CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS : GOVERNOR : Brown-Garamendi Media War Grows Increasingly Bitter

The media war in the Democratic gubernatorial campaign grew increasingly bitter Thursday as John Garamendi’s campaign denounced as false a Kathleen Brown ad accusing the insurance commissioner of possibly costing a woman her old-age pension.

In another new ad, Brown contends that Garamendi flip-flopped on the death penalty--18 years ago. Garamendi emphatically denied changing his views on the death penalty, and the Brown campaign had seemingly inconclusive support for the contention.

Brown’s television commercials this week--her first direct response to Garamendi’s underdog attacks--were broadcast as the campaign headed into the final weekend before Tuesday’s primary. Garamendi has tried to use Brown’s personal opposition to the death penalty to leverage an upset for the Democratic nomination for governor.

Brown, consistently the leader in opinion polls, has contended that her personal views are not relevant because she pledges to enforce the death penalty, if elected, just as rigorously as would Garamendi or Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

Brown began running the pension ad to counter any Garamendi surge as the campaign closed. In the ad, 64-year-old Helen McGrath of Concord appears on the screen saying that after her husband died, she depended on payments from an Executive Life Insurance Co. policy to help her in her old age.

Then she adds, “Because of John Garamendi, I don’t know that I’ll see any of these payments in my lifetime.”

But the state Insurance Department said Thursday that McGrath already had received a $52,500 payment in October, 1991, and is guaranteed to get at least $231,900 of the original $270,000 she had banked on. She may ultimately get all $270,000 on basically the same schedule as first promised, department spokesman Bill Schulz said.

“Really?” McGrath said to a reporter who relayed the news. “How wonderful, if true. I’ll believe it when I see it. . . . It would be nice if they put it in writing.”

But Schulz said McGrath and thousands of other policyholders who opted for a replacement annuity plan from the successor to Executive Life had signed documents acknowledging the proposed payments and schedule.

Asked why she said in the TV ad that “I don’t know if I’ll see any of these payments in my lifetime” when she already had gotten $52,500, McGrath responded, “Fifty-two thousand--big deal.”

John Whitehurst, Brown’s campaign press secretary, said, “She’s talking about her future payments,” although that was not clear in the ad.

In his fourth month as insurance commissioner in 1991, Garamendi seized Executive Life on the grounds that it was sinking into insolvency under a heavy debt of junk bonds. Critics accused him of selling off Executive Life assets at bargain prices, but Garamendi said he had to act as he did under state law requiring him to protect policyholders’ investments. He says that 92% of all policyholders eventually will recoup their full investments.

Also on Thursday, Brown began running an ad that opens with an announcer’s statement: “What John Garamendi doesn’t want you to know--Garamendi opposed the death penalty. Flip-flopped. Then said it couldn’t solve the problem.”

Garamendi insisted that he never had opposed the death penalty in his public life, going back to his first run for the state Assembly in 1974. Every vote on the death penalty during his 16-year career in the Legislature was in support it, campaign manager Darry Sragow said.

The major sources of the Brown allegation were one paragraph from a story in the Stockton Record in 1974 and one paragraph from the same newspaper in 1976 when he ran for the state Senate.

The 1974 article quoted Garamendi: “To say you are going to solve crime with the death penalty, an issue 2 years old, is not realistic. The death penalty is not an issue. Neither is marijuana. To say these are important issues is naive.”

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional, wiping out all pending death sentences. Garamendi voted to reinstate the death penalty when the issue came up in the Senate in 1977 and, after then-Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.--Kathleen Brown’s brother--vetoed the bill, Garamendi voted to override the legislation, Sragow said.

Sragow said all the reports stem from an erroneous reading of the 1974 Stockton Record article.

To support their position, Brown campaign officials urged reporters to contact state Sen. Patrick Johnston (D-Stockton), who managed Garamendi’s 1974 Assembly race, and Doug Watts, who ran the campaign of the GOP candidate.

Johnston, who has been on less than friendly terms with Garamendi recently, said in a telephone interview that he could not recall Garamendi “speaking in opposition, or in support of the death penalty.”

Watts, reached in New York City, said that “Garamendi was clearly against the death penalty. . . . Clearly one of our big issues that he never refuted at the time was that he was opposed to the death penalty. It was pretty classic bleeding-heart stuff for those days.”

Brown campaign officials said Garamendi also flip-flopped by saying the death penalty is needed to solve today’s crime problems. They quoted a 1989 Garamendi statement made in response to a proposal by then-Gov. George Deukmejian to extend the death penalty to those who commit first-degree murder during drug-related crimes: “Does anybody for a minute believe the death penalty or a longer sentence is going to solve the problem?”

Brown has said that one reason for her personal opposition to the death penalty is that she does not believe it deters violent crime.