ELECTIONS / 20TH STATE SENATE DISTRICT : Recall Battle Intensifies in 11th Hour

The recall election of state Sen. David Roberti continued to widen Saturday as vanloads of San Francisco activists joined local Roberti campaign workers amid reports that the National Rifle Assn., the senator’s sworn enemy, was targeting thousands of local voters with an out-of-state phone-bank operation.

Tuesday, voters go to the polls to decide Roberti’s fate in the first recall election against a state official in 80 years.

The ballot, which also features five candidates seeking to replace the incumbent Van Nuys Democrat if more than 50% of the 20th Senate District electorate votes to oust him, is being closely watched nationally as a referendum on gun control.

With the election only three days away, the campaign tempo picked up Saturday as the candidates and their allies fanned out across the San Fernando Valley in search of voters and their support.

A big topic was the NRA’s exact role. Ten days ago, an NRA spokesman confirmed that the organization would enter the race to defeat Roberti, who authored a 1989 ban on assault rifles that has galled California and national gun interests.

But as of Friday, Stephen Helsley, an NRA executive in Sacramento, was still refusing to specify what steps the organization was taking against Roberti.

However, attorney Kevin Washburn, spokesman for the pro-recall coalition, said it was his understanding that the NRA would be making tens of thousands of phone calls this weekend to identify anti-Roberti voters and then, in a second push, remind them on Monday and Tuesday to vote.

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Roberti confirmed Saturday that his campaign workers were hearing about out-of-state phone calls being placed by the NRA. “It’s the NRA’s modus operandi to come in at the last minute,” added Sandy Cooney, western regional director for Handgun Control Inc., the group run by celebrated gun control activist Sarah Brady.

Cooney also reported Saturday that his own group, based in Washington, D.C., had helped Roberti pay for one-minute radio ads that began running Saturday on local stations. Meanwhile, Roberti also benefited Saturday from other imported help as three dozen Catholic church volunteers drove down from San Francisco to join his campaign.

Charles Rathbone of St. Mary’s Church in San Francisco said he and his group of seven volunteers wanted to ensure that progressive politicians like Roberti, who support rent control and gun control, stay in office.

At a midmorning pep rally in North Hollywood, Roberti told 80 precinct workers, including the fresh troops from the Bay Area, that the real issue in the recall is the public’s right to control guns and the real political enemies are the gun extremists.

“But we’re going to drive them out of the San Fernando Valley once and forever!” Roberti told his cheering supporters, many of them members of VOICE (Valley Organized in Community Efforts), an activist group of Valley-based church volunteers.

“We’re sick and tired of our kids being destroyed by guns,” Celia Barragan, a leader of VOICE from Pacoima, told reporters.

Later, recall drive leaders gathered at their own headquarters, where one of them claimed that even if the recall fails at the polls Tuesday, the movement has been victorious.

“We’ve already won,” said Russ Howard, a South Bay financial consultant and leader of the Coalition to Restore Government Integrity. “We’ve effectively prevented David Roberti from going on in politics.”

Roberti, who will be forced to leave the Senate in December anyway because of term limits, is running for the Democratic nomination for state treasurer against former Democratic Party head Phil Angelides. Roberti has been so badly crippled by the charges made by the recall movement against him that he will lose to Angelides, Howard predicted.

Recall organizers have said that Roberti, as president pro tem of the Senate for 13 years, tolerated the political corruption that has scandalized the state capital in recent years and has been soft on crime.

“I’m not saying Roberti knew exactly” about the corruption of many of his fellow senators, including Alan Robbins of Van Nuys, Howard said. “But it’s hard to believe that he didn’t know something stank up there.”

Roberti has denied that he knew of or was involved in any of the corruption that has resulted in prison sentences for three former state senators.

At the pro-recall coalition headquarters in Van Nuys, half a dozen workers, including Paul Payne of Riverside and Easyriders magazine writer Jim Clark, were calling voters, asking them to recall Roberti.

Payne, who owns an auto shop, said he was seeking Roberti’s ouster because the senator has opposed the death penalty. Payne said his father was killed in an armed robbery in Sacramento in 1991 yet his killer was able to avoid the electric chair. “Guys like Roberti let him go,” he said.

Clark, a Van Nuys resident in a Harley-Davidson sweat shirt, said he was recruited to work the phones by People’s Advocate, a taxpayer group founded by Paul Gann. “Relatives and friends of mine died in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and they didn’t do so to keep the likes of Roberti in office,” Clark said.

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Several miles away in Sherman Oaks, candidate Randy Linkmeyer, a gun store owner, was trying to persuade John Goddard, a local contractor, to vote for the recall.

Goddard, standing in the doorway of his Sherman Oaks home, was leery at first, but his attitude appeared to change when Linkmeyer told him of Roberti’s support for ousted California Supreme Court Justice Rose Bird. “He called her a modern-day Joan of Arc,” Linkmeyer said. “Oh, ge-e-e-z,” said Goddard, turning away in disgust.

“I think we turned him around,” Linkmeyer later told a reporter as he and his entourage walked along Fulton Avenue. Among the Linkmeyer troop was the candidate’s 5-year-old son, Danny, friends with their child and Helen Gabriel, who in years past was the GOP nominee in races against former state Assemblyman Tom Bane.

“I’m here with Randy, because I think he’s highly qualified,” the veteran campaigner said of Linkmeyer.

Finally, outside a Hughes Market in North Hills, candidate Al Dib, a retired green grocer, and his daughter, Vanessa Birkner, were having some luck with the voters they were hitting with campaign flyers. “I hadn’t made up my mind, but now I have,” said Virginia Meyer, a retired real estate broker. “I think it’s good that he’s out in a public place asking for support.”

“Don’t forget to vote for me,” Dib told one shopper as he stuffed a flyer in her grocery bag.

But the candidates also faced some rough spots, too, indicative of the passions aroused by the Roberti recall.

Composer Rand Bishop cursed Dib at the Hughes Market, saying he had just that morning seen Dib’s TV commercial that criticizes Roberti for being soft on crime. “I saw your ad and it was disgusting,” Bishop told an astonished Dib. “Well, at least they’re seeing them,” Dib said later.

Likewise, an unidentified man in a Jeep rolled down his window and hurled expletives at Roberti as the senator stood in the parking lot outside his campaign headquarters talking to supporters. “What was the license plate on that car?” a security man from the Roberti camp later asked reporters.