LOCAL ELECTIONS BOARD OF SUPERVISORS : Dana Dismisses Longtime Adviser, Hires New Team to Direct His Campaign

Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana, forced into a runoff election by the upstart campaign of Rolling Hills Mayor Gordana Swanson, has fired his longtime political adviser and brought in a new team to plot a different course for the November election.

The shake-up in the campaign comes after Dana’s surprising weakness in the June primary, in which he polled just 42% of the vote, far less than the 50% plus one vote need to win the election outright.

In response to his poor showing, Dana this week ousted Ron Smith and brought in hard-nosed political consultant Harvey Englander.

Smith, who rocketed to political prominence by successfully managing Dana’s underdog 1980 campaign for supervisor, has fallen on hard luck this year. His biggest campaign of 1992, Rep. Tom Campbell’s (R-Stanford) run for U.S. Senate, went down in flames. And on the same day, Dana was humiliated at the polls despite his $1-million war chest.

Englander, known for waging aggressive campaigns, has developed a specialty in recent years of salvaging sagging campaigns after a primary and gearing them up for a final showdown.

Englander was brought in to redirect the flagging campaign of Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who was locked in a bitter 1991 reelection contest with Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein. After a tough, personal campaign in which Englander focused on Korenstein’s bid to act as a Jesse Jackson delegate at the 1984 Democratic convention, Bernson won handily in the conservative and overwhelmingly white western San Fernando Valley district.

“The supervisor was looking for a new direction,” said Don Knabe, Dana’s chief deputy. Knabe plans to take a leave of absence from his job on the supervisor’s staff to manage the campaign with Englander operating as the consultant. “It will be a very aggressive campaign,” Knabe said.

“This campaign just needs a shot in the arm, or maybe lower in the anatomy,” Englander said. He added that he is planning to run a “positive campaign” but explained his philosophy this way: “A political campaign is a battle. There are winners and there are losers. Thankfully, I work for more winners.”

Smith said the parting with Dana, after three successful campaigns, was a mutual decision. Smith said he has been approached about managing a state initiative campaign later this fall and would not have time to handle it and the Dana race. “Plus, they wanted a new direction,” Smith said.

Gary South, manager of Swanson’s campaign, said the change in campaign consultants was predictable. “They’re desperate,” South said. “They can’t believe this happened to them. They were overconfident and arrogant.”

South said that Dana’s campaign theme of “Great Job Supervisor Deane Dana” was “moronic.”

Vandals and political tricksters had a field day with the signs and doctored some of them to read “Get a Job Supervisor Deane Dana” and scrawled “NOT” across others. Some signs were placed by the Dana campaign on empty lots, leaving passersby with the confused impression Dana was taking credit for a hole in the ground.

Knabe agreed that the theme “didn’t play well” and said he has decided to abandon it for the fall campaign. “That’s gone, it’s history,” he said.

Other Dana campaigns managed by Smith were more successful--and more controversial. In Dana’s first run for public office, when he opposed appointed Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Smith was accused of drawing attention to Burke’s race.

Burke, who is black, was featured prominently in photographs in Dana’s campaign materials mailed to voters in the largely white district.

The campaign was cited as part of a pattern of discrimination in supervisorial elections in the 1990 trial of a Voting Rights Act lawsuit.

But his victory in that election transformed Dana, a politically inexperienced middle-management phone company employee, into one of the most powerful politicians in the county.

Dana’s new campaign consultant, Englander, is known for playing hardball with his clients, as well as the competition.

When Westminster City Councilwoman Lyn Gillespie refused to pay a $12,000 bill for a successful campaign managed by Englander, he took her to court, had her car impounded, her salary garnisheed and a warrant for her arrest issued. Gillespie paid the bill.