corporate lawyer Tom Behr; land-use planner John Brand; general contractor Les Braund; lawyer and part-time county planner Mike Eckmann; former congressional aide Dena Holman; former San Diego City Councilman Floyd Morrow, and credit union services manager Ken Moser.

Like those who hope to replace her if the recall succeeds, Bernhardt faces strategic challenges stemming from the unusual double-election format--arguably none more important than identifying those voters likely to participate in the first council recall election since the City Charter was approved early this century.

Amid widespread predictions that less than 20% of the 5th District’s 70,771 registered voters will cast ballots, Bernhardt and her would-be successors are focusing heavily on identifying so-called “high-propensity” voters.

With the recall being the only measure on the ballot, campaign consultants feel that only the most diligent voters--by some candidates’ definition, those who voted in at least seven of the last eight elections--will do so this time. To attempt to woo more casual voters, the strategists contend, would be a waste of time and money--both precious commodities in a campaign that did not become official until a Superior Court judge authorized it on Feb. 6.

“Targeting is the key to this thing,” said Tom Shepard, the consultant to Morrow, widely viewed as the candidate to beat if Bernhardt is ousted. “When a few thousand votes could be enough to win, it gets down to basics.”

Though Bernhardt campaign manager Tim Smith, like his counterparts in the other races, has no desire to tip his hand publicly, several major components of Bernhardt’s targeting strategy have become clear.

Her door-to-door politicking has focused on neighborhoods where she ran strongly in 1989, a plan based on the premise that the 13,832 voters who supported her then offer a potentially receptive audience again this year, the defections in Scripps Ranch and other areas notwithstanding.

Environmental groups, which are among Bernhardt’s most ardent supporters, also have rallied their members to her cause--at least partly out of self-interest, because her defeat would jeopardize the council’s tenuous pro-environmental majority. The Sierra Club, for example, has endorsed Bernhardt and used its newsletters to urge a “no” vote on the recall--a message reinforced by absentee ballots being distributed to the group’s nearly 2,000 members in the 5th District.

“Our position is that the recall process, as it’s being used here, is an abuse of the process,” Sierra Club Executive Committee Chairman Rob Langsdorf said.

Recall leaders, however, view it as a perfectly appropriate response to what they see as Bernhardt’s serious political transgressions.

“Situations like this are why there are recall laws,” argues Kathy Gaustad, the recall committee’s chairman. “Linda Bernhardt committed voter fraud. She lied and used the people of the 5th District for political gain.”

From the anti-Bernhardt group’s perspective, the councilwoman broke faith with her constituents by jettisoning Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa into another district, which they perceive as an effort to rid herself of those communities’ thorny growth problems. They argue that her credibility was further tarnished when, after her election, she began accepting contributions from developers, contrary to campaign pledges not to do so.

In her defense, Bernhardt stresses that the redistricting was governed both by a federal court order aimed at enhancing Latino voting rights and by the legal need to scale down her rapidly growing district to bring its population in conformance with the seven other districts.

“The complaint seems to be that everybody wanted to keep Linda Bernhardt,” Bernhardt said. “My district had to shrink. Somebody, somewhere was going to be unhappy.”

As to the campaign pledge that she is accused of breaking, Bernhardt notes--correctly--that it referred only to principals of development firms with pending projects or that were before the City Council within the past year, and was never intended to be a blanket ban on such donations. That distinction, however, got lost even in her own 1989 campaign brochures, one of which stated flatly that Bernhardt “refused to accept any campaign contributions from developers.”

“With Bernhardt, the story’s always changing,” charged recall consultant Trettin. “This ‘here’s what I meant’ routine of hers just isn’t going to fly. With her, the truth is a moving target.”

While Bernhardt and the recall committee have battled on one front, the seven other candidates have labored on another.

Despite the obvious link between the two races, there has been little interaction between Bernhardt and the seven challengers. Instead, the campaigns have been conducted like races being run on parallel tracks, with seven competitors trying to outdistance one another on one side, knowing that if the solo runner beside them crosses the finish line standing, their efforts will be meaningless.

For her part, Bernhardt pays scant attention to the seven other candidates, recognizing that her fate is in her own hands. Indeed, she does not need to worry about outpolling the contenders, only about persuading more people to vote “no” than “yes” on the recall.

In her public appearances, Bernhardt eschews even mentioning the other candidates, saying simply: “I don’t have to worry about talking about them because they spend plenty of time talking about and attacking each other.”

The challengers, meanwhile, have been relatively restrained in their public comments about Bernhardt, primarily for strategic reasons. Just as Bernhardt does not regard them as her opponent, they recognize that voters’ up-or-down decision on Bernhardt is largely independent of their own campaigns.

“We’re running for City Council, not against Linda Bernhardt,” Brand adviser John Kern said. Harsh criticism of Bernhardt by the other candidates, Kern adds, also could inspire a sympathetic backlash “counter to our interest.”

Others have resisted sniping at Bernhardt because of their hopes of attracting the “second-choice” ballots of Bernhardt supporters who will look to the other candidates as a political safety net, in the event that she does not survive.

“It’s a pretty high-risk strategy to attack Linda, because a lot of those ‘no’ (on the recall) people are going to be voting on the bottom half of the ballot, too,” said Eckmann, who finished fourth in the 5th District’s five-candidate 1989 primary.

Several candidates have tried to position themselves as a backstop to Bernhardt, none more aggressively than Braund, a member of the group Prevent Los Angelization Now (PLAN) who argues that his own growth-management policies are compatible with those of Bernhardt.

Describing himself as “a kind of insurance policy,” the 46-year-old Braund tells campaign audiences: “Vote your conscience on the (recall), but vote for me on the second part if you’re concerned about managed growth.”

Others have tried different ways to distinguish themselves from the pack.

For Morrow, that means underlining his lengthy political experience through the slogan “Because You Can Depend on Him.” A 58-year-old lawyer who represented the 5th District from 1965-77, Morrow has lost a succession of races in recent years, including campaigns for mayor (twice), City Council, state Board of Equalization and judge. Even in those losses, however, Morrow consistently ran strongly in Kearny Mesa and Linda Vista, where he has lived and worked for more than three decades. As a result, Morrow has a level of name recognition and a political base unmatched by any other challenger.

Behr, who has received roughly half of his contributions from development interests, has tried to soften that image by pointing to his service on the Scripps Ranch and Kearny Mesa planning groups. A 47-year-old lawyer for Solar Turbines, Behr also has cast himself as someone who already has fought and won for the district, noting that his lawsuit helped insure that the recall election would be held in the district that elected Bernhardt, not the new one created under last year’s redistricting plan.

Holman, a 36-year-old Linda Vista resident, jokes that “gender and substance” might distinguish her candidacy, a reference to the fact that she is the only woman among the challengers and has prepared detailed position papers on various issues.

Eckmann, meanwhile, argues that his 1989 candidacy should add weight to his current bid, often rhetorically asking: “Where were all these people who want to represent you now, then?” The 46-year-old Scripps Ranch resident also has seized on a gimmick that draws chuckles at forums, distributing his personal water bill, which shows major reductions over the last year, and challenging his opponents to prove that they, too, are “willing to lead by example.”

By his own admission, Moser, a 32-year-old Mira Mesa resident, has tried to stake out the “conservative niche” in the race by, among other things, reciting his doctrinaire conservative positions on issues such as abortion and gun control--topics beyond the council’s purview. Leaving no doubt about his philosophical bent, Moser said in an interview that he has solicited support from the 1789 Club, which he described as being similar to the National Rifle Assn., “only a little farther right.”

Contrary to the other candidates’ efforts to distance themselves from Bernhardt’s woes, Brand has highlighted the race’s raison d’etre through the slogan: “Leadership You Can Trust.” Saying that he planned to oppose Bernhardt in 1993, Brand adds: “All the recall did was move up my plans by 2 1/2 years.”

Like Braund, Brand, who turns 35 today, is concerned that their two names might be confused on the ballot--a problem that Braund has addressed by listing his first name in bigger type than his last on campaign brochures. One of five first-time candidates in the race--with Morrow and Eckmann being the only exceptions--Brand says simply that he expects any voter confusion to be “a wash” for both himself and Braund.

Inevitably, however, most public attention in the campaign will focus on Bernhardt’s battle for political survival. And if she is to win that fight, Bernhardt will have to find more voters like John Clay of Clairemont.

“I voted for Struiksma, but now that you’re in, I’m not sure they should recall you,” Clay told Bernhardt when she appeared on his doorstep recently. “Why conduct a recall? A recall is a dead waste of time. So what (if) she voted for redistricting? That’s politics. Leave her alone. If she screws up in 3 or 4 years . . . then you’ll get her at the polls.”

That perspective, Bernhardt says, is the one that she hopes most voters take to the polls next month.

“This whole thing is politics at its worst, and it’s my job to make sure that people understand that,” Bernhardt said. “I can accept that some people didn’t like me when I ran before and still don’t like me. That doesn’t mean my opponents should get an extra swing at me just because they missed the first time.”