Baiting Game : With No Record to Explore, Golding Focuses on Navarro’s Past Writings, Statements

San Diego mayoral candidate Peter Navarro once described the city manager with whom he would have to work if elected as a “developer dupe” and called a city councilman a “developer dawg.’

Though he now terms himself the race’s “jobs candidate,” Navarro previously authored ballot initiatives that could have limited economic expansion. He is an independent who was previously a Republican and, before that, a Democrat. He has argued passionately for full disclosure of campaign contributions but concealed the source of more than $200,000 in personal money that he spent in the June primary.

While publicizing a book, Navarro called the home mortgage interest deduction on federal taxes a fiscally ineffective “sacred cow.” And, in his campaign, he has expressed support for a needle exchange program and “domestic partnership” benefits for gay couples.

During the final 5 1/2 weeks of San Diego’s mayoral campaign, the public can expect to be deluged with details about those and other Navarro comments and positions as his opponent, San Diego County Supervisor Susan Golding, tries to plant doubts about his political philosophy, integrity and personality in voters’ minds.

In recent campaign forums and interviews, it has become clear that a major component of Golding’s strategy is to weave what she sees as Navarro’s inconsistencies, policy flip-flops and remarks on controversial topics into a pattern that she hopes gives voters pause as they go to the polls Nov. 3.

On some matters, Golding’s attacks are well-founded and have put Navarro on the defensive, producing apologies or rhetorical back-pedaling on his part. On others, however, Golding portrays issues colored with considerable gray areas as evidence of black and white distinctions reflecting poorly on Navarro--a conclusion that she hopes to nudge voters toward.

Golding’s success or failure in doing so will be pivotal in the election’s outcome, both candidates acknowledge. Whatever other strategic and ideological factors are at work in the mayoral race, the contest hinges, they agree, on one crucial question: Can Golding create enough uneasiness about Navarro and his political outsider status to overcome the anti-incumbency sentiment confronting her?

“That’s the equation,” Navarro said. “Susan Golding would like to run away from her record and distort mine. But the irony and hypocrisy in all this is that whatever lies she tells about me aren’t as bad as the truth about her. Voters just don’t trust Susan Golding, so every time she attacks me, I think she digs her own grave a little deeper.”

Golding, meanwhile, said that she hopes to persuade voters to reflect on “the gap between rhetoric and reality” in Navarro’s record.

“Peter would love to be judged solely on the basis of what he’s been saying in this campaign--what politician wouldn’t?” Golding said. “But the Peter Navarro we’ve seen in the campaign isn’t the same we saw before this year. My message and question to voters is, ‘Where is the real Peter Navarro, and will he please stand up?’ ”

Although candidates usually probe their opponents’ personal and professional histories for topics that can be raised--and sometimes distorted--as campaign issues, the strategy carries particular import for Golding because of Navarro’s limited public record.

Having never held public office before, Navarro has neither a voting record nor lengthy history of campaign contributions subject to scrutiny, as is the case with Golding. Moreover, although Navarro’s advocacy of managed-growth issues has made him a widely recognized player at City Hall and within political circles, he was a largely unknown commodity to most voters when he started the mayoral campaign early this year.

Navarro has, however, written two books, extensive magazine articles and newspaper commentaries that, combined with his activism in a handful of San Diego political campaigns, add texture to his still-evolving public image.

Although many of those words were written long before his current campaign--indeed, in some instances, years before he even lived in San Diego--Golding’s top aides regard them as an appropriate means of measuring Navarro’s candidacy.

“We’re running against a guy with no real record, so this is about all we have to work with,” said Golding’s campaign manager, Dan McAllister. “It’s the only way to see whether what he’s saying and doing now is consistent with his actions in the past. And, in many cases, it clearly isn’t.”

Since her second-place finish behind Navarro in the primary, Golding has sought to raise questions about her opponent that fall within several broad categories: his truthfulness, his consistency on issues and whether he possesses the temperament and skills to be a consensus-builder at City Hall.

Amid increasing pressure from Golding, Navarro last month disclosed that much of the money that he has loaned his campaign came from a $300,000 family inheritance, not, as he had repeatedly insisted earlier, from investments, savings and speaking fees.

“No matter how he cuts it, Peter just flat-out lied about that,” Golding said.

The revelation was all the more politically embarrassing for Navarro because of his frequent descriptions of his primary campaign as a “shoestring” and “grass-roots” effort. He told one primary forum, “It takes vast sums of money to run a mayor’s race which I don’t have,” and commented at another: “I believe in full disclosure.”

Navarro acknowledges “making a mistake,” but emphasizes that he disclosed the $219,000 personal loan on campaign finance reports, which do not require candidates to reveal the specific source of personal funds.

“I did it to protect my family . . . but it was still a mistake,” Navarro said. “I’d hope people could accept the fact that I’m the type of person who, when I make a mistake, admits it and tries to move on.”

Questions about Navarro’s consistency have become another common theme for Golding at campaign forums.

“Peter Navarro reinvents himself to suit his immediate purposes,” Golding said. “He becomes whatever his audience wants him to be or what he thinks best suits his needs.”

None of those shifts grates on Golding more than Navarro’s description of himself as a pro-business candidate. That “grossly inaccurate image,” she argues, contradicts his years of advocacy of ballot initiatives and legislative proposals that opponents and even some neutral economic analysts argued could have curtailed job growth, driven up housing prices and damaged San Diego’s economy in other ways.

In a 1987 newspaper commentary that he co-authored, even Navarro conceded that his insistence that developers pay their fair share of infrastructure costs associated with growth “will require a ten-fold increase in the contributions they currently make.”

“For Peter to call himself the ‘jobs candidate’ may be the biggest lie of all,” Golding said. “Everything he’s done here would have had the opposite effect.”

Navarro, however, responds that development still would be profitable under the economic formulas that he previously promoted, some of which would have linked construction to factors such as air quality standards and levels of police protection. The building industry’s vehement opposition, he argues, stems primarily from developers “being used to paying only a fraction of what’s fair.”

What Golding wryly terms Navarro’s “inconsistencies or incredible flexibility” also is illustrated, she contends, by his Democrat-to-Republican-to independent political party registration, as well as by his changing rhetoric on certain topics over the years.

For example, in his 1984 book, “The Policy Game,” Navarro included organized labor in a chapter titled “The Greedmongers.”

Yet a labor union provided extensive financial backing for his unsuccessful 1991 Planned Growth and Taxpayer Relief Initiative, which was declared unconstitutional because of a brief section guaranteeing a certain wage level for construction workers.

Furthermore, in his current campaign, Navarro has aggressively courted organized labor’s support, and “has accepted their platform hook, line and sinker” on issues ranging from union dues to guaranteeing public employees’ right to strike, Golding argues.

With Golding trying to persuade voters that Navarro lacks a “mayoral temperament,” even some of his top aides concede that Navarro’s sharp tongue and quick temper sometimes have played into her hands.

His description of City Manager Jack McGrory as a “developer dupe,” well-publicized confrontations with an elderly man and a Golding aide during the primary, and his occasional caustic responses to the public’s questions at forums have allowed Golding to characterize Navarro as “someone who operates by conflict, not cooperation or consensus.”

At forums, when Navarro displays even a hint of testiness with voters’ questions--some of which appear to be “plants” by the Golding camp, given the frequency with which they are asked and the fact that they hone in on sensitive topics--Golding usually responds with a disapproving shake of her head and a moralistic remark about the need for governmental leaders to avoid being rude to the public.

“It’s a real joke when she does that,” Navarro said. “She spends 80% of her time cutting and slashing me, and then, if there’s a strong interchange between me and someone else, she becomes a model of equanimity. It’s political play-acting of the worst kind.”

Regardless, few areas of the campaign, no matter how seemingly trivial, have been ignored by the Golding camp in its effort to whittle away at Navarro’s popularity.

After an incident last week in which a group of pro-Golding swimmers tried to upstage Navarro by beating him to shore when he swam one mile to a waterfront debate site, Navarro charged that he had been bumped in the water by one of the rival swimmers.

Not so, the Golding swimmers responded, demanding a public apology from Navarro.

“Considering who they’re working for, I’m not surprised,” Navarro said. “But they can forget it.”