Volume Turns Up on ‘Whisper Campaigns’ : Politics: Damaging but unfounded tales abound as candidates turn to smear tactics for an edge at the polls.

San Diego mayoral candidate Peter Navarro is said to be so hot-tempered that he wears a special watch that monitors his pulse to help keep his anger in check during public appearances. His opponent, Susan Golding, may be running her campaign with laundered money, anonymous tipsters suggest.

Congressional candidate Judy Jarvis, it is whispered, relies heavily on astrology. Tony Valencia has used his campaign treasury in his congressional race to expand his wardrobe and pay his wife. A married candidate is often seen in gay bars, while another once got caught up in a drug deal gone bad. One office-seeker has unusual sexual tastes, supposedly documented by nude photos. Another candidate supposedly assaulted a former campaign worker over a financial dispute.

As Campaign ’92 enters its final month, these and other rumors are being whispered with increasing frequency as candidates strive to put potentially damaging tales about their opponents “into play,” to use political jargon.

As a political weapon, campaign rumors are as old as the Republic itself. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was described by opponents in 1800 as a French agent and atheist who planned to confiscate all the Bibles in the country--rumors that he overcame to win the nation’s fourth presidential election.

As that historical anecdote and the current whisper campaigns being waged in San Diego elections illustrate, if even a fraction of the rumors passed around by candidates and their partisans were true, political debate would more closely resemble the “Geraldo” show than the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.”

Campaign rumors often start like most gossip does, with tantalizing tidbits being whispered from person to person within political circles. Sometimes, the rumors die there, victims of their own fallacy and, perhaps equally important, their inability to catch the ears of a wider audience.

Indeed, political strategists admit that a rumor’s potential impact on a campaign often has less to do with its veracity than with whether it reaches average voters through leaks to the press or--in a subtler form of media manipulation--by “planting” questions about it at public forums.

“I doubt that there’s a consultant in town who hasn’t sent an anonymous letter or fax to about 20 of his favorite reporters at one time or another,” said political consultant David Lewis. “And if (the newspapers) don’t take the hint, then you do whatever you can to spread it like crazy behind the scenes.”

Even when an allegation being made about an opponent has a factual basis, political rumor-mongering is an inherently surreptitious process, according to Larry Sabato, a professor of political science at the University of Virginia.

“Candidates and consultants prefer to get the information out without leaving their fingerprints on it,” Sabato said. “That way, if it backfires, there’s less damage.”

The “planting” technique has surfaced recently in the San Diego mayoral campaign, with Navarro being asked by members of the audience at several recent candidate forums whether he has changed his name--a question that he insists is baseless.

Regardless, that rumor continues to have “an incredible shelf life,” as one campaign consultant put it, particularly in Latino neighborhoods, where Navarro’s opponents have vigorously fanned it by hinting that he might have altered his surname for political advantage or other reasons.

“There’s absolutely no basis in fact to it,” Navarro said after the subject came up at one recent debate. “That’s about as low as it gets. . . Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter whether things like this are true. You can still get hurt.”

A more whimsical rumor about Navarro involves the suggestion that he wears a pulse-monitoring watch to help prevent himself from losing control at campaign events.

Although seemingly humorous and inconsequential, the watch rumor plays off Navarro’s image as someone with a sharp tongue and quick temper--a reputation earned through his sometimes testy appearances before the City Council, and reinforced through well-publicized confrontations with an elderly man and a Golding aide during the mayoral campaign.

In fact, Navarro does own a watch that monitors his pulse, but he insists that he wears it only when exercising, not during campaign appearances.

“You hesitate to talk about these things, because they can take on a life of their own,” Navarro said, laughing. “But, no, Golding hasn’t gotten me that upset yet.”

Golding, meanwhile, has confronted potential political liabilities from the outset of her campaign stemming from the conviction and imprisonment of her former husband, Richard Silberman, on federal charges stemming from his involvement in a money-laundering scheme.

Without offering any proof, several anonymous callers have contacted The Times in recent weeks suggesting that some of those ill-gotten dollars are perhaps helping to underwrite Golding’s campaign. Several Navarro backers also have privately raised questions about Golding’s personal finances.

“It’s just the sort of factless, baseless innuendo that we’ve come to expect from our opponent,” said Golding campaign manager Dan McAllister. “In politics, everybody’s past is subject to scrutiny. But this is something I don’t think people are going to give much credence to.”

Several local congressional candidates also have been the subjects of potentially damaging whisper campaigns--rumors that, in one case, proved to be true.

Judy Jarvis, the Republican nominee for an open seat in the 49th Congressional District, said that she began picking up rumors last month suggesting that she was a devoted believer in astrology.

That rumor stemmed largely from the fact that Jarvis’ name appeared on county fictitious name records from 1986 relating to prospective businesses called “A Crystal Sage” and “The Chiron Connection.” Jarvis’ “lucky” automobile license plate number and the name of her boat--Gypsy Witch--also figured into the rumor, demonstrating that in the realm of political gossip, no detail is too trivial to be passed along with raised eyebrows.

The two business names, Jarvis explained, were simply alternative proposals for a New Age book store that never opened and with which she had only a peripheral link. Jarvis, who at the same time headed a nurses’ registry company, said that an acquaintance who planned to bankroll the book store had simply asked her for business advice and to co-sign the so-called “doing business as” forms. Ultimately, the woman backed away from the idea “when she learned how expensive it was going to be,” Jarvis said.

“I have no doubt at all where those rumors started,” Jarvis said, pointing to her Democratic opponent, Lynn Schenk. “I guess they thought they could make me look strange or something. The whole thing’s ridiculous. It’s irritating to me that things like this distract from what’s really important in the campaign.”

In the 50th Congressional District race, there were rumors throughout the summer that Republican Tony Valencia had spent money raised in his campaign in ways that, while perfectly legal, could be politically embarrassing. “Tony’s money is going to Tony,” one caller said, urging a close examination of Valencia’s financial disclosure statements.

The campaign records show, in fact, that during a six-week period in May and June, Valencia spent more than $4 out of every $10 that he raised on clothing for himself and to pay his wife for working on his campaign. Of the $8,750 in contributions that Valencia received during that period, $1,869 was spent to buy a “wardrobe for (the) candidate” and $2,000 went to his wife, according to the report.

Valencia’s Democratic opponent, San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner, helped expedite the spread of those politically juicy details--once they were upgraded from rumor to fact--by sending copies of Valencia’s reports to his contributors, hoping to dry up his financial support by raising questions about his judgment in spending scarce campaign dollars.

“It had just the opposite effect,” Valencia said. “It angered people that Bob Filner would think he knows better than we do how to spend our money. They saw that it was done with an air of arrogance and racism.”

Filner campaign manager David Ginsborg, however, said that several Valencia supporters contacted Filner’s headquarters to say that they were “outraged that their money had been spent that way.”

The decision to use campaign funds for personal clothing and his wife’s salary was made by his 12-member executive committee, Valencia said.

“I am not wealthy and I did not have the proper attire for this campaign,” Valencia said. “The committee felt that it was only appropriate to dress in a way not to embarrass Tony Valencia, the committee and the Mexican-American community.”

Similarly, his political committee decided to pay Gloria Valencia $2,000 for working full time on his campaign for three months, Valencia added.

Some of the more titillating rumors--such as those dealing with the purported nude photos and drug buy episodes involving candidates--remain simply unsubstantiated political gossip, months after they first surfaced. And, even if some such rumors proved to be true, one might reasonably ask what, if anything, could--or should--be done with the information in a political campaign.

“When it comes to something like sex, unless it’s in front of Horton Plaza at noon, who cares?” political consultant John Kern asked rhetorically. “As long as nothing illegal is happening, that’s a personal area that I think should be off limits in a campaign.”

Even so, salacious rumors have long been a staple of the local political rumor mill, Kern acknowledged.

“I can think of at least three candidates for mayor in the past 15 years who were rumored to have nude pictures floating around, three whose sexual preference was questioned, two who had rumors about cocaine use and at least one with a sexual arrest allegation,” Kern said.

The University of Virginia’s Sabato attributes the increasing volume of such rumors to a “general deterioration of standards in society” and to a growing trend in which tabloid newspapers and television shows “can drive the agenda of the more respected media.” Often called “bankshot journalism,” that phenomenon sees newspapers that are unwilling to print a rumor originally run stories about it after it appears elsewhere.

As evidence, Sabato contrasts the charges of womanizing lodged against Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent President Bush, this year to the allegations of adultery that drove former Sen. Gary Hart from the 1988 presidential race.

“Four years ago, the ‘Have you ever?’ question was asked under only the most extreme circumstances,” Sabato said. “This year, long before Gennifer Flowers surfaced, almost all stories about Clinton included an obligatory paragraph saying, ‘Clinton has been dogged by charges of womanizing.’ To a certain extent, that’s happening at all levels of society and politics. Human nature being what it is, I don’t see that changing.”

Indeed, Sabato’s point perhaps was underlined by many of the San Diego politicians and campaign consultants interviewed. Because, even as they joked about some of the more risque rumors circulating, most also ended the interview with one request. If you find out more about those nude photos, they said, give me a call.