NEWS ANALYSIS : Garamendi Puts $500,000 Into 3-Week Catch-Up Bid : Democrats: The infusion of family funds may be too little, too late. Many feel Brown’s lead is safe.

“The Eagle has landed.”

That was the cryptic message on a reporter’s home telephone answering machine from Darry Sragow, the whimsical manager of state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi’s struggling campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor.

Sragow did not have to say any more. He meant that Garamendi finally had opened his checkbook and pumped some of his family money into his campaign against state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, the well-financed, long-term front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor.

Three weeks before the June primary, the question preoccupying California’s political worlds, Republican and Democrat, is whether Garamendi can make a race of it with Brown.

Of course, in a state where large numbers of voters often pay little attention until the last few weeks of the campaign, virtually anything is possible.

Brown’s campaign, supremely confident of victory, nevertheless has seemed to bumble at times this year, and state Sen. Tom Hayden, while taking the high road to deliver a message of reform, has chugged along a distant third in the polls.

On the Republican side, Gov. Pete Wilson has been taking a surprising pounding from Ron Unz, a little-known but well-financed Silicon Valley entrepreneur. But Wilson’s campaign, also sure of victory, is more interested in the Garamendi question--on the theory that a hard-fought contest in the Democratic primary would make life easier for the Republican nominee this fall.

For Garamendi, time is short. Politics is--among other things--an exercise in expectations, creating them and living up to them. Increasingly, the conventional political wisdom of this race is that it’s Brown’s to lose.

Yet if Garamendi seizes every opportunity, if he comes out with strong television advertisements, if Brown commits some major goofs, if . . .

A key question has been how much money he will spend.

The reporter punches in Sragow’s paging number. Sragow calls back in five minutes.

“How much?” Sragow is asked.

“Five hundred thousand,” he says.

“Is that all?”--the identical response of at least three political reporters when Sragow spread the news over the weekend that Garamendi had given or loaned his campaign $500,000.

For a full month it had been rumored that Garamendi would come up with at least $1 million to finance the last-ditch TV blitz.

Good lord, Sragow thought. Just what does he have to do to convince people that Garamendi, the enigmatic 49-year-old former rancher, banker and legislator from the Sierra foothills, still has a chance to win on June 7?

A month ago, when the Brown campaign seemed to be foundering in indecision and vagueness, Sragow’s task was simpler.

Since then, Brown seems to have found her stride after changing campaign managers in early April. After being almost out of sight for weeks at a time, the 48-year-old treasurer has been on a rented bus touring California and talking to voters with a simple, consistent message: a million jobs, a million jobs, a million jobs.

The daughter of one governor and sister of another, she had a campaign treasury fat with cash. Over the weekend she went on the air with fresh ads billing her as “America’s Best Treasurer to Revive America’s Worst Economy.”

The expectation that he would act sooner, against the fact that he didn’t, has hurt Garamendi. Week after week, he remained off television and where was the money?

Now $500,000 might buy him some time.

So far this year, much of this battle of expectations and image has occurred outside of public view. It circulates by fax, computer mail, word of mouth and newsletter within a limited underground of campaign consultants, political science academics, pollsters, political media specialists, newspaper writers, and the few radio and television reporters who follow politics.

When it becomes part of the public debate, a campaign can become doomed within hours. One of the most dramatic examples occurred 22 years ago when George McGovern and Hubert H. Humphrey were locked in what seemed to be a deadlocked battle for California’s delegate votes in the June Democratic presidential primary.

On the Thursday before the election, a statewide poll showed that McGovern had maintained a substantial lead in spite of Humphrey’s energetic campaigning. Before the day was out, Humphrey’s campaign contributions had stopped coming in.

There was not even enough to buy postage for a campaign brochure that was printed and ready to go to every Democratic household in the state. Overnight, the energy and politics of joy had visibly drained from Humphrey. He became a gloomy man who snapped at aides. The campaign virtually folded.

But in the balloting the next Tuesday, Humphrey lost by the barest of margins, a small percentage of the vote. It became apparent that the election had still been his to win late the previous week.

In the California governor’s race this year, Garamendi has a different problem. He has yet to establish that he can make it a neck-and-neck contest.

In the last independent statewide polls, at the end of March, Brown held leads ranging up to 17 points. There have been no dramatic events recently of the sort that seemingly might send the poll numbers spurting one way or another.

But some experts believed Brown’s support may have faded because of the listless nature of her campaign much of the spring. Some of that has been registered in polls conducted by other campaigns, Garamendi said.

Garamendi, talking to a reporter at the 2,200-foot level of the Sixteen-to-One Gold Mine in the Mother Lode country Monday, was upbeat: “I feel pretty good about it.”

Wilson’s campaign disclosed several weeks ago that its polls showed that Garamendi had narrowed Brown’s advantage to just 3%. But the sample was so small--289 Democratic voters--that it had little credibility.

Wilson’s numbers were suspect for another reason. In the curious dance of primary politics, Wilson’s interests lie in having as strong a Garamendi candidacy as possible. Wilson has devoted a large part of his campaign effort to attacking Brown--an effort that Sragow, Garamendi’s aide, jokingly refers to as “in-kind contributions” to the Garamendi campaign.

Wilson spokesman Dan Schnur recently said hopefully: “This is a fundamentally different race than it was even two weeks ago. The two major Democratic candidates are virtually dead even. And now that Garamendi has committed to spending his own money, we expect them to go at each other tooth and nail all the way to the primary.”

In such an event, Schnur said, “Whoever staggers out (of the primary) is going to be very broken and very bloody.”

But Mervin Field, founder of the Field Poll, indicated that his latest poll being released today would show no substantial movement in the Democratic governor’s race.

“Garamendi hasn’t been able to strike any chord with the voters,” Field added. “He’s not getting the attention he might have if he had raised a lot of money and could have campaigned heavily.”

Today, with money in hand, Sragow says he has TV ads ready to go, possibly this week. Experts say he will have to attack Brown and raise questions about her record in her one term as state treasurer, question the depth of her experience and her ability to lead.

To forge an upset, Garamendi must dramatically outscore Brown in their three debates the week of May 22 with something that forces Brown into an “uncomfortable, embarrassing or revealing position,” Field said. And it would help to have some poll data or other signs that his campaign is gathering some momentum.

Some experts believe that Garamendi blundered by spending so much of his time working on everyday jobs in 58 counties, many of them in rural areas with relatively few voters.

“Until he has (a television ad) that explains the workday thing, that was a waste of time,” said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist advising Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

But Carrick added, “I think he could make a race of it. He’s going to have to spend a lot of money, but he could make it interesting.”

For Brown’s part, how would she respond to a surge from Garamendi? She could continue as she has to attack Wilson on the economy and ignore Garamendi, following a traditional front-runner strategy--don’t give an underdog opponent any attention.

In fact, if Brown started attacking Garamendi in ads, it might be read as a sign that she feared he was eroding her support.

Clint Reilly, Brown’s campaign manager, has said, however, that “I would think that generally it’s kind of difficult to go through an entire campaign being attacked from both directions and not respond in some way.”

Reilly, a big believer in demographics, is convinced that it will be hard for Brown to lose the primary, almost regardless of how the campaign goes. In particular, he notes the number of women who will vote in the Democratic primary.

Field said it is evident that Brown’s strategists decided, “Let’s leave well enough alone. Don’t change a winning formula.”

“And so far, they haven’t,” he added.

But dynamics can mean a lot in California campaigns, particularly in the final weeks.

Two years ago, then-Rep. Barbara Boxer was waging a come-from-behind battle against better-financed and better-known male candidates for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Rose Kapolczynski, who managed Boxer’s campaign, recalled: “We really believe that our ability to develop a sense of momentum and grass-roots energy all over the state (in that last month) helped give us the winning margin. . . . We felt that we had momentum that could propel us to victory. It didn’t just happen. We worked hard to get that victory.”

Boxer won the nomination and the fall election and now is in the Senate.

Most California political analysts say they have not seen that sort of momentum yet in the governor’s race. The candidates have nearly three weeks in which to try to change that.