COLUMN ONE : Digging Up Blasts From the Past : In California, more victors--and victims--are feeling the effects of ‘opposition research.’ The governor’s race will showcase the power of probing candidates’ political and private lives.

In baseball, it’s scouting. In war, it’s spying . In politics, it’s called opposition research. You will not hear much about it from candidates themselves, but the California gubernatorial race promises to be a showcase for the age-old practice of digging into the public--and private--lives of political rivals.

Just ask Darry Sragow, who is running state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi’s campaign for governor. Sragow is collecting “everything I can find out” about Treasurer Kathleen Brown, whom Garamendi faces in the June 7 Democratic primary.

“It’s the motto of the Scouts,” Sragow said. “Be prepared.”

Garamendi is in good company. After years of lagging behind Republican research efforts, the state Democratic Party has amassed a database on Gov. Pete Wilson so his opponents can, in one party official’s words, “move quickly when a weakness appears.”

This month, when Brown asked fellow candidates to join her in pledging to run a “no-negative” gubernatorial race, she did not mention that her campaign had already spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours delving into her opponents’ vulnerable spots. Her political gumshoe: Ace Smith, whose clients have included a presidential hopeful named Bill Clinton.

Wilson’s camp has built a fat file on Garamendi and an even fatter one on Brown--an effort made easier by the fact that Joseph D. Rodota, who did opposition research on Brown during her 1990 bid for treasurer, is now Wilson’s Cabinet secretary.

In one form or another, opposition research has been part of the rough and tumble nature of democracy since the first election. Today, rapidly improving campaign techniques and communications technology have made research more crucial than ever.

Campaign professionals say that to stay competitive they must start research earlier, be able to access it more quickly and package it in a dizzying array of sophisticated formats, from a television sound bite to an “attack facsimile.”

“You’ll be accused of malfeasance if you don’t do opposition research,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a Los Angeles-based Republican consultant. “It’s part of the game.”

Campaigns, it is said by those who run them, are won or lost in the library. Information is power, and when that power is unleashed in a focused way the results can be devastating.

One recent contender whose dreams were dashed by an opponent who did his homework: Orange County Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder, whose front-running bid for Congress in 1988 was derailed after the college degree she listed in her campaign literature was found to be nonexistent. And who can forget former television commentator Bruce Herschensohn, whose 1992 U.S. Senate bid ended on a sour note after a Democratic Party official revealed that the Republican had visited a nude dance club?

Among opposition research specialists, almost everyone agrees on the craft’s basic tenets: Start early. Be accurate. Investigate your own candidate as painstakingly as you do their opponents.

Most professional researchers distance themselves from the kind of dirt-digging that was used against Herschensohn. Their preferred hunting ground is the vast and varied public record--resumes and campaign finance reports, committee votes and newspaper clippings. Their quarry: flip-flops and contradictions, unkept promises and outright lies.

But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of political snooping--What information is relevant? Is anything off limits?--there are no hard and fast rules.

“It’s a very slippery area,” said one campaign official. Another political veteran, asked to draw the line between what is scrupulous and what is sleazy, said bravely: “It depends.”

“So much in politics is situational ethics. It’s right or wrong, good or evil depending on whose ox is being gored,” Hoffenblum said. “A negative campaign is when they’re talking about you. A truthful campaign is when you’re talking about them.”

Opposition research was used to powerful effect during the last gubernatorial race when Wilson, then a U.S. senator, faced former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. Insiders still talk about the summer of 1990, when Wilson’s information gathering team, in the words of one begrudging Democrat, “neutralized their biggest negative right off the bat.”

Feinstein was on the attack, airing a television ad that skewered Wilson for accepting thousands of supposedly tainted dollars in contributions from the savings and loan industry. Coming at a time when then-U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston’s ties to the S & L industry were front-page news, the ad could have caused major damage. Instead, Wilson’s team used research to turn a vulnerable point into a non-issue.

Immediately, his camp aired an ad that accused Feinstein’s husband, Dick Blum, of owning an interest in a failed S & L in Oregon. Feinstein fought back, accusing Wilson of telling the “big lie” and noting that Blum’s interest amounted to 0.25% of the thrift’s assets. But the mission was accomplished: the S & L issue--what some had seen as Wilson’s Achilles’ heel--was a soft spot Feinstein could no longer afford to poke.

The man behind this coup, Rodota, has since closed his Sacramento-based opposition research firm, Benchmark Research. Campaign staffers insist that his role in Wilson’s Administration prevents him from playing anything but an advisory role in their research efforts. But he may always be known by the nickname his colleagues gave him during the 1990 race: “Dr. Death.”

When then-Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor in 1982, rival George Deukmejian’s campaign was alarmed to discover that Bradley had significant support in the San Joaquin Valley.

“I was going nuts--there was no way Bradley was going to be a friend of farmers,” said Ken Khachigian, a Republican political consultant and a close Deukmejian adviser. So Khachigian started digging, searching for something--anything--to prove his point.

He found it in a newspaper clipping: In 1973, Bradley had nominated United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez for the Nobel Peace Prize. “In the ag’ community, that was death,” Khachigian recalls happily. And what made the discovery even sweeter was that the tidbit made a perfect one-liner. (Khachigian’s rule of thumb: “If you can’t reduce it to a 3-by-5 index card, something’s wrong.”)

“If you liked Jerry Brown, you’ll love Tom Bradley,” began the index card that Khachigian distributed to farmers throughout the state. The card mentioned Bradley’s nomination of Chavez and added this footnote: “Cesar Chavez (has) said that California’s growers are ‘bad people.’ He added: ‘I hate them.’ ”

The card’s flip side described Deukmejian as “an advocate, supporter and friend of California agriculture.”

Statewide and nationally, Republicans have long had the upper hand in the cutthroat research wars. The Republican National Committee’s opposition research unit, created by the late committee Chairman Lee Atwater, is credited with helping to demolish then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis during his presidential bid in 1988.

One of the weapons that research wrought: Willie Horton, a felon who murdered a man and raped his companion while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. In television ads that described Horton’s misdeeds, George Bush’s campaign portrayed Dukakis as being soft on crime.

During the 1992 presidential election, however, Clinton’s advisers helped the Democrats make up lost ground. And California’s Democratic Party got busy too.

“In the past, after the primary we would say: ‘Oh, let’s do research.’. . . We were weak and everybody knew it. But now it’s a whole new ballgame,” said Bob Mulholland, who was political director of the state Democratic Party when the approach to information gathering underwent a sea change beginning in 1992.

Under the chairmanship of Phil Angelides and now Bill Press, the party set out to get the goods on Republicans that could make a difference on Election Day. The 1994 governor’s race will be the most important test of that new system, and the party is taking its anti-Wilson effort very seriously.

Employing up to 10 people at a time to pull court records and hunt down committee votes, the party has collected piles of data, “triaged” it to determine what is usable and organized it via computer to make it instantly accessible.

“We have moved the party into the 21st Century,” executive director Susan Kennedy said. Already, that effort has begun to pay off, she said.

In December, after Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders suggested that legalizing drugs deserves study, Wilson called for her resignation. Within 15 minutes, the state Democratic Party was sending out attack faxes with “proof” of what Kennedy calls the governor’s “blatant hypocrisy.”

In 1970, when he was an assemblyman, Wilson introduced and carried legislation that required police, in certain situations, to release arrested people who were under the influence of drugs. Moreover, Wilson in 1968 co-authored a measure that reduced the first possession of marijuana from a felony to a misdemeanor.

“The object is to be able to respond or launch something in the same news cycle,” Kennedy said. Failure to pounce on an opponent’s weakness--or, worse, failure to respond to a rival’s attack--”is the kind of thing that can destroy a candidacy. You have to be able to defend yourself without delay.”

That, Brown campaign staffers say, is precisely the reason the 48-year-old Democrat is assembling opposition research--despite what they describe as her sincere desire to run a positive campaign.

“We have to do it,” said Michael Reese, Brown’s campaign spokesman. “They have it. We need it. We must at least be prepared for the coming battle because we don’t know what tactics are going to be used, what weapons will come into play. Foolish would be the candidate who didn’t prepare . . . for this war.”

Indeed, the only major gubernatorial candidate who insists he is doing no opposition research is state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who has raised the least money and says he does not expect to win.

In addition to shoring up her defenses, Brown has begun a little informational target practice as well. This month, an item appeared in a San Francisco newspaper’s political column under the headline, “Garamendi Flip-Flop.” It noted that while Garamendi told a Los Angeles radio station he had believed in the death penalty “for all of my life,” he had opposed capital punishment early in his political career.

Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, conceded the error. But he was quick to note that although Brown was not identified as the source of the tidbit, he saw her fingerprints all over it: “Kathleen Brown’s people love to talk about things that happened back when people were wearing leisure suits.”

Reese, Brown’s spokesman, acknowledges that they planted the story. “Part of opposition research is knowing what’s out there and being able to point reporters in the right direction,” he said. Indeed, the leaking of hot tips to the media is a common campaign technique, although reporters do not always bite.

As eager as some campaigns are to leak the fruits of their research, they are often reluctant to talk about the process itself. When asked to describe Brown’s effort, Reese was initially terse: “Yes, we do opposition research. That’s it.”

Dan Schnur, Wilson’s campaign spokesman, first greeted inquiries about Wilson’s research effort with a stab at deadpan humor. “We have no need for opposition research because we intend to run on Pete Wilson’s record,” he said, adding a moment later: “I thought I’d give (that answer) a try.”

The topic that really makes political professionals wary is private investigators. Most campaigns, fearing the stigma that a cloak-and-dagger, garbage-sifting private eye might bring to their candidate, say they do not hire sleuths--although a few acknowledge that they know of others who do. However, Harry F. Block, a Newport Beach private detective, says “it happens all the time.”

“I’ve done governors in different states and more than one political figure here in Southern California,” said Block, who added that he is often asked to look for undeclared gifts, misappropriated government funds and, the latest hot-button issue, instances of sexual harassment. Not that he always knows exactly whom he’s working for.

“Of course, they don’t want to be ‘in it.’ So you get your money and your instructions somewhere else. But when you get into it, you know damn well who’s behind it,” he said, recalling one assignment he got from a lawyer in San Jose. “He gave me my instructions. . . . But what does a lawyer in San Jose care about an Illinois senator?”

Block said he is not involved in the California governor’s race.

Campaigns never use every fact they gather. Sometimes the information they have in reserve is deemed too sensitive or irrelevant. Certain topics--particularly ones dealing with a candidate’s sexual proclivities--are difficult to raise gracefully. Many a tawdry detail has been junk-piled for fear of a campaign backfire.

That is why Herschensohn’s eleventh-hour embarrassment has been so controversial. Four days after the Republican was confronted with a huge photograph of the Seventh Veil, a nude dance club he later admitted he had visited, Barbara Boxer was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Mulholland, the Democratic official who waved the photo in Herschensohn’s face at a campaign stop in Chico, said that issue was relevant because Herschensohn had made family values a foundation of his campaign. But others tried to distance themselves from Mulholland’s activities, and today Mulholland tries to draw a distinction between opposition research and the dirt he dug up about Herschensohn--an investigation he characterizes as “a total sidebar to research.”

“Research is public policy stuff. . . . People’s personal lives should remain personal and most of what I call ‘the beyond the public record stuff’ should not be used,” he said. “But when (a Republican) gets up there and starts preaching to me, they better be careful.”

Khachigian, who was Herschensohn’s campaign manager, calls this “the faulty logic of hit men and toadies.” Boxer and top Democratic party officials can say they knew nothing about Mulholland’s stunt, Khachigian said, but he is not buying it.

“Having participated in this little rancid episode, Angelides, Mulholland, Barbara Boxer and all the rest have to pay the penalty,” Khachigian said. “Forever more I get to attach (the words) ‘sleaze and smear’ to what they did.”

Sometimes, aggrieved candidates get to do more than that. Former Los Angeles County Assessor Alexander Pope will never forget the morning in 1978 when his opponent, a tax agent named Frank Hill (no relation to the state senator), held a news conference accusing him of resisting arrest in a Sacramento bar. Within hours, an embarrassed and apologetic Hill was back before the cameras. Closer inspection of police files had shown that Alexendera Pope--a 27-year-old woman--was the culprit.

“They had waited until (five days) before the election. . . . They just figured there was no way I could respond,” Pope said. But respond he did. After Pope won the election, he sued Hill for libel and won. When Hill paid up, Pope donated the $15,000 judgment to the League of Women Voters.

Researching the Opposition

For months, researchers have been sorting through voting histories, court records, political fund-raising and campaign literature in search of discrepancies, flip-flops and errors. The Times asked several political consultants--not employed in this year’s governor’s race--what they would look for in the backgrounds of the major contenders.

Gov. Pete Wilson--Lots to analyze in Wilson’s decades of public service as a state legislator, San Diego mayor and U.S. senator, but what he has done--and not done--as governor will be the meat and potatoes of the research effort. Of particular interest is anything inconsistent with Wilson’s current stands on hot-button issues such as crime and illegal immigration.

Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi--Like Wilson, Garamendi has a lengthy public record beginning with his 1974 election to the Assembly. Opponents will pore over Garamendi’s record as the first elected insurance commissioner as well as his unsuccessful 1982 run for governor. Republican researchers will scrutinize Garamendi’s lengthy legislative record looking in particular for liberal votes.

State Treasurer Kathleen Brown--Brown’s shorter history of public service will force researchers to rely more than usual on newspaper clippings and correspondence. Brown’s five years on the Los Angeles Unified School Board will be analyzed because education is central to her campaign. Her four years as state treasurer will also be scrutinized, as will her substantial fund raising.

State Sen. Tom Hayden--Opponents are unlikely to spend a lot of effort researching Hayden. “His life story is an open book,” said one insider, referring to Hayden’s history of civil rights and anti-war activism and his former marriage to actress Jane Fonda. Hayden’s many years in Sacramento and in politics also could provide campaign fodder, particularly anything at odds with his reform agenda.