Mayor Candidates Slide Back Into the Mud Over ‘Quotes’

Embarrassed over the increasingly negative tone of their campaign, San Diego mayoral candidates Peter Navarro and Susan Golding pledged Monday to stay on the high road during the remainder of the race, but took a detour minutes later and by day’s end were again stuck in a muddy rhetorical ditch.

Golding, who was unable to immediately document some of the charges she made Monday, may find herself in the deeper quagmire today.

For voters distressed over the two major candidates’ growing animosity, Monday began promisingly enough as both Golding and Navarro started a 90-minute debate on KFMB radio by disavowing last week’s campaign tactics that saw the two accusing each other of accepting campaign help from pornographers and male prostitutes.

“Last week served no purpose for the voters of San Diego,” Navarro told the radio audience.

Unfortunately, the same remark could apply to much of what transpired during the rest of Monday’s campaigning.

Navarro, who parried, not initiated, most of Monday’s verbal thrusts, disgustedly termed the charges and countercharges “a silly side show.” By that description, one of the show’s main acts dealt with Golding’s inaccuracies about Navarro’s past writings and comments on economic issues. Ironically, Golding presented the apparently false quotes attributed to Navarro in arguing that he has been duplicitous in his campaign.

“This is just another example of how far they’ll go to besmirch my reputation,” Navarro said. “It’s the sleaziest kind of campaign tactics. But nothing they do surprises me.”

Monday’s hostilities began during the morning radio debate, when an aggressive Golding consistently challenged Navarro’s assertions and questioned his integrity, reiterating her oft-heard laments that he had lied about the source of much of his primary campaign funding, misrepresented her record and deceitfully recast his own policy positions.

Later Monday, Golding arranged a news conference at which former, present and future heads of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce termed Navarro’s past growth-management proposals “idiotic” and “classroom, cockamamie” ideas that could have devastated the local economy had they not been defeated.

“I’m always a little bit leery of a miraculous last-minute conversion,” former Chamber of Commerce Chairman Pat Crowell said. “For (Navarro) to now stand up and say that he’s the greatest friend of business . . . doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Golding, meanwhile, used the occasion to charge that Navarro has “done more than any other single individual . . . to drive business” from San Diego in recent years.

Not to be outdone, Navarro, during the radio debate, issued a particularly curt summation of Golding’s decade of service on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors and San Diego City Council.

“The only thing that’s happened is that we now stand on the precipice of economic disaster with the county government in shambles,” Navarro said. In a later interview, he warmed to the same subject, calling Golding “a cynical politician at the helm of a sinking ship of state.”

Monday’s daylong sniping followed a strategic script likely to be repeated in the campaign’s final six weeks.

With Navarro maintaining a comfortable double-digit lead in recent polls, some of Golding’s top strategists have concluded that she must take the offensive by underlining what she describes as his “unending inconsistencies” in order to chip away at her opponent’s popularity as a political outsider.

Golding is particularly chagrined that Navarro, who in the past advocated growth limits linking development to factors such as air quality and infrastructure financing, has labeled himself the “jobs candidate” this year. By doing so, she argues, Navarro has masked a “dangerous” philosophy that would have meant “less jobs and fewer, more expensive homes” for San Diegans.

“This isn’t negative campaigning--all I’m doing is quoting his own words,” Golding said. “It’s just talking about the record and the facts. If he doesn’t like it, he’s going to have to explain what he doesn’t like about his own opinions and comments.”

Golding could have some explaining of her own to do, however, because she and her staff appear to have taken liberties with quotes that they attributed to Navarro on Monday.

At her downtown news conference, Golding recited a series of purported past comments from Navarro that she argued diametrically contradict the positions he has articulated in the campaign, terming the shifts “one of the most unbelievable political flip-flops in history.”

Golding noted, for example, that in announcing his candidacy, Navarro described himself as “so pro-economic growth you can’t believe it.” But in a 1988 newspaper story, Golding said, Navarro was quoted as saying that “controlling the rate of job growth can, in fact, control population growth.” A computer copy of the San Diego Union story cited by Golding, however, reveals no such quote.

Golding’s campaign aides were unable to explain the discrepancy Monday night, saying that their copies of the newspaper stories in question had been taken home by one staffer and therefore were not available for review.

“Without that in hand, about all we can do is say we stand by the essence of what was said . . . at the press conference,” Golding campaign manager Dan McAllister said.

Similarly, in a 1988 memo to Mayor Maureen O’Connor, Navarro argued that “housing caps provide little downside risk to San Diego policy-makers,” according to Golding. But in another newspaper story early this year, Golding said, Navarro called slow-growth policies “a discredited theory that would impose population caps.”

The computer copy of that San Diego Union-Tribune story, though, shows that that line is a paraphrase of Navarro’s position, not a direct quote, as Golding characterized it Monday.

“Our impression of that is that it was a direct quote from him,” McAllister said.

Beyond faulting Golding for the apparent discrepancies, Navarro dismissed Golding’s criticisms as “just more negative campaigning from a politician with a bad record and no message.”

“I wish we could hear more positive ideas about how to solve serious economic problems rather than negative press conferences that simply point fingers,” Navarro said. “It’s easy enough to go into the record of someone who’s written over one million words on economic theory and take it out of context. That’s what Supervisor Golding has done here.”