COLUMN ONE : Punditry at Your Fingertips : When it’s time for a quote on state politics, reporters tend to call the same dozen or so analysts. It’s not a diverse group, and some are known to pull their punches.

It was 1:30 a.m. on primary election night and Sherry Bebitch Jeffe had gone more than two hours without checking for phone calls from news reporters. Dialing her answering machine, Jeffe, a Claremont Graduate School political scientist, was overwhelmed by what she found: 18 messages.

Rather than wait for morning, however, the exhausted academician, who had been on the air all evening as a KCAL-TV election analyst, began ringing back those who might still be on deadline. “In some cases, I got nothing. In some I got an answering machine. But in some cases,” she later recalled with relish, “I got the reporter.”

Jeffe, 49, is one of no more than a dozen or so professors, political consultants and pollsters who by remaining readily available and having something to say--succinctly--have found themselves anointed by the mainstream media as the pooh-bahs of punditry on a wide range of political and governmental issues in California.

When it is time for a quote to round out a story, veteran political reporters acknowledge, observers such as Jeffe, Bruce Cain of UC Berkeley and Larry L. Berg of USC, Democratic consultant Joseph R. Cerrell of Los Angeles and longtime California pollster Mervin Field rarely are more than a land line, car phone or Airfone away.

Field’s name turned up 19 times during primary week in a computer analysis of four of the state’s leading newspapers--the San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and The Times.

“You’re doing a story on the quotemeisters extraordinaire?” he asked during a later interview. “I’m teased a lot by my friends about being a quotemeister and a media freak.”

The phenomenon mirrors a decade-old national trend in which a relatively small group of analysts, primarily from East Coast universities, think tanks and political consulting firms, appear time and again in the national print and broadcast media on a variety of domestic and foreign topics. On the state and national levels, the keys to membership in this elite group seem to be a combination of experience and expertise, coupled with glibness and availability.

“If it’s a choice between calling the hospital to see how your wife’s surgery went and calling back a reporter, you call the reporter,” said Los Angeles Times political columnist Bill Boyarsky. “That’s why they keep calling you back.”

There are no minorities and a preponderance of longtime insiders on the short list of commonly quoted pundits in California, a lack of diversity that can limit the range of opinions that the public receives.

“It’s a pretty white bread list, white males, with Sherry being the one very obvious exception,” said Bill Endicott, the Bee’s Capitol bureau chief.

“You can’t assume you understand Latino politics just by observing it,” said Cal State L.A. political science professor Byran O. Jackson, an increasingly quoted black academician. “People who are Latino have a very unique perspective about what’s going on.”

Moreover, in an era of widespread disenchantment with government institutions, some of the most-quoted analysts at times provide a rosier-than-reality picture of politics.

Cerrell admits that he tends to “pull punches” when asked to comment on officials whom he likes or politicians whose business he might solicit. “I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that has to enter the mix,” he said.

Although most top-rung California pundits have a Democratic orientation, even several leading Republican strategists downplay the suggestion that the pundits lend a leftish bias to coverage. The opinions provided in most stories are generally such conventional wisdom that the quotes of leading analysts are often virtually interchangeable, they say.

“I think the media . . . tends to be centrist and cover a relatively narrow span of respectable opinion,” said conservative scholar Alan Heslop of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Here is a look at some of the state’s most-quoted analysts:

The Old Warhorses

Nobody seems to understand the proposition that availability equals exposure any better than Joe Cerrell.

The affable New York native recalls having had a private phone installed at the hospital when his wife gave birth to their first child. “She thought they were setting me up so I could be calling our relatives. . . . But it was to keep on doing all of my usual work.”

Cerrell has been a fixture on the California political scene for more than four decades and in that time has built trusting relationships with veteran reporters.

“You know, (New York Times national political reporter R.W.) Apple comes to town and he calls you and you go over to the Pacific Dining Car and have a nice dinner,” said Cerrell, 57. “And (a couple days later) I’m quoted (in) the New York Times.

“They know it’s fairly reliable and they’re not going to get too much bull.”

Cerrell got his start in the mid-1950s when he ran the Trojan Democratic Club while attending USC. After working in various capacities for Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and the state Democratic Party, he became a political consultant, expanding his business to include lobbying on behalf of corporations.

These days, Cerrell Associates, in the genteel Larchmont neighborhood of Los Angeles, handles few political campaigns other than Los Angeles County judgeship races. But Cerrell, an inveterate name-dropper, rarely lacks opinions. Nor is he reluctant to voice them.

While in New York to attend the Democratic National Convention this year, Cerrell consented to being awakened at 4 a.m. to serve as a guest on a Los Angeles radio call-in talk show.

And at a recent political function upstate, Cerrell recalls running into state Sen. Alfred E. Alquist (D-San Jose), who said: “ ‘Joe, you get quoted in the San Jose Mercury more than I do.’

“I said, ‘Al, if you’d return calls to (political editor) Phil Trounstine every once in awhile, you can get quoted too.’ ”

Cerrell readily acknowledges that personal and professional considerations color his commentary.

“I was much tougher for eight years on Gov. Deukmejian than I am on Pete Wilson,” he said. “I think Pete Wilson is a nice guy . . . and I happen to like his wife.”

Merv Field, on the scene since the mid-1940s, is also somewhat sentimental, though he takes pains to say that he does not socialize with governmental leaders.

“My instinct is not to pile on,” said Field, citing the case of Sen. John Seymour, far behind in the polls in his race against Democrat Dianne Feinstein, as an example.

“I see him having a real problem in that he was appointed to his job and is not well known,” Field said. “So I’ve used the word ‘valiant’ in interviews in respect to the way he is staying in there and being cheerful.”

Field, a New Jersey native, worked for polling pioneer George Gallup before moving to California just after World War II. In the years since, his Bay Area-based Field Institute has taken 400 independent public opinion surveys on more than 3,500 topics.

Field is questioned about his surveys and issues well beyond the scope of his polling data. In a Sept. 1 Times article, Field labeled the state budget stalemate between Wilson and the Democratic-dominated Legislature “an abomination.”

“I have a personal predilection to make myself available to the press,” he said. “Other pollsters who do what I’m doing in other states feel uncomfortable talking to the press. But some of my best friends are reporters.”

The Eggheads

The rap against academicians is that most are long-winded or more likely to focus on events that took place 50 years ago than those that occurred yesterday. What’s more, only a smattering of California scholars devote their careers to the study of state government.

But a troika of top academic pundits has emerged in recent years.

Jeffe, Berg and Cain are regarded as knowledgeable, pithy and accessible. They also have another thing in common. Each is either a registered Democrat or has worked at one time for the Democratic Party or its leadership.

Jeffe, a New Jersey native, moved to California in the mid-1960s to take a post as a legislative staffer for then-Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh. Later, while working on her doctorate, she served as a college political science instructor.

Jeffe now serves as a senior associate at the Center for Politics and Policy at the Claremont Graduate School. Under her arrangement with the school, she is allowed to devote virtually all her time to writing and punditry rather than teaching.

“An academic umbrella gives you an air of objectivity and nonpartisanship,” she said.

Jeffe traces her public ascent to Willie Brown’s angry reaction to a California Journal magazine story she wrote in 1987 in which she characterized the Speaker as having exhibited fewer policy-making skills than administrative abilities.

Reporters soon began calling Jeffe for her analysis on efforts by a group of young legislators to usurp Brown’s power. She was ready and willing to speak--in short, pointed sentences.

“I’d like to think it’s because I make sense and am fair,” said Jeffe, who works out of a cluttered office in her LAX-area ranch home. “And I want to tell you quite frankly it also has to do with the fact that I’m a woman.

“I mean, if what had happened reached critical mass at any time, it was as a result of the 1990 gubernatorial race. There was a woman (Dianne Feinstein) running and there was a real effort on the part of media outlets to get a different perspective.”

Some reporters say Jeffe is quoted so often that they are reluctant to add to her visibility. Some also believe that she has too many forums to express herself because she serves as a contributing editor to the Sunday Opinion section of The Times. Most, however, praise her acerbic tone and the homework she does to keep current on political issues and personalities.

Berg, like Jeffe, sports a catchy title: founder and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. Berg, 53, said he is interviewed 300 to 350 times a year by reporters on subjects ranging from the state budget to smog in the San Gabriel Valley. Last week, he returned a call from a Times reporter by car phone from Washington.

Unlike Jeffe, however, Berg, who managed Democratic election campaigns in the 1960s, maintains ties to politicians. He is Speaker Willie Brown’s appointee to the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

An Iowa native with a political science doctorate from UC Santa Barbara, Berg said he continually tries to “guard against” allowing his ideology to color his analyses.

“If there’s one real benefit of graduate training,” said Berg, who began teaching at USC in 1969, “it’s an ability to try to look at things objectively. I’m not saying we always do that. But I think that with academic writing, you really try to be objective, and those in academia are a bit more able to do that.”

Cain, associate director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, also has long ties to Democrats. In the early 1980s, Cain, who was teaching then at Caltech in Pasadena, took a leave to serve as reapportionment consultant for the Democratic Assembly leadership.

Within hours after Ross Perot announced in midsummer that he was backing off his run for the presidency, Cain said, he was called by reporters from 14 newspapers, three TV stations and five radio stations.

But Cain is somewhat more diffident about his pundit status than other top-rung analysts and he sees his role as a sounding board.

“I think that reporters are under a lot of pressure to check out their views with a lot of other people,” said the Massachusetts native, who received his doctorate at Harvard University in 1976. “Editors become suspicious if you’re too far afield from what others say. So you consult others to get their perspective on things.”

Occasionally, he says, he regrets speaking to the press, particularly when “the reporter has pushed me into providing evidence for his or her thesis.”

“Say someone in 1988 had an angle about why (presidential candidate Michael S.) Dukakis had a good chance of doing well with Hispanics and I’d say on the one hand this, on the other hand that.

“And the reporter would keep asking until he got enough of the one hand he wanted.”

Cain said that sometimes he wonders why he even talks to reporters.

“I don’t talk to everybody,” he said. “I talk to people when I have some downtime (from teaching) and often I get information from talking to the reporters which is useful to me. So there’s an exchange of information.”

Up and Comers

When Republican strategist Steven A. Merksamer served as Gov. George Deukmejian’s chief of staff, he was willing to talk to reporters, but on a background basis only. Now that he is out of government, the Sacramento attorney is coming into his own as one of the state’s most candid Republican analysts.

Indeed, Merksamer is so frank that he readily admits that he is not always that frank. Merksamer says he will never lie to the press, but “if things are really crummy in Sacramento, you don’t want to say it that directly. There are ways of saying it to get the point across without being so graphic.

“And if I’m particularly dismayed about something that a friend in political office may be doing, instead of finding myself saying he’s really screwing up, I might find myself saying: Yeah, he’s had a real bad week but things will get better for him next week.”

In recent years, several women analysts, most notably USC law professor Susan Estrich, have begun to emerge alongside Jeffe. Estrich, who served as campaign manager for Dukakis’ ill-fated 1988 presidential bid, discusses state issues but also appears frequently on network TV to ponder national political and social questions.

From the African-American community, Los Angeles civil attorney Cynthia McClain-Hill, who publishes a quarterly political newsletter aimed at young black professionals, is another pundit on the rise.

Asked last year to appear on a segment of “The Week in Review,” a Westside cable television public affairs program, McClain-Hill, 34, took the unusual step of hiring a media consultant to teach her the ropes.

“Once I started doing television,” she said, “I wanted to be sure that I was doing as well as I possibly could.”

Since her initial appearance, McClain-Hill has received increasing numbers of calls from print and broadcast journalists seeking her opinions on city and state issues. She sees her rising visibility as a means of “influencing and impacting public opinion.”

“No one person can speak in any definitive way for any mass group,” she said. “But it still is important that an attempt is made to communicate viewpoints that are honest and well thought-out.”

The Reigning Pundits

When it comes to commenting on politics and government in California, no more than two dozen academics, political consultants and pollsters seemed to be called on by the news media on a regular basis. Here are six of the state’s most quoted quotemeisters: Sherry B. Jeffe, 49

Position: Senior associate of the Center for Politics and Policy at the Claremont Graduate School, and contributing editor to the Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times.

Background: One of the state’s few female pundits. Some say she is overexposed, but most praise her for doing her homework in her field of specialty: state government.

Quote: “If I want to do anything, it’s to be the voice of everybody who isn’t an insider. Although I know, for sure, I am one.”

Mervin Field, 71

Position: Director of the Field Poll, which has taken over 350 independent public opinion surveys in California since 1946.

Background: The granddaddy of California pollsters, Field has few compunctions about giving an opinion on any issue, whether or not it relates to his research data.

Quote: “The people back East will tease me and say, ‘Why are you always refered to as the “widely respected Mervin Field.” ’ I say I changed my name officially. Just call me W.R.”

Joe Cerrell, 57

Position: Chairman of Cerrell Associates, a Los Angeles political and public affairs consulting firm.

Background: Cerrell’s firm primarily handles campaigns of Los Angeles County judgeship candidates. But the onetime state Democratic Party bigwig appears ready, willing and able to comment on almost any political topic.

Quote: “I’m not trying to brag, but an airplane telephone call is expensive.. . . . (ButI’ll call from a plane when they say (a national reporter) called and has only one question.”

Larry L. Berg, 53

Position: Director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC and member of governing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Background: Speaks on a wide variety of political, governmental and environmental issues. Averages more than 300 calls a year from the media.

Quote: “There is maybe too much of a tendency to seek out people right or wrong, good or bad or whatever, to comment on things. I don’t know if it’s good or bad for the public.”

Bruce Cain, 43

Position: Associate director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC-Berkeley.

Background: One of a handful of California college professors who has spent his career studying California politics and governmental institutions.

Quote: “A lot of what (reporters) are asking people to do is comment on the horse race aspect and the inside dynamics. From that point of view, you’re always restricted to a small number of people knowing what’s going on.”

Steven Merksamer, 45

Position: Sacramento attorney who served as a chief of staff for former Gov. George Deukmejian.

Background: One of the few leading Republican strategists willing to speak frankly on the record on a wide variety of state issues.

Quote: “You hear how the press has an ideological agenda. I can say in my experience with the press they’ve always been straight with me.”