Backing of GOP May Help Little in Recall : Politics: Some doubt whether endorsement will add up to money and volunteers in campaign to oust Sen. Roberti.

Outgunned financially and often outmaneuvered politically, the recall campaign against state Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) received a boost recently when the movement, relentlessly reviled by Roberti as the creature of gun zealots, was embraced by the state Republican Party.

The endorsement last Sunday of the recall by a unanimous voice vote at the GOP’s winter convention would help legitimize their effort, recall organizers said hopefully after the vote.

“Is the entire Republican Party run by assault weapons extremists? I don’t think Roberti can say that,” said Russ Howard, a Palos Verdes Estates financial consultant and a top strategist for the recall movement.

To date, Roberti has widely succeeded in marginalizing his foes by painting them as little more than a cabal of gun nuts seeking revenge against him because he authored a 1989 ban on assault weapons.

But some doubt if the GOP endorsement will bear real fruit--money and volunteers--for the recall or carry much weight with the Republican rank-and-file even as a symbolic gesture, because some of the party’s top leaders, including Gov. Pete Wilson and state Sen. Ken Maddy (R-Fresno), distanced themselves from the convention action.

“I’d be surprised if the party gives them much more than token support,” predicted Republican-based corporate political consultant Paul Clarke.

Meanwhile, the GOP endorsement has not persuaded Roberti or his partisans that they are suddenly dealing with a different political animal.

Bill Press, chairman of the state Democratic Party, quickly called the GOP endorsement a disgraceful sign that the GOP had climbed into bed with gun fanatics who have opposed laws to control the ownership of the kind of assault weapons that have figured dramatically in some of the nation’s most heinous killings.

Press and Roberti supporters also observed that the resolution adopted by the GOP convention was introduced by John Stoos, the Sacramento lobbyist for Gun Owners of California, a group organized by former Sen. H.L. Richardson.

But to the recall leadership, the GOP endorsement was a much welcomed boon. Although Roberti’s foes scored a surprising coup in January when it was learned they had gathered the nearly 20,000 signatures needed to force Roberti into a recall election, now set for April 12, they have suffered several setbacks since.

One such setback occurred this week when it was disclosed that recall organizers were raffling off firearms, including an assault rifle, to raise funds for their cause. And the movement is bracing for a media blitz this week when gun control celebrity Sarah Brady comes to Los Angeles to defend Roberti. Her husband, James Brady, was critically injured in the 1981 assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan.

Brady, who will hold a news conference with Roberti and be the featured guest at a Biltmore Hotel fund-raiser for the embattled senator, was the prime sponsor of the new federal gun control law that took effect last week.

Her efforts locally are designed to elevate Roberti’s campaign to a national referendum on gun control.

Facing such formidable odds, the recall organizers have hoped to turn their GOP endorsement into solid cash and volunteers in coming days.

But success in this regard remains uncertain.

“Why should the party waste its time on a recall?” said Clarke, noting that term limits will force Roberti to leave his Senate seat in November, anyway. The party’s energy would be better spent on this year’s governor’s race and the U. S. Senate seat race, Clarke said.

Maddy, Senate leader of the GOP caucus, argued at last weekend’s convention against the party underwriting the recall fight.

“We have a shortage of funds and should be putting our money into races where we have a better chance of winning,” Maddy said in an interview this week, recapping the arguments he made to the party’s board of directors at the convention.

Republican prospects in the 20th Senate District--the seat now held by Roberti--are not bright in large part because GOP voter registration is low, Maddy said. Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly a 2-1 margin in this district. Maddy further observed that he is leery of “single-issue” campaigns.

Gov. Wilson, too, has steered wide of the race.

Pressed for his position by reporters at the convention, Wilson praised Roberti for his help in passing state budgets, said he was unclear about the purpose of the recall and predicted a Roberti victory at the polls.

“Roberti will probably survive the recall,” Wilson said.

Clarke warned, too, that even the endorsement is not necessarily a barometer of rank-and-file party sentiment. “The convention is composed of people who are furthest to the right,” Clarke said. “They are not representative of the average party member.”

In fact, Roberti recently claimed that he has significant support among Republicans, and Staci Walters, his campaign press secretary, said the senator soon will be showing off his GOP supporters at a news conference.

Yet despite the coolness of some of the party’s top elected officials to the recall, others in the party are gung-ho about defeating one of the Democratic party’s leaders--for 13 years Roberti was president pro tempore of the Senate--and a highly visible liberal.

One of these is Downey businessman Keith McCarthy, chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Central Committee and the person who will be making the pitch next week to state party Chairman Tirso del Junco for financial support from the GOP’s state organization.

McCarthy acknowledged in an interview that gun rights advocates are a significant part of the recall movement but insisted that the gun issue is not why he wants Roberti’s ouster. “This is about Roberti’s corruption and arrogance, not about guns,” McCarthy said.

Recall leaders have damned Roberti as a carpetbagger because he does not live in the district and labeled him the “godfather of political corruption” because he was leader of the Senate when three of his Democratic colleagues were either convicted or pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the biggest political corruption scandal in Sacramento in decades.

Although incidents such as the firearms raffle may make his job of securing mainline Republican support for the recall more difficult, McCarthy said it would not deter him from proceeding.

“I don’t think we should sit on our thumbs and let an opportunity like this go by to elect a Republican,” he said.