Dornan Has Campaign, Needs Manager : Politics: ‘We’re still looking,’ says Garden Grove presidential hopeful who announced candidacy last week.

Wanted: professional manager to handle the fledgling presidential campaign of candidate who marches to the beat of his own drum. Interested parties should contact Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), a hopeful for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

Dornan, who last week became the seventh candidate to officially enter the GOP race, has yet to find the campaign wizard with national experience.

“We’re still looking,” Dornan said during a campaign swing through New Hampshire last weekend. His daughter, Terri Cobban, is managing the day-to-day operations and organized the announcement tour that began in Washington, D.C.

Dornan’s unofficial campaign manager has been F. Andy Messing Jr., executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation, which conducts humanitarian missions around the world.

However, Messing said Tuesday he would not be able to join the campaign full-time because it might violate Federal Elections Commission rules and create a conflict with the foundation, which he helped establish in the 1970s. He said he continues working with the Dornan campaign as a volunteer.

Even without an official chief strategist, Messing insisted Dornan was holding his own, even though political experts consider Dornan’s presidential bid a long shot.

“He knows how to do it. He has a sense of politics, a sense of history,” Messing said. “There’s no campaign manager who’s going to wind up telling him what to do. You can’t reform him like they did with Robert Redford in (the film) ‘The Candidate.’ ”

Before the campaign officially got underway, Dornan lost another campaign consultant, Jeff Taylor, who had been part of George Bush’s 1988 team in New Hampshire.

Taylor said in an interview when he resigned in February that he had “other opportunities” he wanted to pursue. He questioned whether the campaign could muster the organizational strength needed for a national campaign.

Charles Arlinghaus, the executive director for the New Hampshire state GOP, said Dornan does not have an on-site campaign contact in the nation’s lead-off primary state. Volunteers, organized by members of the Young Americans for Freedom, handled the advance work for Dornan’s recent visit to the state.

Dornan’s wife, Sallie, managed his nine congressional campaigns in California, with fund raising primarily handled by another daughter, Robin Griffin.

Messing credited Cobban with getting the campaign off the ground.

“The spark plug in this whole thing is his daughter (Cobban), who is smart and savvy and nice, and she can out-organize anybody I have ever seen,” Messing said.

“I feel confident, given the initial guidelines we talked about and campaign strategy, that he’s going to have a lot of success getting his message out,” he added.