Golding Needs ‘Selective Reality’ Check, Navarro Argues : Campaign: Each mayoral candidate accuses the other of cutting factual corners when attacking their opponent. And both are right.

Aware that crime remains one of voters’ primary concerns, San Diego mayoral candidate Susan Golding often boasts that 3,200 jail beds have been added during her eight-year tenure as a county supervisor.

Nearly half those beds, however, are unoccupied because the county lacks the money to open a major portion of the new East Mesa detention facility.

At candidate forums, Golding has sharply criticized her opponent, Peter Navarro, for supporting public employees’ right to strike, even though she has approved contracts giving county workers the same right under certain circumstances.

Navarro’s support for needle exchange programs and so-called domestic partnership benefits for gay and unmarried couples also has drawn fire from Golding. But her own comments on those issues have occasionally left listeners feeling that Golding leans in the same direction, despite the fact that she opposes both proposals.

One of Golding’s brochures proudly notes that she “slashed the county budget (and) cut her own pay to avoid cutting needed services.” But Golding also hired a staff aide in the middle of a county hiring freeze and joined other supervisors in approving a controversial $68,000 severance payment to Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey when he left last spring to accept another high-paying public job in Florida.

Golding frequently accuses Navarro, sometimes with good reason, of distorting both her record and his own background. But, in attacking Navarro’s record, Golding has misquoted him and, in a television commercial, appears to take a Navarro statement out of context to imply that he favors tax increases.

As those examples show, while Golding has tried to elevate Navarro’s credibility into a major character question in their Nov. 3 election, she herself has occasionally cut factual corners.

But though Navarro has been quick to pounce on what he terms Golding’s “nonstop lies, distortions and deceptions,” that description portrays the gap between reality and her campaign rhetoric as being wider than it is.

Instead, in instances colored more by grays than by blacks and whites, Golding has taken fewer liberties with the facts than she has with their context, often one of the first casualties in any political campaign. By selectively picking her facts--hardly a new phenomenon in politics--Golding sometimes leaves voters with a distorted picture of the differences between herself and Navarro.

“From the beginning, she’s been guilty of misrepresentations and hypocrisy, at best, or outright lying, at worst,” Navarro charges. “If you listen to Susan Golding, you’d think everything is just great in San Diego. All you have to do is look around to know that’s not true. If she’s done such a wonderful job, why is the county falling apart? The only way she can distract attention from that dismal record is to try to tear me down.”

Golding, however, argues that any distortions in the mayoral campaign stem less from her words and actions than they do from Navarro’s persistent attempts to attach a sinister interpretation to them.

“Peter puts his spin on everything,” Golding said. “I don’t have to twist the facts to defend my record or to show that his views are not supported by a majority of people. And that’s Peter Navarro’s problem. He has to try to sell people his version of events.”

It is not simply Navarro, however, who faults Golding for some of the claims that she has made throughout the campaign. For example, the TV ad in which Golding implies that Navarro favors general tax increases, a charge based on a comment that Navarro made in 1988, has been characterized as deceptive even by the editor of the magazine in which Navarro’s statement appeared.

In the Golding ad, a narrator says that Navarro “said San Diego needs to raise taxes, which would hurt our economy, and his past proposal would have doubled unemployment.” As those words are delivered, text appears on the screen quoting both Navarro and an analysis from the San Diego Economic Development Corp. concerning an earlier growth-management plan that he advocated.

While Navarro terms the Golding ad “an outrageous lie, a real smoking gun that shows she can’t be trusted,” Golding describes it as “another case of (Navarro) being unwilling to be judged on what he said and did in the past.” As with much in politics, the truth appears to lie somewhere between those two extremes.

The article in question appeared in San Diego Home/Garden Magazine in March, 1988. In that story, Navarro, a business school professor, said: “Growth is a game that has losers and winners. The people who win are the developers and the immigrants. The people who lose are the ones who already live here. The city needs to raise taxes to pay for public services, but San Diego is a Republican town that takes pride in the fact that we don’t spend enough for public services. From an economist’s perspective, the developers are making a lot of money. Their fees are five to ten times too small. We need to force them to pay full price.”

After the issue had become a point of contention in the campaign, Peter Jensen, the magazine’s editor, wrote a letter to Navarro in which he argued that “the Golding camp took your statement out of context.”

“When I reread this entire quote, I hear an economist who is clearly identified as a ‘slow-growth advocate’ saying that if we don’t slow growth, the city is going to have to raise taxes to pay for the needed services,” Jensen wrote. “The point you were obviously making is that developers, not taxpayers, should, in your opinion, pay the burden of mounting public service costs. Anyone reading the entire quote can see that you were not advocating increased taxes.”

Saying “fair is fair,” Jensen concluded by noting that Golding’s ad writers “should be chastised for their egregious machinations.”

Golding, however, defends the ad as “a clear and accurate” recitation of Navarro’s position, arguing that his complaints again demonstrate his “clear-cut political opportunism (and) refusal to take responsibility for his past.”

“He first says he’s been misquoted and then, when he finds out that isn’t the case, he goes for second best and says he was taken out of context,” Golding said. “Maybe you can get away with that in academia, because all you ever do is analyze. But the next mayor should have the guts to stand up for what she or he believes.”

On other occasions, Navarro has accused Golding of presenting a “selective reality” to voters by omitting pertinent details that add context and perspective to the two candidates’ positions and records.

Golding is accurate, for instance, in saying that the county has constructed 3,200 new jail beds over the past eight years. However, until Navarro began pointedly reminding campaign audiences that nearly half of the beds are in the largely unopened East Mesa jail, Golding often neglected to mention that fact.

“I’ve never attempted to disguise the fact that all the beds were not operational,” Golding said. “But if you don’t build them, you’ll never be able to operate them. If they weren’t there, we’d be in much worse shape. We’ve done half the job and I’m proud of it.”

Similarly, Navarro contends that Golding “stops short of the full truth” in detailing their differences over public employees’ right to strike. While Golding opposes work stoppages by public employees, Navarro supports that right, arguing that a state law permitting job actions that do not significantly impair public health and safety overrides a city charter provision forbidding strikes--a crucial issue never tested in court.

Moreover, under a provision included in county contracts approved by the supervisors, workers may strike six months after a labor impasse begins, according to county attorneys.

“That makes it somewhat hypocritical of Miss Golding to point her finger at Mr. Navarro over this,” said Eliseo Medina, executive director of the Service Employees Union, which represents about 10,000 county workers.

Golding, though, points out that the “city can do things the county can’t,” and argues that the crucial distinction is that, unlike Navarro, she would “fight to preserve” San Diego’s ban on public employee strikes.

For months, the two mayoral candidates have squabbled over needle exchange programs and domestic partnership benefits for gay and unwed couples, with each accusing the other of distorting the record.

Navarro conceptually supports both proposals, calling domestic partnership payments “only fair” and arguing that a needle exchange program could help stop the spread of AIDS.

In contrast, Golding opposes both programs, but has made statements that, on the surface, appear to be contradictory. In a questionnaire to a gay group, Golding said that she could support domestic partnership benefits “by contract” so long as they did not increase public expenses. Before another gay audience, Golding said that she would “do anything” to combat AIDS--an answer that Navarro argues was “interpreted by everyone in the room as at least implicit support” for needle exchanges.

“She’s told different audiences different things,” Navarro said. “To give her the benefit of the doubt, you’d have to say she’s been inconsistent. Or maybe she’s just acting like the career politician that she is.”

But Golding contends that she has been “very clear, very consistent” on both issues. What she meant by the words “by contract” in regard to domestic partnership programs, Golding explained, was that two individuals could privately agree to provide each other such benefits, not that such plans would be sanctioned or financed by government. In addition, Golding notes that she voted against a needle exchange proposal put before the Board of Supervisors, feeling that any potential benefit was outweighed by its potential for increasing drug abuse.

The $1.9-billion county budget has been another battleground in the campaign, with Golding trumpeting her efforts to tighten and streamline it while Navarro tries to chip away at that image by highlighting minor but politically embarrassing details.

Navarro delights in telling campaign audiences that, during a county hiring freeze, Golding hired a staffer to replace a higher-paid aide who had resigned. He also rarely misses an opportunity to emphasize that, at a time when county workers had gone more than a year without a raise, Golding and her board colleagues approved a $68,000 severance payment to departing CAO Norman Hickey--an award that Navarro has dubbed the “Golden Hickey.”

Arguing that the freeze “technically didn’t apply” to the board, Golding also notes that the personnel change on her staff produced a net savings because of the new aide’s lower salary. And, while she did not favor the payment to Hickey, Golding stressed that the county counsel’s office advised the board that the failure to approve it could result in a higher settlement via a lawsuit.

“Once again, Peter is twisting things to his own tune,” Golding said.

“She wants to have it both ways,” Navarro responds. “She votes one way or does something and then says, ‘But I really opposed it.’ Well, that doesn’t change what happened.”

Beyond her detailed position-by-position explanations, Golding has one other powerful ally in defending herself against Navarro’s charges--ironically, Navarro himself.

Throughout the primary, Navarro insisted that his was a “shoestring” and “grass-roots” campaign likely to be financially steamrollered by huge development industry donations to Golding. Later, when financial disclosure statements revealed that he had spent more than $200,000 in personal funds on his own campaign, Navarro claimed that the money came from investments, savings and speaking fees.

However, under pressure from Golding, Navarro acknowledged last summer that much of the money that he loaned to his campaign had in fact come from a $300,000 family inheritance. His earlier concealment of the source of his personal funds, Navarro says, was “a mistake” intended to protect his family’s privacy.

“When someone starts out the race telling the Big Lie, you have to question everything else he tells you,” Golding argues. “For him to accuse anyone else of being inaccurate is almost laughable.”

But Navarro, for one, is not laughing.

“The facts and Susan Golding’s own record put the lie to her campaign,” Navarro said. “Take me out of the picture, and you’re still left with a politician who can’t tell the truth.”