Stallings’ Campaign Strategy Is Simple: ‘Just Do It’ and Win

San Diego City Council candidate Valerie Stallings, a devoted six-miles-a-day runner now trying to master a different kind of race, could well take her philosophy of life from the advertising slogan of the Nike running shoes she wears: “Just do it.”

“That is my attitude,” Stallings said. “If there’s a job to be done, let’s just go do it. Of course, that attitude also gets you a lot of jobs no one else wants.”

In planning last year’s Pacific Beach Christmas parade, for example, Stallings realized that there were no takers on the organizing committee for the critical but unenviable job of cleaning up behind the horses along the parade route. So, Stallings volunteered.

Some of Stallings’ friends have half-jokingly suggested that parade photos showing her wearing a cowboy hat and bandanna, with shovel and garbage can in hand, should be included in her campaign brochures. After all, they say, what better way to show that Stallings is the best candidate to clean up the--uh, mess --at City Hall?

“Maybe that’s good training for anyone in politics,” Stallings said, chuckling.

During the parade, Councilman Bruce Henderson passed by Stallings in a car, but did not recognize the woman who pulled down her bandanna to smile at him. Since then, however, Stallings’ visage has made a lasting imprint on the 6th District councilman.

In challenging Henderson, Stallings took on another job no other else wanted. Facing a better-known, much better-financed incumbent, Stallings was a heavy underdog given little chance of even making an impressive showing in last month’s 6th District primary.

Instead, Stallings out-hustled Henderson and capitalized on voter antipathy toward him to achieve a stunning first-place finish in which she fell only 14 votes short of the majority needed for outright election.

Though Stallings outpolled Henderson, 9,601 votes to 9,481, the 146 write-in ballots drawn by City Hall gadfly Don Stillwell kept her just below the 50%-plus margin needed to avoid a November runoff.

Stallings’ supporters have agreed to pay about $2,500 for a recount this week, but local elections officials have said that her chances of picking up the extra votes needed for a conclusive victory are exceptionally slim.

An “aging triathlete” who began competing in the swimming, biking and running events in her mid-40s, Stallings used sheer tirelessness to compensate for her lack of name-recognition and money in the primary. After reporting to work in pre-dawn hours to keep her afternoons free for campaigning, Stallings typically walked door-to-door for several hours daily--a level of effort unmatched by Henderson, who conceded after the election that he “did not work nearly hard enough.”

“To have come so close was . . . excruciatingly painful,” said Stallings, a cancer researcher at the Salk Institute. “But I’m pretty resilient and bounce back from things fast. The runoff is a new challenge, but I see challenges as opportunities.”

That attitude, too, has served as a guiding tenet of Stallings’ life, one in which, by her own admission, she has often veered from the “safe, comfortable route.”

Born in Chicago, the 51-year-old Stallings was raised in New York, where two childhood lessons--the rewards of hard work and of standing up for one’s convictions--helped shape her life.

As a child, Stallings modeled with her mother, while her father was a radio announcer on the Jack Benny show and the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade.” Before she was 5, Stallings’ parents had divorced and her mother had remarried an advertising executive from Long Island, a widower with two children. The couple later had two more children.

Despite the family’s financial comfort, Stallings’ mother insisted that the children work during summer vacations. One year, they planted 2,500 strawberry plants on their 7-acre Long Island estate and sold the strawberries door-to-door, and another year planted and sold trees.

“Even though we were surrounded by affluence, my mother had grown up with a Depression-era mentality and felt you always needed to have a nest egg or something to fall back on,” Stallings said.

In the late 1950s, long before smoking had become a critical public health issue, Stallings’ stepfather gave up a coveted account for Pall Mall cigarettes as an act of conscience, deciding he could “no longer help advertise a product that endangered people’s health,” Stallings recalled.

“That gave me a certain sense of values and integrity, a sense that you stick to your word and stand up for what you believe,” she added. “Those are guidelines that stayed with me.”

After Stallings’ stepfather took early retirement and moved his family to Florida, she enrolled at Florida Southern College but, being “not particularly motivated,” dropped out after one year.

Returning to New York, Stallings resumed modeling and became a swimmer and dancer in a show featuring the former vaudeville team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. Later, in her 20s, Stallings moved between jobs as disparate as airline stewardess, an assembly-line worker at Hallmark Cards’ factory in Kansas--where she moved to marry a West Point cadet who became a lawyer--and a March of Dimes fund-raiser.

While visiting San Diego in 1970 to attend a March of Dimes conference that included a tour of the Salk Institute, Stallings said she experienced a pivotal “moment when my life’s calling” became clear.

Inspired by the institute and San Diego’s beauty, Stallings decided to leave Kansas and her marriage behind to become a Salk lab assistant in La Jolla. By her own choice, her son and daughter remained in Wichita and were raised by her ex-husband, whose nearby family provided the support system that she believed the children needed. Stallings never remarried, but has spent the past five years with her “significant other,” Duncan Campbell.

After moving to San Diego and while working at Salk, Stallings returned to college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from UC San Diego when she was 38 years old.

For the past 20 years, Stallings has worked with Dr. Robert Hyman, researching how the surface of normal cells differ from that of cancerous cells.

“Essentially, we’re asking questions that the body’s immune system asks itself,” Stallings explained.

Trying to chip away at her credibility, Henderson’s top strategists have privately questioned Stallings’ scientific credentials, dismissing her as a “test tube washer” who has resorted to resume puffing to call herself a cancer researcher.

Stallings readily acknowledges that Hyman is the “intellectual genius” who devises their research projects, describing herself as a “sounding board” who works side-by-side with Hyman on their experiments. The two also have co-authored a number of scientific articles, including one now in progress entitled “Co-ordinate Change in Phenotype in a Murine Cell Line, Selected for CD8 Expression.”

Hyman himself also praises Stallings’ contributions to his research, saying that she often “talks through the experiments with me and makes suggestions” and has developed an expertise on tissue culture over the years.

“She’s never said she’s a Ph.D., but she’s a very valued member of the team,” Hyman said. “I value her input tremendously.”

For someone hoping to pursue a career in politics, where immediate gratification is the currency preferred by elected officials and constituents alike, the laboratory--where experiments can last years and conclusive breakthroughs are rare--is an unorthodox training ground, Stallings concedes. Still, she believes that the skills vital in her current job are transferable to public service.

“It teaches you patience and the importance of staying focused on your goals,” Stallings said. “In basic research, you pick away at knowledge and develop an accumulation of information that maybe gives others the answers they need. There’s definitely a sense of being part of a bigger picture, of working together for common goals.”

A longtime Democratic Party activist, Stallings got her first close look at Henderson in the 1987 council campaign, in which she worked on behalf of one of his primary opponents, Paul Johnsen. Stallings came away singularly unimpressed with Henderson’s talents, confident that she could do a better job and determined to run against him four years hence.

“What he’s done on the council certainly hasn’t changed my mind,” Stallings said. “He’s an obstructionist who seems more interested in blocking things than getting things done. He’s all smoke and mirrors, a grandstander who talks a better game than he plays.”

However, when council boundaries were redrawn this year, Stallings found that her home was in Ron Roberts’ 2nd District, and tentatively made plans to enter that race. Last spring, however, she moved to Bay Park to be back in the 6th District, prompting Henderson to label her a carpetbagger and political opportunist “willing to run wherever her U-Haul takes her.”

“It’s not like I dropped in here from the moon,” Stallings responds. “I just moved from one side of the freeway to the other.”

Since the late 1980s, Stallings has served on both the Pacific Beach Town Council and Planning Committee. She also is active in a wide range of other organizations, including the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, the University of California’s Alumni Assn. board of directors, Citizens Coordinate for Century III and the steering committee of the mayor’s Christmas shelter for the homeless.

Describing Stallings as “thoughtful and conscientious,” Planning Committee Chairman Jim Magot said that she has often been a voice of moderation on that panel.

“She takes a pretty pragmatic approach and always is interested in getting enough information before making decisions,” Magot said.

On the planning committee, Stallings has differed with Henderson’s council votes on several high-profile issues, including proposals for a 174-bed beachfront hotel in Pacific Beach and a controversial council-approved downzoning plan pushed by Henderson.

While Henderson opposed the hotel, saying there was insufficient public benefit to justify the surrender of valuable public easements, Stallings favored it as a means of cleaning up a blighted area near the Promenade shopping mall.

Though Stallings has been strongly endorsed by the Sierra Club and other major environmental organizations, Henderson--rated by the same groups as having the council’s worst environmental record--cites that difference to support his argument that such groups rely on “selective eyesight” in judging candidates.

Similarly, Henderson criticizes Stallings for opposing his plan to reduce future density in Pacific Beach. To protect single-family neighborhoods from an influx of apartments and condominiums, Henderson’s plan prohibits property owners from building more than two homes on an average-sized lot, half the number formerly allowed.

“She willing to destroy single-family neighborhoods and allow higher density, and she’s the big environmentalist?” Henderson asks mockingly. Stallings, though, contends that she did not differ with Henderson’s goals as much as she did the “divisive manner” in which he pursued them.

To date, Stallings has waged a campaign long on criticism of Henderson’s record but noticeably short on alternatives of her own, and has displayed spotty familiarity with major city issues.

In an interview last week, for instance, Stallings admitted that she did “not know enough” about so-called citywide impact fees--one of the major growth-control measures to come before the council in the past two years--to formulate a position. Approved but later rescinded by the council amid vehement protests from developers, the fees would compel builders to pay for roads, libraries and other public facilities necessitated by growth.

“I really haven’t thought about that,” Stallings said of the fees. “Anything I said would be based on total ignorance.”

To Henderson, such comments underline his contention that Stallings would be “pretty green” at City Hall and would require “months or years of on-the-job training.” Among Stallings’ partisans, however, her candor not only is refreshing in a profession whose practitioners are loathe to admit ignorance on anything, but also demonstrates that shoot-from-the-hip decisions are not her style.

“Valerie makes no pretensions that she knows everything about everything, as so many in politics do,” said her best friend, UCSD professor Shirley Strum, during a telephone interview from Kenya, where she is researching baboon behavior. (Stallings has visited Kenya seven times herself, including trips on which she supervised photographic safaris for the San Diego and St. Louis zoos.)

Stallings’ reticence, Strum suggested, is traceable to her scientific training, and would be a valuable attribute in elective office.

“Her attitude is, if I don’t know enough about an issue to have an educated opinion, I’ll go out and find someone who can inform me,” Strum added. “She understands the value of having enough information before making decisions.”

Similarly, State Sen. Lucy Killea (I-San Diego), a close friend and frequent running partner of Stallings, characterizes her as “a person of action who also knows how to listen and learn by absorbing from others.”

“There are a whole lot of politicians who don’t know how to do that,” Killea added.

Even with the closer scrutiny that the runoff campaign will bring, Stallings recognizes that she will remain a relatively unknown commodity to many voters--a gap that her absence at a handful of post-primary forums, termed “the Stallings stall” by the Henderson camp, has done nothing to close. In her absence, Henderson plays video tapes of Stallings’ remarks at previous forums--creating what one top Henderson aide dubs the “Is it Memorex or is it Valerie campaign?”

Stallings, however, contends that she skipped those meetings, not because, as Henderson suggests, she fears that added exposure will expose her flaws, but rather because they were arranged by Henderson backers and “stacked to make me look bad.”

“We’re not going to be foils for Henderson’s clowning and let him decide what we should do in our campaign and when we should do it,” said Tom Shepard, Stallings’ campaign consultant. “If he wants to act like a fool, let him.” Stallings, meanwhile, emphasizes that she and Henderson will make a number of joint appearances later in the campaign.

“Before this is over, Bruce Henderson is going to know more about Valerie Stallings than he wants to,” Stallings predicted. “If the primary showed anything, it showed that more people may know more about Henderson than about me, but they don’t care much for what they know about him. The primary was pretty much an anti-Bruce thing. But I think the runoff will be as much pro-Valerie as ‘goodby Bruce.’ ”