Navarro, Golding Trade Jabs Over Polling Incident

San Diego mayoral candidates Susan Golding and Peter Navarro traded accusations of “Gestapo-like tactics” and “sleazy campaigning” Monday after a weekend incident in which Navarro aides interrupted a Golding telephone poll, arguing that the questions being asked distorted Navarro’s record.

On Saturday, two top Navarro aides went to the Kearny Mesa firm where the Golding survey was in progress to lodge a protest after being alerted by a sympathetic poll respondent who felt that several questions unfairly characterized Navarro.

After entering the Decision Research office, Navarro campaign chairman Becky Mann and aide Les Braund demanded a copy of the poll, threatened a lawsuit because of what they called the slanderous accusations included in it and were “generally quite disruptive,” according to Robert Meadow, the firm’s president.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Meadow said. “Sometimes you might get a couple complaint calls, but I’ve never heard of a campaign mobilizing people to show up like this.”

While Golding campaign manager Dan McAllister termed the incident “a raid” that illustrates Navarro’s reliance on “strong-arm tactics,” Navarro and Mann offer a different, tamer version of the five-minute dispute.

“No one was disruptive, no one ever raised his or her voice,” Mann said. “The whole thing was discussed in a very cordial, business-like manner. We walked in an open door. It wasn’t like we sneaked past a bunch of ‘No Trespassing’ signs.”

After a Decision Research official refused to give them a copy of the poll or to tell them who had commissioned it, she and Braun quietly left, Mann added.

The poll questions that the Navarro camp found objectionable alluded to his support for a hypodermic needle exchange program to limit the spread of AIDS, his purported “assault” on a senior citizen during the primary and his receipt of a campaign contribution from a man arrested last week on pornography changes.

While Meadow stressed that none of the poll questions directly named Navarro, Mann contended that it was obvious that he was the unnamed candidate referred to in the survey.

“Some of the questions bordered on and probably transcended slander,” Navarro said. He noted, for example, that he was originally unaware of the source of the $500 contribution, which he plans to donate to charity, and that there was “no physical contact” in the alleged assault with a man who tried to prevent Navarro from politicking at a La Jolla event.

Golding aide McAllister, however, called the incident “an excessive overreaction” stemming from Navarro’s attempt “to hide his record.”

“If he’s this sensitive now, it makes you wonder what he’d be like as mayor,” McAllister concluded.