NEWS ANALYSIS : Wounds, Some Self-Inflicted, Plague Golding’s Campaign : Politics: Opponents say the front-runner in the mayoral race will find it hard to recover on Election Day from political damage.

First it was Susan Golding’s stand on welfare cuts. Then her gaffe about a second runway at Lindbergh Field. Then the aide she hired during the county’s hiring freeze, the continuing scandal at Child Protective Services, a grand jury report on welfare fraud, a large severance payment to a departing county executive, and, most recently, her tax returns.

In just two months’ time, the county supervisor and mayoral candidate has been forced to explain all those episodes, making her media campaign so far an exercise in damage control and blunting her own message in newspapers and on television.

Although extra scrutiny from the press and potshots from rivals always accompany the frontrunner status that Golding enjoys in the high-profile mayor’s race, the two-term supervisor has been put in an unusually defensive posture for this stage of the campaign, analysts say.

“I think it hurts,” said political consultant David Lewis. “I don’t think it’s been a serious problem to date . . . (but) every time you get any kind of a negative story, it costs you to some degree.”

“It undermines her credibility,” added Chris Crotty, a political consultant and former aide to Mayor Maureen O’Connor. “It basically undercuts her message.”

The good news for Golding, however, is that many voters have not even begun to consider whom they want as San Diego’s next mayor and probably won’t until the final weeks before the June 2 primary.

That means that much of the negative publicity will have relatively little impact on voters at large, unless it surfaces again at the end of the primary campaign. Golding can still shape voter perceptions through paid advertising and the heightened exposure the race will receive near the end of May.

“Public attention will begin to focus slowly on the race,” said Tom Shepard, Golding’s campaign consultant. “The level of scrutiny inevitably must begin to equalize itself among the three major candidates.”

But the campaign so far has not gone as Shepard planned. In a Feb. 12 strategy memo obtained by The Times, Shepard outlined a two-month schedule of issue-oriented media events that Golding was prepared to present.

“The goal of these events will be to maintain the offensive in the campaign, keep the debate focused on the performance of the city and ‘earn’ as much free media exposure as possible as a vehicle for getting our message out,” Shepard wrote to two Golding campaign aides and three members of her supervisor’s staff.

“We need to seize the initiative and define the scope of debate as early as possible,” he added.

In an interview, Golding contended that “attacks always make better news. That’s why the media are printing . . . attacks” from rivals Ron Roberts, a San Diego city councilman, and Peter Navarro, founder of the growth management organization Prevent Los Angelization Now! Financier Tom Carter, the fourth major candidate in the race, has largely stayed out of the fray.

Shepard maintained that “the primary reason (for Golding’s position) is that she is perceived by everyone as the frontrunner and as a result has been subjected to attack almost constantly by both Peter Navarro and Ron Roberts.

“That’s their only strategy. They have decided the only way they have a chance of winning is to tear Susan down. I don’t see it having a significant impact on her,” he said.

Roberts strongly disagrees. “You are seeing an almost total collapse of county government,” he asserted at a news conference Wednesday, at which he criticized Golding for her part in the decision to give recently departed Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey a severance payment of nearly $68,000, even though Hickey left for another job in Florida.

The supervisors “have made a lot of bad decisions that unfortunately have all caught up with her,” Roberts said.

Certainly, Golding could not control the timing of scathing grand jury reports on the county’s Department of Social Services, which were released in February and April as the mayoral campaign picked up steam. One study sharply criticized county child welfare workers for unnecessarily breaking up families. The other highlighted fraud and corruption in county welfare payments.

But some of the criticism has been generated by Golding herself, or her staff. Roberts, Navarro and the press have made issues of a campaign strategy memo that urged cutting thousands off welfare for the publicity it would generate; an off-the-cuff Golding proposal to add a second runway to Lindbergh Field; a newly hired staff member in the midst of the county’s hiring freeze; the payment to Hickey, and Golding’s tax returns.

Golding has responded to all the charges. She said that welfare cuts were planned long before the memo, and that she needs the staffer to serve her constituents. Golding said the offer to Hickey was made with the understanding that he would be unemployed, and that she opposed the payment when she learned that he had landed a job.

She was forced to back-pedal less adeptly over the airport proposal--which would have directed air traffic over La Jolla and Pacific Beach--but finally held a news conference outlining her plans for the city’s aviation future.

And, when she released her tax returns--revealing that she paid no federal income taxes in 1990--a minor flap with the media ensued when Golding’s staff at first planned to show the documents only to three print reporters.

Nevertheless, Golding and her staffers note, she has been treated differently from other candidates. Two media organizations sent accountants to review her tax returns, scrutiny that no other candidate received.

Little probing has been done into Roberts’ four-year record on the City Council, while stories on Golding and her ex-husband, financier Richard Silberman, have been printed on several occasions. Silberman was convicted for his role in laundering what he believed was drug money.

Shepard claims that all Golding proposals “are dissected under a microscope” while her opponentsd’ ideas “are reported verbatim.”

Golding maintains that aggressive attacks inevitably hurt the attacker as well as his target. Because Roberts and Navarro lack her name recognition, Golding is confident that their strategy will backfire.

“When you throw mud, mud sticks to you,” Golding said. “You may bring the other person down a bit, but you bring yourself down a bit too. I don’t know if Ron and Peter can afford to do that right now.

“People hate what is going on. They hate the negativism. They want to respect their leaders again. They want to feel that somebody has a clear vision for the city and where it is going to go, and that is what I’m talking about everywhere I go.”

That is also part of Golding’s strategy. Throughout the campaign, her chief message has been that she is the kind of leader who, as mayor, will bring consensus back to the fractured City Council and direction back to a drifting San Diego. To engage in bitter back-and-forth with her rivals would detract from that theme by showing that she, too, is willing to engage in the kind of battle that has tarnished the council’s reputation.

Roberts’ consultants are banking on their belief that Golding is dead wrong about their attacks.

“There has never been a more vulnerable frontrunner, ever,” said John Whitehurst, one of Roberts’ consultants.

“She was the frontrunner for the sole reason that she had highest name identification,” Whitehurst said. “Once you get beyond name I.D., you see a series of negatives which makes the name I.D. crumble as a reason for a lead, and that includes both her personal life and the state of the county.”

Golding concedes that the media are not delivering her campaign message and not picking up on charges she levels at candidate forums, where media coverage is minimal. She is generally more aggressive at these debates and usually has the time to outline her platform.

Golding and Shepard promised that, beginning May 1, the supervisor will start to describe her vision for San Diego’s future. The schedule included in Shepard’s memo has been pushed back so that the information will be disseminated when voters are paying attention, Shepard said.

“It may take television (advertising), and it may take mailers, and it may take televised debates, but (my message) will get out,” Golding said.