The Task for the Party: ‘Believe Again’ : Democrats: State Chairman Angelides tries tough talk to restore the public’s faith. He takes shots at Bush, Seymour and Wilson.

Into the studio at San Fernando Valley talk radio station KGIL, where state Democratic Party Chairman Phil Angelides has just made his partisan pitch, came the voice of listener Steve from Los Angeles.

“Very lame,” pronounces Steve, a self-described lifelong Democrat. “The Democratic Party of 20 years ago is dead.”

Four calls and a handful of insults later, only Ann from Pacific Palisades has offered the least hint of praise. “Finally, the Democrats in California are waking up!” she said.

Even if it came at long odds, it was music to Angelides’ ears. Resurrecting California Democrats is precisely what he has in mind.

Eight months into the job, the lanky 38-year-old Sacramento developer has in the last several weeks tried to kick-start the party with pure adrenaline. He unleashed a blizzard of attacks on President Bush and Gov. Pete Wilson. He aired radio ads critical of appointed Republican U.S. Sen. John Seymour, drawing Seymour into a nasty public snit a full year before the 1992 general election. He fully expects to offend other Republicans shortly.

The gibes are meant as much for Democratic consumption as for Republicans. As Steve and other radio callers indicated, Angelides’ toughest task is persuading Democrats that there is a Democratic Party.

“The hardest thing is to get people to believe again,” Angelides said.

For good reason--things have rarely been this bad for Democrats. The party has lost five of the last six presidential races, most recently when Michael S. Dukakis was trounced by George Bush in 1988, and the prospects for success next year appear marginal.

In California, Democrats have lost the last three contests for governor. Last year’s defeat of Dianne Feinstein by Wilson was blamed in part on the party itself, which under former Chairman Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. delayed the start of its get-out-the-vote operation until six weeks before the election.

Party registration in California continues to decline, although Democrats still nominally outnumber Republicans. Less than half of all registered voters are Democrats, a post-Depression low.

Angelides does not spare Democrats as he places blame for the problems. Chief among his targets are unnamed Democratic elders on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, much criticized for sitting back as Republicans forced through the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

“It hurt,” he said of the Thomas hearings. “But it also energized. I said to people: ‘This is our party, not the party of people too tired to fight, out for their own interests.’

“It was like, after Dukakis and Thomas, how much humiliation is enough?”

On this day, one of the two a week that Angelides spends on the road in his guerrilla campaign for the party, the air is heavy with dismay, if not outright humiliation.

His first stop, the office of a prospective Democratic fund-raiser, finds Angelides griping more about his own party than at Republicans.

“We got comfortable, fat and lazy,” he said. He ticks off his plans for the coming year--a fund-raising operation that will send 8 million letters into California mailboxes by Election Day, 1992; focus groups to test advertising messages, targeting of voters and a $400,000 fund-raiser that was scheduled for Sunday with all six Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate. “Acting like Republicans,” he said pointedly of the party’s plan.

Yet, there and at a second stop with another prospective fund-raiser, questions center on past failures.

“The difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is that there was a Republican Party--and there wasn’t a Democratic Party,” said the second fund-raiser, who has spent decades helping Democratic candidates. He asked not to be identified.

Outside, having extracted promises of assistance from both men, Angelides said their reaction had been mild.

“It tends to be harsher than that,” he said. “It tends to be: ‘We run really crappy campaigns. What’s the problem?’ ”

None of this manages to dent Angelides’ perpetually upbeat demeanor. He looks younger than his 38 years, an unruly mop of dark hair and thick aviator glasses framing his face. He turns downright gleeful at the mention of Seymour, the appointed senator most recently in Angelides’ sights.

Their dust-up began when Seymour objected to a news conference Angelides held to publicize radio commercials criticizing the senator for his vote to confirm Thomas for the Supreme Court. Seymour was particularly upset when Angelides said racially divisive politics played by Bush--and acceded to by Seymour--had set the stage for the popularity of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who Saturday lost a runoff for governor of Louisiana.

Seymour sent a tart letter to Feinstein objecting to the characterization, prompting a second letter from Angelides to Seymour and another from Seymour to Feinstein. Seymour expects to meet Feinstein in the general election for his Senate seat and argued that Angelides was acting as her surrogate.

He called Angelides’ behavior “inexcusable” and “lacking in maturity and self-control.”

Angelides contends that he is just playing tough, as Republicans have for years.

“I feel we have to play really hard with these guys,” he said. “Issue differences aside, they have played rougher. . . . I feel like they’re bad and someone has to stand up to them.

“Sometimes you’ve got to scream at someone, hit them over the head with a 2-by-4 or punch them to get them to be civil,” he added.

While a great part of his role is to hammer at Republicans and laggard Democrats, Angelides also delivers a dramatic appeal to would-be loyalists. Angelides can deliver an address more bluntly--and in ways more appealing--than the party’s official candidates. Mostly, his speeches are triumphs of idealism over specifics.

At Thomas Jefferson High School recently, he apologized to students for what he said was the party’s diffidence toward young voters in past years. And he resurrected the call to action that invigorated Democrats a generation ago.

“We have been the political party that pure and simple fought for people,” he told the students, most of whom were Latino or black. “The right to eat in the restaurant you want, the right to live in the house that you want. That’s what civil rights is all about and that’s what the Democrats fought for!”

Fund raising, Angelides said, is picking up after a somnolent summer. But it will still be a stretch for the party to meet next year’s $7-million budget, which will finance coordinated campaigns for the presidency, Senate and legislative seats. By the end of one day last week, after two courtesy calls to fund-raisers, three radio shows and a few assorted meetings and receptions, Angelides summed up:

“Once you know where we are, what do we have to lose?” he asked. “The White House? The Supreme Court? The governorship? . . . Nothing!”