CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS / GOVERNOR : Garamendi, Brown Attack Ads Signal Nasty Finish to Race

One week before the primary election, the two leading Democratic candidates for governor went on the attack Tuesday, broadcasting television advertisements that jabbed at each other’s perceived weak spots and seemed to bode for a nasty, combative finish.

Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi’s campaign struck first, unveiling a 30-second and a 10-second spot that call attention to state Treasurer Kathleen Brown’s personal opposition to the death penalty. “My opponent, Kathleen Brown, is against the death penalty. I support it and I’ll carry it out,” Garamendi says in one ad, failing to mention that Brown says she, too, would carry out executions if she is elected.

Just hours after Garamendi’s ad was made public, Brown’s staff revealed that she would respond in kind, skewering Garamendi for how he handled the failure of Executive Life Insurance Co. “John Garamendi for governor?” asks Brown’s ad. “Now that’s putting California into the wrong hands.”

The campaign cross-fire, which began airing Tuesday night and will continue for at least a few days, prompted sighs from some political observers.

“My God, here we go again,” said pollster Mervin Field. “They’ve both descended to the routine low road. . . . Think about the money down the drain.”

“This underscores there is no such thing as civility in politics anymore,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the Claremont Graduate School. “There is no such thing as party loyalty.”

Staffers for both campaigns defended the ads as a necessary way to inform the Democratic electorate, which will choose among Brown, Garamendi and state Sen. Tom Hayden on June 7. But each side accused the other of distorting the facts and of being desperate.

John Whitehurst, a spokesman for the Brown campaign, said “Garamendi’s misleading commercial is the hollow sound of a 20-year career coming to a whimpering end.” Whitehurst took issue with the ad’s assertion that Brown “has said she’d vote against laws to expand (death penalty) use.”

The statement is true as far as it goes, Whitehurst said. But Brown has also said that as governor she would make sure any effort to expand the death penalty would go before the voters, and that she would act in accordance with the will of the people.

“The issue is: As governor will she allow that expansion law to be put before the voters? And the answer to that is yes,” Whitehurst said.

Darry Sragow, Garamendi’s campaign manager, challenged the accuracy of the Brown ad. The ad begins with a 64-year-old widow named Helen McGrath, who says she was counting on insurance payments from Executive Life for survival, but “because of John Garamendi, I don’t know that I’ll see any of these payments in my lifetime.”

The ad continues: “When . . . Garamendi seized Executive Life, the result was financial disaster.”

Sragow countered: “When John seized Executive Life he was attempting to undo and resolve a financial disaster. And the fact is that 92% of the policyholders will be paid in full. . . . Are some of the other 8% unhappy? Yes. And the Brown camp I guess found (one of those people).

“This just shows how desperate they are to keep voters focused on something other than Kathleen’s opposition to the death penalty,” said Sragow, who noted that in February, Brown asked her opponents to sign what she called an “honest and clean campaign pledge” to prohibit attack advertising.

Whitehurst was unapologetic. “This campaign isn’t just going to sit there and get hit,” he said.

Whitehurst said Brown’s attack ad will be interspersed with another new ad, a biographical commercial that shows Brown cuddling her children. Having been “raised in the family of California,” the ad says, “grandmother Kathleen Brown is fighting for the California family.”

The Brown campaign has spent $500,000 on this week’s media purchase, Whitehurst said, but may spend more before Election Day.

Sragow called Garamendi’s focus on the death penalty a “precise message to motivate voters.” He admitted that the candidate may have trouble getting the message out. Although Garamendi will have up to $1 million to spend on air time, Sragow said, the airwaves are so jammed with political advertising that there may not be $1 million worth of air time left to buy.

As of Tuesday, Garamendi had spent $100,000 to air the ad in San Diego and Los Angeles, Sragow said. Beginning today, the ad will appear in additional markets, he said.