Outsider Image Put Navarro In

Economics professor Peter Navarro, a political long shot when the primary season began, has vaulted to the front of the mayor’s race with a reform theme that capitalized on anti-incumbent fervor and voter frustration with the status quo.

Navarro’s first-place finish showed that voters were ready for a credible outsider who could offer them an alternative to business as usual, much like the campaign of expected presidential candidate Ross Perot, political observers said Wednesday.

In placing first, with 38.2% of the primary vote, the founder of Prevent Los Angelization Now! vanquished San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, while other women candidates were surpassing fields dominated by men.

He conquered two Establishment Republicans, Golding and San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts, in a city noted for its Republican power structure.

And Navarro, a college economics professor, prospered as a “managed growth” candidate despite a recession that has decimated the building industry and led to a sharp rise in unemployment.

Navarro’s victory showed “the power of the single idea, delivered with precision, to the right audience, at the right time,” said political consultant Jack Orr, a bitter opponent of the new front-runner. “And everybody should have seen it coming.”

“You can beat City Hall, and I think Peter proves you can take City Hall if you’ve got the campaign and the candidate and you address the issues that people are concerned about,” said Peter Andersen, field coordinator for the Navarro campaign.

But now Navarro faces a much different challenge as he heads into a one-on-one contest with Golding and an expected confrontation with powerful construction industry interests whom he has battered in his rise to prominence.

“This is going to be a watershed year, when Susan Golding will be able to mobilize everyone but the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society,” Orr said. “The biggest effort taking place in the city of San Diego right now is how many independent campaigns will be run against Navarro, by how many independent groups.”

Golding, the two-term county supervisor who led in the polls from beginning to end, finished with 31.2% of the vote in the contest to choose a successor to retiring San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor. Roberts and three other contenders trailed the pack.

The totals could change slightly when 26,500 remaining absentee and write-in ballots are counted beginning today.

The runoff campaign began bitterly Wednesday when Navarro admitted on a television talk show that he had called Golding press secretary Nikki Symington a “pig” when the two engaged in a brief shoving match at Golden Hall Tuesday night. Navarro was captured on television forcing his way past the diminutive Symington as he attempted to join Golding, who was being interviewed.

Golding professed satisfaction at having survived the primary, and one of her campaign consultants promised Wednesday to puncture the notion that Navarro is a local version of Perot.

“Peter did a very successful job during the primary of costuming himself in the image of Ross Perot, the great outsider. My opinion is that is a fraud,” said Tom Shepard, the Golding consultant.

Voters admire Perot’s can-do attitude and record of accomplishment, highlighted by the rescue of some of his employees from Iran, Shepard contended. Navarro has accomplished nothing, he said.

“When you get down to this one-on-one contest, where voters are going to have to choose between the strength and weakness of two people, that masquerade is going to fall apart,” Shepard contended. “The truth is that Susan Golding is the only person who has accomplished something.”

Golding said, “When it is a race between Peter and myself, the citizens of San Diego are going to see very clearly who is best prepared to lead this city for the next four years and make sure that it has a progressive economy so that opportunities are available to everyone who lives in the city, whatever their ethnic background.”

O’Connor, still the city’s most popular political figure and no friend of Golding, doesn’t believe it will be that easy.

Navarro has “tapped into the frustration, and I think, right now, out is in and in is out. If you’re in politics and you have been there more than two terms, you’re out,” O’Connor said.

Several observers noted that Golding appeared to coast through the primary, offering voters little in the way of specifics and relying on her advantage as a well-known figure and vague promises of leadership to draw in voters.

“She has a strong personality (and) name recognition. She has everything going for her,” said Harlan Lewin, a San Diego State University political science professor who has followed the mayor’s race. “She supposedly fits in the mainstream of San Diego as a moderate Republican. Why didn’t she run away with it, especially in what they’re calling the Year of the Woman?”

Most analysts expect the city’s power structure to circle the wagons around Golding and contribute liberally to her campaign in an effort to defeat a candidate that their leaders openly fear and despise.

The trouble with that strategy is that it could validate everything Navarro has been saying about Establishment control over America’s sixth-largest city.

“She’s going to try to position herself as close to me as possible and then bury me with her developer money,” Navarro contended. “We know that they’re going to get dirty. The only question is whether Susan’s campaign is going to do it or whether her surrogates will.”

Regardless of the outcome in November, no one can deny Navarro’s remarkable rise from a pugnacious community activist to the city’s front-running mayoral candidate in little more than four years.

The 42-year-old UC Irvine professor of economics, a registered independent, came to local prominence as chief spokesman for two 1988 ballot initiatives that sought to impose restrictive numerical caps on the number of homes that could be built in the city and the county.

Both measures lost in the face of a building industry campaign that spent $2.5 million. In subsequent years, Navarro renounced building caps, founded PLAN! and failed twice more in attempts to rein in growth via the initiative process.

But the paradox of Navarro’s mayoral aspirations is that, with each defeat, his credibility grew along with his reputation as the city’s leading opponent of traffic congestion, pollution, runaway growth and vanishing open space.