Candidates for S.D. Mayor Stress Status as Outsiders : Campaign: Golding, Navarro try to make political hay of the electorate’s yearning for change.

More than a year, $2 million and countless charges and countercharges after it began, next week’s mayoral election turns on one central question: How would San Diego be different four years from now if Peter Navarro or Susan Golding is elected?

That question, the bottom line of the political equation in any election, has been largely obscured by the increasing acrimony in recent weeks between Golding and Navarro in what has become the most expensive mayoral campaign--and one of the most negative local races--in San Diego history.

Almost lost in the confusing blur of mutual accusations over politically embarrassing sources of campaign contributions, distortions of each other’s records and a flurry of last-minute attack ads, the question of whether the race’s outcome could produce an appreciably different San Diego has finally resurfaced in the race’s closing days as both candidates returned to the core themes of their respective bids to succeed retiring Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

For Navarro, that means incessantly reminding voters that he is an outsider running against a governmental insider with a lengthy public resume--a contrast that clearly is the highest card in his political hand in a year in which voters’ yearning for change has made the absence of elective experience a particularly valuable commodity.

Golding, unwilling to allow Navarro to dictate the parameters of the campaign but forced to pay heed to the volatile forces moving the electorate, has responded by casting herself as someone who, despite having served more than a decade in local and state office, remains an outsider by virtue of gender, philosophy and the fact that she currently is employed at the County Administration Center, not City Hall.

“Elected or not, women have never been part of the Establishment,” Golding said. “Voters want change, and women represent change . . . plus, I’ll be bringing new ideas, new approaches.”

In one of the more ironic plot twists seen in the campaign, Golding often tells campaign audiences that Navarro, who in recent years has frequently lobbied City Hall for the managed-growth proposals that were the genesis of his political career, “is much more of an insider at the city than I’ve been.”

Navarro, meanwhile, has countered by trying to saddle Golding with a share of the blame for all of the region’s ills, irrespective of whether they fall within the city’s or county’s jurisdiction. In a political variation of a sports world maxim, he argues that, just as a losing team typically fires the manager, not the players, so, too, does San Diego’s political team need a new leader.

“She’s had her chance . . . and failed,” says Navarro, a 43-year-old economics professor. “Now it’s time for someone else to try.”

“The issue here is change versus the status quo,” Navarro said this week in one of the race’s final debates. “I’m an outsider, she’s an insider. I’ll be a voice of the people, she’s going to be a voice of the power structure. I come at it from the grass-roots. She comes at it from Astroturf. I’m a professional economist. She’s a professional politician.

“On the environment, I’m endorsed by the Sierra Club, she’s financed by the building industry. It’s night and day. It’s the difference between San Diego being San Diego in four years and San Diego becoming Los Angeles.”

Golding also sees a potentially bright or dark path for San Diego’s next four years.

“The anti-business attitude of the city will not exist. I will change that,” says Golding, a 47-year-old two-term county supervisor who in the early 1980s served on the City Council. “Mr. Navarro’s (past growth-control plans) would have doubled unemployment in San Diego. That’s exactly the wrong way to go. . . . He is held by the business community as responsible as anyone for creating that anti-business climate and for bashing job-creation in this city for many, many years.”

With perception as important as reality in politics, Navarro’s anti-business reputation has been one of the major hurdles that he has had to try to overcome in the campaign.

Although he dismisses that image as a “developer distortion,” he acknowledges that the distinction between his critical view of the development industry and his “strongly supportive” stance toward the remainder of the business community has been imperceptible to many San Diegans.

“Whenever your opponents define who you are, and that’s happened sometimes in my case, it’s bound to be a problem,” Navarro conceded.

Navarro’s answer to that problem has been to shrewdly repackage his past themes, to try to sell ideas that were widely criticized in the late 1980s as being likely to reduce jobs and increase housing costs as the solution to San Diego’s economic woes in the 1990s.

Developers’ failure to “pay their pay share” of public costs associated with growth--the need for more police, schools, libraries and other facilities--has shifted that financial burden to current residents and existing businesses, Navarro argues. That factor, he contends, is a major underlying cause of San Diego’s lingering economic downturn.

In the kind of logic perhaps found only in politics, Navarro also has found political benefit in the past losses that he suffered through voters’ rejection of his various managed-growth ballot initiatives. What he has told voters, in essence, is this: You rejected my ideas, so don’t blame me for the problems facing San Diego today.

Simultaneously, Navarro has tried to persuade voters to hold Golding accountable for those same problems, even if many of them were beyond her purview at the county. In so doing, he has made effective use of the compelling question that Ronald Reagan installed as one of the defining issues in virtually every future campaign when he rhetorically asked voters during his 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

At candidate forums, Navarro consistently asks audiences to reflect back on the eight years in which Golding has been a San Diego County supervisor.

“How many of you think our local political leadership over the past eight years has adequately managed our growth and protected our environment?” Navarro asks. “How many think you’re safer in your home today than you were eight years ago? How many think that your environment’s cleaner, that your jobs’s more secure? If you can’t answer yes to even one of those questions, my advice is to help me work with you to change directions.”

Of necessity spawned by her incumbency, Golding has been forced to adopt a different approach in an effort to appeal to voters’ desire for change. Indeed, perhaps the most delicate rhetorical balancing act in her campaign has been to defend her own record while simultaneously chipping away at Navarro’s appeal as an outsider.

“I’ve seen government from the inside, so I know what works and what doesn’t,” Golding tells audiences. “Seeing what’s broke from the inside makes it easier to fix it. . . . The city is a complex, $1-billion-a-year corporation. You don’t make someone the CEO of a billion-dollar corporation when he hasn’t even been to the mail room yet. Experience does count and it does matter.”

The contest to succeed O’Connor in the mayoral suite on the 11th floor at City Hall has seen its share of strategic miscalculations, perhaps none so severe as Navarro’s repeated deceptions about the source of the nearly $220,000 in personal funds that he spent on his first-place finish in the June primary.

For months, Navarro insisted that the personal money had come from savings, investments and speaking fees. However, under pressure from Golding, Navarro acknowledged that most of the money had come from a $300,000 family inheritance.

Even while explaining that he initially concealed the source of the funds to protect his family, Navarro admits that his handling of the issue was probably his major strategic error--one for which he continued to pay a high price through the race’s final days.

Indeed, while politicians often shade the truth, it is rare for them to be caught in an outright lie as Navarro was, and Golding has capitalized on the incident by using it to raise questions about Navarro’s credibility whenever he attacks her record.

Last week, for example, when Navarro began airing a series of TV and radio ads that attacked Golding via references to her former husband, imprisoned felon Richard Silberman, Golding quickly labeled the gambit “another Navarro lie.”

Golding diminished her own credibility and lowered the campaign’s dialogue, however, through her constant allegation that Navarro had received contributions from the pornography industry. Although Navarro did receive several donations from adult book store owners, the contributions totaled less than one-quarter of one percent of the more than $620,000 that he has spent on his campaign to date--and, more to the point, were returned once Navarro learned of their source.

Even as they defend the legitimacy of their respective attacks, however, both Navarro and Golding implicitly acknowledged that the political “hits” often concealed more than illuminated the mayoral campaign’s overriding question: Which candidate can be more effective in meeting San Diego’s current and future needs?

In pleading his case, Navarro often quotes a most unlikely source: professional baseball Hall of Famer Satchel Paige.

“Satchel Paige said, ‘If we don’t change directions, we’re going to wind up where we’re headed,’ ” Navarro says. “I don’t know many people who are very happy with where our politicians have San Diego headed.”

Golding agrees that San Diego would change directions under a Mayor Navarro, but argues that the new course would be a detour toward even tough economic problems and other challenges.

“However serious our problems are now, people might start thinking back on this time as the good old days if Peter Navarro gets elected,” Golding concludes.