Republicans Confident Allen Will Be Recalled : Election: Low on campaign cash, assemblywoman resorts to ‘town hall’ meetings and says crowds are receptive: ‘They like me.’

If hell hath no fury like a Republican scorned, then Doris Allen could be scorched Nov. 28.

That’s the day the embattled Cypress assemblywoman faces a recall election fostered by her brethren in the GOP, who have accused Allen of all manner of transgressions against the party. Their chief complaint: That Allen schemed with Willie Brown and the Democrats to become Speaker of the Assembly, an act that prevented Republicans from seizing control of the lower house for the first time in a quarter century.

Now if GOP leaders can yank Allen and install a “loyal Republican” in her place, they stand to finally grab the prize that has repeatedly eluded them since capturing numerical superiority in the Assembly in last November’s election.

The party’s kingpins are crowing that polls of likely voters in Allen’s 67th Assembly District don’t bode well for the 13-year incumbent. They predict she’ll be toppled by a 2-to-1 ratio.

Allen, however, is the consummate underdog, a legislative loner who has battled most of her life for what she has earned. She is displaying some of that same against-all-odds pluck even as the Republicans shove her toward the inferno.

Perseverance may not be enough. Heading into the final week, the Allen campaign has drained most of its campaign cash. Allen has raised more than $250,000 since her opponents began trying to qualify the recall for the ballot, but nearly all the money has been spent, much of it on an unsuccessful legal effort to scuttle the recall election itself. Allen reported about $8,000 in cash on hand last week, hardly enough to finance a closing flourish of mailers to boost her cause.

Facing that cash crunch, Allen has used her Assembly mailing privileges to dispatch letters to thousands of district voters inviting them to “town-hall” type meetings. The crowds, she says, have been receptive.

“Everywhere I go, they like me,” Allen said of her efforts to drum up votes. “Everywhere I go. Some of them ask hard questions, but when they leave, they know the truth.”

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment has mounted an all-fronts war against Allen. Nearly $300,000 has already been spent; recall organizers say they expect to spend more than $400,000 before election day.

And there’s been help from other quarters. The California Republican Party has weighed in, with state Chairman John Herrington and Gov. Pete Wilson both dispatching personal letters to Republicans in Allen’s district, imploring them to toss her from office.

Voters have also been littered with hit mailers attacking Allen as a puppet of Brown and the Democrats. Local foot soldiers from the county GOP have staffed phone banks, walked precincts and run a massive absentee ballot program, garnering what will likely be half the votes cast in the race.

“I think the conventional wisdom is that Doris is limping to the finish line,” said Orange County political consultant Dan Wooldridge. “She’s probably behind in the first round of absentee ballots by 70% to 30%. I think she will probably be recalled.”

But even as he says that, Wooldridge notes that Republican leaders have failed so far to turn over the polls they contend show Allen behind by a huge margin.

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Abandoned by friends on both sides of the aisle, Allen has tried to make her message simple and straightforward. To anyone who will listen, Allen says she is being persecuted by a small cadre of Orange County GOP power brokers she has dubbed “the machine.”

She points to the $5 million in campaign cash funneled to conservative candidates in recent elections by state Sen. Rob Hurtt of Garden Grove and the political group he helped form, Allied Business PAC. Allen said the money has helped install candidates beholden to Hurtt and his loyal Orange County cohorts, among them Assembly GOP Leader Curt Pringle of Garden Grove, the presumptive Speaker-in-waiting if Allen is recalled.

Allen contends she went along with the Democrats and became Speaker--replacing the ubiquitous Brown, who had held the job for nearly 15 years--in large part to derail the efforts of Hurtt and his clan. She contends that they use “Nazi-like” tactics to bully and intimidate prospective GOP candidates perceived as unwilling to march in lock step.

As proof, Allen points to her efforts last spring to capture a vacant state Senate seat. She found that her anticipated sources of campaign cash dried up because of what she considers intimidation by “the Orange County mob.”

It was that treatment that prompted Allen to cut her deal with the Democrats and grab the speakership in June without the support of a single Assembly Republican. Allen vacated the post during the final week of the legislative session in September, under mounting pressure from both sides.

Allen contends that the power politics have continued during the recall, with Hurtt and others attempting to carve up the field of replacement candidates to ensure that “their boy”--conservative political newcomer Scott Baugh--has an easy road to victory.

With a crowded field of Republicans, GOP kingpins were worried that a split vote in the winner-take-all replacement contest might allow a popular Democrat--former Huntington Beach Mayor Linda Moulton-Patterson--to squeeze through for a victory.

Allen and Orange County Democrats argue that Republicans planted a second Democrat in the contest to water down the vote for Moulton-Patterson. If so, it backfired when Democratic candidate Laurie Campbell was thrown off the ballot by a Sacramento County Superior Court judge for misrepresenting the manner of gathered signatures on her nomination papers. The matter is now the subject of an investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office.

With the contest very much in doubt, Hurtt and Gov. Wilson helped the GOP cause last week by persuading one of the party’s top contenders, abortion rights backer Haydee Tillotson, to pull out. Allen sees that as another example of the Orange County cadre twisting arms to get their way.

“It’s power politics and it’s nothing new,” Allen said. “In Orange County, this little group has run the show. And they didn’t want just any Republican installed as Speaker. They wanted their Republican installed as Speaker. The biggest gift I can give California is to stop them.”

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Allen’s opponents roll their eyes at such pronouncements, which they characterize as last-resort rhetoric by a desperate politician.

“I’ve always kind of chuckled at this notion of the Orange County Machine,” said state Sen. John R. Lewis (R-Orange), one of Hurtt’s top lieutenants. “What she calls the machine, other people call the Orange County Republican Party. And if there truly was an effective political machine running things in Orange County, we certainly wouldn’t have had four Republican candidates running against one Democrat.”

Lewis and others see Allen’s attacks as the byproduct of “this bizarre persecution complex and political paranoia that Doris has consistently displayed through the years. She was imagining people were out to get her way before they were ever out to get her.”

It was that very paranoia, Lewis contends, that drove Allen into the Democratic camp. Wooed for years by small perks and favors from longtime Speaker Brown, Allen willingly went along with a Democratic plot to keep power despite losing numerical control of the Assembly, he argues.

“I believe Doris Allen was bought off by the Democrats with a 20% pay increase by becoming Speaker, a bigger pension, the most lavish office in the Capitol, a chauffeur-driven Cadillac and the ability to thumb her nose at her Republican colleagues,” said state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), who defeated Allen last spring in the senatorial contest.

“Doris became Willie Brown’s puppet. And she felt there was nothing her constituents could do in response to that betrayal of them, her party and the principles she has claimed to stand for. Well, she was wrong.”

Aside from attacking her colleagues, Allen has underlined her many years of service to the district, a fact backed up by the dozens of local mayors and council members supporting her. Allen also says she faithfully promoted the Republican cause as Speaker by pushing out 259 bills backed by the GOP caucus despite the furor over her alliance with the Democrats. Allen notes that she eventually got Republicans a majority on all the Assembly’s policy committees.

Finally, Allen argues that she “pulled off a miracle” in the final hours of the session to “save” legislation that helped pull Orange County from bankruptcy. Allen said she built bridges to reluctant Democrats and derailed a last-minute effort by Republicans to link the Orange County package to a statewide mandate relief bill that could have toppled it.

It all prompts Republicans such as Lewis to guffaw.

He and others say that Allen was a latecomer to the bankruptcy recovery effort, “injecting herself at the eleventh hour simply to steal credit for work other people had done.” They say it is preposterous to suggest that the recovery package was threatened by attempts to push through the other bill.

“It makes perfect sense she would oppose mandate relief,” Lewis said. “Democrats have opposed it for years and she was carrying their water.”

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They also say that Allen played “musical chairs” with committee chairmanships and memberships to help Democrats in some cases. The most notable example was on a measure that would have dramatically trimmed state environmental regulations; Allen put Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos) on the key policy committee at the last minute. Firestone, one of the few Republicans representing a district dominated by environmentalists, had to vote with the Democrats to kill the bill.

Allen said she played that card because of concerns that the laws would be gutted and allow offshore oil drilling near her coastal district. But her opponents in the GOP say the move was simply a plot to aid the Democrats.

Whatever the reason, Firestone was irked. He has contributed $10,000 to the campaign to recall Allen.