Pringle Can Relate to Baugh’s Discomfort : Politics: Like the new O.C. assemblyman, the GOP leader started his career with campaign controversy.

It’s political deja vu all over again.

A fresh-faced Republican wins an Orange County Assembly seat, but lands in trouble for alleged campaign wrongdoing. Democrats--who normally prowl the fringes of Orange County’s electoral landscape--pounce like a pack of wolves. The press follows suit, a scandal is born, and the new lawmaker heads to Sacramento under a black cloud.

Assembly GOP Leader Curt Pringle lived through it in 1988 as a rookie legislative candidate, when his campaign team was accused of stationing uniformed guards at polling places to deter Latinos from voting.

He’s seeing it again with recently elected Assemblyman Scott Baugh, a Republican newcomer backed by Pringle and now under investigation for any role he might have played in planting a friend on the Democratic ballot to dilute the vote for his main Democratic rival.

But for Pringle, the events of the past two months are more than just a reminder of an untidy bit of personal history he’d rather forget. They are a potential political liability at the worst of times.

These days, the blond, bespectacled conservative is seeking to take the Assembly speakership from its current owner, Fresno Republican Brian Setencich, a moderate lifted to power on the shoulders of Assembly Democrats. With the stakes increasing, Pringle’s political enemies are whispering in Capitol hallways about what part he might have played in the Baugh mess.

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Now there’s an additional public relations problem. Jacob “Jim” Rems, a Republican hopeful for the coastal 70th Assembly District seat, has accused Pringle chief of staff Jeff Flint and aide Mark Denny of trying to strong-arm him out of the March GOP primary race against incumbent Assemblywoman Marilyn C. Brewer (R-Newport Beach).

Pringle, Flint and Denny all deny the charge, saying Rems is a follower of former Assemblyman Gil Ferguson, a Pringle antagonist, and is twisting the facts.

Such disputes are difficult to resolve, but there’s no denying that the provincial politics of Orange County have been dragged onto the statewide stage. Some of the county’s Republican leaders consider the recent gaffes the inevitable byproduct of struggles for control of the California Assembly, which has been fractured since Republicans won a slim majority in the Legislature’s lower house last year.

“There’s much agony when you have these tectonic political shifts,” said Buck Johns, a generous Orange County political donor and a director of the conservative Lincoln Club. “You’re going to have these kinds of problems.”

But that doesn’t mean Johns likes it. After learning of the Rems episode, Johns said, he called state Sen. John R. Lewis, the Republican from Orange who is one of the party’s top political strategists, and told him “talk to your people and tell them that someone is going to be looking at them and everything you are doing. You are not a bunch of guys throwing rocks from the outside anymore. You are in power.”

Johns also said that Denny’s behavior--Rems complained that the Pringle aide hassled him while the candidate was trying to pull nomination papers at the registrar of voters office--was “second-class conduct. We are going to carry that message to Mark and Jeff Flint and Curt and the rest of the guys. We have got to elevate our conduct until it is impeccable conduct.”

Democrats, of course, paint the unfolding saga in particularly ominous shades. They see Republican players in a Republican county doing political dirty deeds with impunity.

“I think Curt Pringle will go to any length to elect an extremist majority in the Assembly,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), a longtime Pringle nemesis. “The poll guards, the strong-arming of candidates and certainly what happened with Baugh indicates a political operation out of control.”

Pringle, however, suggests critics such as Katz are just as politically motivated.

“I believe our people have walked a straight line,” Pringle said. “In this sort of hypersensitive atmosphere, anything can be criticized. So I agree that we need to continue to be very cautious to ensure that the Democrats and other political opponents don’t try to take shots at every single action that occurs.

“This is the year of transition in California politics. You’re moving from 25 years of total Democratic domination, 15 years under the imperial speakership of Willie Brown. That shift is not going to be easy.”

The episodes involving Baugh and Rems are examples of Democrats and the media “just blowing out of proportion many things that can be natural occurrences in politics,” Pringle said.

In a more sedate year, when the political tug-of-war was less intense, an episode like Baugh’s might end up with the candidate simply paying a state Fair Political Practices Commission fine, Pringle said.

“But the focus is greater because this is one of those heightened times,” he said.

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Thomas A. Fuentes, Orange County GOP chairman, goes even further, asserting that reporters and editors with local newspapers have been co-opted by the Democrats and other enemies of the Republican establishment in Orange County.

“I’m sure that anybody with any level of political sophistication sees this as another example of the Democrats using the courts and their liberal media cohorts as vehicles in the political battle,” Fuentes said. “The Democratic Party is impotent in the political process in Orange County, so they--along with their allies at the newspapers--utilize other vehicles to try to have a political influence on the affairs of this community. But I think the voters see through all of this hoopla.”

Fuentes and Pringle say they saw something similar with the poll guards episode of 1988.

That scheme was hatched by campaign strategists for Pringle, who contends he was out of the loop on the decision. Republican Party officials went along with the idea of stationing the guards, saying they were convinced that Democrats were going to bus illegal immigrants into the largely Latino district to cast fraudulent ballots.

After the story broke on election day, press coverage was intense, and the Democrats--eager to injure Pringle after he took a coveted seat--made the most of it.

The majority Democrats made Pringle a pariah when he arrived in Sacramento. He was stuffed in a tiny office, and most of his bills, even the innocuous ones, were killed in Democrat-controlled committees. When Pringle ran for reelection in 1990, the poll guard incident was among the ammunition used by the Democrats to topple him.

He returned to Sacramento two years later after capturing a seat in another district.

Fuentes said the public perception of the poll guards case generated by the media was distorted. He argued that Republican concerns about potential voter fraud were legitimized when a Democratic operative was convicted of signing up noncitizen voters, but the press focused instead on investigations of the episode by the state and federal government.

No charges were ever filed. When a civil suit against Pringle and the party was settled out of court for $400,000, there was little mention that it occurred over their objections, Fuentes said.

“It was a situation where the insurance companies abandoned their responsibility and didn’t give the Republicans a fair day in court,” he said.

While the brouhaha dogged Pringle when he first arrived in Sacramento, Baugh’s predicament might not prove so politically onerous if no criminal charges are filed, some insiders predict. Baugh comes to the Capitol as part of a Republican majority, not under the thumb of then-Speaker Willie Brown. In addition, many of Baugh’s peers have transgressed themselves, said an expert in campaign law.

“He’ll be judged by his peers, all of whom have at one time or another violated the state Political Reform Act and just weren’t caught,” claimed Dana Reed, an Orange County attorney who specializes in campaign law. “Of course, there’s also scads of lawmakers in Sacramento who were caught and fined. So it’s not a horrific problem in Sacramento.”

Democrats, however, are talking as if the stakes of the game have been raised. Katz suggests that Assembly Democrats might cite the ongoing investigation by the Orange County district attorney as a reason for Baugh to be barred from the seat until the air is cleared.

Pringle, meanwhile, has been walking a tightrope, trying to distance himself from Baugh’s predicament while standing by a lawmaker whose vote is crucial to making him speaker.

Pringle said he can’t help but remember how he felt when his name was being splattered in the headlines for the poll guards case.

“Of course I have empathy for him,” Pringle said. “As I have come to know, he is an honest and forthright person, and he’s in a difficult position in his first entre to politics. The press and others want to make him guilty of something. And in politics you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Times political writer Peter M. Warren contributed to this report.