Mail Firm Has Rivals in Its Bag : Politics: One company addresses, stamps and sends direct correspondence for six major contenders in the L.A. mayor’s race.

If Southern California is a special home for politicking by direct mail, Ken Anderson’s shop is its Eden.

Indeed, the soft-spoken Minnesota native occupies perhaps one of the best seats from which to watch Los Angeles’ political scene.

Last Wednesday morning, for example, one $25,000 machine in Anderson’s North Hollywood direct-mail plant was gluing address labels on a four-color mailer for Los Angeles city mayoral candidate Michael Woo.

Six feet away, a similar machine whirred as it labeled tens of thousands of mailers for candidate Nate Holden.

On a third, a slate card for Richard Katz, another mayoral hopeful, was being labeled with the names of registered voters at the rate of 300 pieces per minute.

The irony of all this strange bedfellowing rarely fazes Anderson, who is doing the mail for six of the city’s most prominent mayoral candidates.

Indeed, such paradoxes are commonplace when Anderson’s firm, USA Direct Mail, is cranking out 500,000 pieces of political mail daily for nearly two dozen candidates in Tuesday’s municipal election.

California has been a pioneer in politicking by direct mail.

Using the mails to reach voters is much more cost-effective than TV and radio advertising. Armed with sophisticated mailing lists developed by political demographers, consultants can tailor-make their message for specific groups of voters.

From Anderson’s perspective, it’s like sitting in both dugouts at the World Series.

“We’re the first to see it all,” said the 46-year-old West Hills resident, standing next to mountains of mail bags marked with red priority mail tags and headed for the post office.

At his mail house, political pieces are stuffed in envelopes, given address labels and delivered to the post office. Since April 6, Anderson’s shop has been running on overtime to keep up with the political mail.

“I came to work at 3 a.m. this morning,” he said Thursday. “We’ve never missed a drop deadline at the post office.”

While awash in politics, Anderson steers clear of partisanship.

“This is a business,” he said. “I do both Republicans and Democrats and I’m one of only a few mail houses that’ll do both sides in an election. But sometimes I’ll see a piece and I’ll jump up and say, ‘That’s not true!’

“I’m not immune to what’s happening. But the bottom line is that my customers come first and my political leanings are not an issue,” said Anderson, who five years ago was an executive for a credit card systems manufacturing company. During the off-seasons, his firm keeps busy printing business mail.

Anderson sees the political hit pieces before they hit, and the storage area at his nondescript plant near a railroad track even contains bags of fully printed mailers candidates have prepared sim ply as a defensive reply if a rival reveals some inglorious part of their career. “We release them but only when we get a call that the hit piece they’d been anticipating has gone out,” he said. “Sometimes they’re not used.”

Anderson also knows what voter bloc (elderly women, Latinos, blacks, Republicans, gays and so on) is the target of which campaign before they know it.

And he sees what nasty things one mayoral candidate, an Anderson client, is about to say about a rival, also an Anderson client.

“I tell the client if we’re going to be doing mail for the other side in the same race,” Anderson said. “Then it’s their choice.”

Some would pay good money to know what Anderson knows.

During a tour of his cavernous plant, a visitor was repeatedly warned not to read the mail being processed and that anything he saw was not to be written about.

The business is sensitive, and snooping is not unknown.

“The political consultants don’t get into our back shop,” Anderson said of the production area, where 25 employees Wednesday were massaging tens of thousands of pieces of mail. “We’ve had a few try, but we just escort them to the front office.”

More serious attempts to breach security have occurred, Anderson said. But he refused to discuss these incidents in detail.

Even the garbage here is sacrosanct.

“We don’t throw leftovers in the garbage,” Anderson said. After all, political consultants have been known to dive around in the bins of direct-mail houses to pick up clues about their opponents’ campaigns.

“I’ve done it,” one consultant active in the April primary confided recently.