Political Salvos Intensify in Drive to Recall Roberti : Campaign: Senator’s foes say they’re grass-roots government reformers. He calls that label a cover for vindictive gun fanatics.

Depending on who’s talking, the leaders of the effort to recall State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) are an eclectic coalition of madder-than-hell good-government proponents or a secretive bunch of vindictive gun nuts.

Recall advocates claim to be grass-roots reformers who see Roberti, who was the powerful state Senate president pro tempore for 13 years, as epitomizing a political system gone haywire with soft-on-crime liberalism, corruption, arrogance and deal-making.

But Roberti, who recently became the first state lawmaker in 80 years to be forced into a recall election, has rejected attempts to characterize his foes as anything other than vengeful--and potentially dangerous--gun fanatics angry with him for his bill that led to a 1989 assault-weapon ban.

“That’s what this is all about,” Roberti said at a news conference last month as he held up an outlawed Uzi assault weapon.

Not so, said recall leader Bill Dominguez, who accuses Roberti of demonizing his foes to avoid dealing with their charges that he is a carpetbagger who tolerated the political corruption that has scandalized the Legislature in recent years.

But Dominguez also has acknowledged that the recall leadership has had a political marriage of convenience with gun activists.

“When we called them (gun activists) for financial help, it was almost a situation of them being ready to mortgage their houses,” Dominguez said. “But call up someone and ask them to contribute to a movement to stop corruption in government, and they’d say, ‘That’s nice--we’ll get back to you.’ ”

But while Dominguez, 43, a systems analyst with Transamerica Insurance Group and candidate in the recall election, denies that gun issues are the driving force behind his own political activism, he nevertheless shares with 2nd Amendment enthusiasts the belief that gun control is liberalism’s failed substitute for getting tough on criminals.

“I guess I’ve been hanging around these 2nd Amendment people too long,” Dominguez said recently, joking about their influence. Dominguez, whose father was a political refugee from Castro’s Cuba, also ran against Roberti in 1992.

The recall movement has paid a price for its alliance with the anti-gun-control forces.

Such ties have handed Roberti valuable ammunition in his bid to paint his foes as single-issue activists. Handgun Control Inc., sponsor of the federal Brady bill, has jumped to Roberti’s defense. Roberti aides have said they hope to turn the recall, scheduled for April 12, into a national referendum on gun control.

Still, the recall movement cannot be easily dismissed as merely a puppet of the gun lobby.

For example, among the five official proponents of the recall are Glenn Bailey, 38, an Encino educator and longtime environmental activist; Hans Rusche, 63, an engineering company executive and local leader in Ross Perot’s United We Stand movement, and Dolores White, 59, a real estate broker and veteran activist in county and state Republican party circles.

Rusche said recently: “This gun thing has been played up too much by Roberti and the media. There’s no question these people are involved. But the NRA (National Rifle Assn.) hasn’t supported us with money.”

Besides, Rusche said, he applauds Roberti’s assault-weapon ban. “Such high-tech weapons belong on the battlefield, not on our streets,” he said in a recent interview.

Both Bailey and White ran against Roberti in 1992. White and seven others, including Dominguez and a Canoga Park gun dealer, filed last week as candidates to replace Roberti if the recall succeeds.

Meanwhile, last Monday, state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal, who has represented the Westside for two decades in Sacramento, announced that he will run in the regular election this spring for the Senate seat now held by Roberti.

Roberti’s current term expires in December, and due to term limits he is ineligible to run for reelection. In effect, if he is recalled, Roberti’s successor in the April 12 election would serve only until December.

Rosenthal faced a difficult reelection campaign because the 1990 reapportionment radically changed his constituency. His surprise decision to run for the 20th District seat held by Roberti was quickly endorsed by the key leadership of the political organization run by U.S. Reps. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) and Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

But critics swiftly likened the Rosenthal decision to Roberti’s own controversial move to the San Fernando Valley--from Hollywood--in 1992 and predicted that it would help the recall movement by fueling the community’s anger against over-the-hill politicians trying to set up shop in the Valley.

“It’s Roberti revisited,” White complained.

In more recent weeks, the recall has captured the support of a number of taxpayer, victims’ rights and government watchdog advocates. They include Ted Costa, president of People’s Advocate, a group founded by the late tax fighter Paul Gann; Ralph Morrell, a state capital gadfly, and Kevin Washburn, a leader in the “three strikes and you’re out” anti-crime initiative.

But the Roberti camp claims such views and diversity are the exception and not the rule in a movement spawned by the gun lobby.

The Roberti thesis got a major boost when the media obtained a lengthy confidential memo, laden with sinister, threatening rhetoric, written to the NRA by recall advocate Russ Howard, a South Bay resident. In the memo, Roberti is graphically described as the target of the anti-gun control movement.

“The beast is wounded,” the memo says in one section, a reference to Roberti’s costly 1992 struggle to win election to the Valley-based seat of former state Sen. Alan Robbins. “It’s time to go in for the kill before he can run for something like attorney general.”