GOP Slowed by Turmoil in Orange County : Politics: Infighting involving Pringle and investigation of new Assemblyman Baugh could hurt the party’s drive to wrest control of the Assembly from Democrats.

It isn’t often that the internal political fights in the Republican bastion of Orange County, as bitter and hardball as they may be, attract outside attention. But now there’s no denying that the local infighting has been dragged onto the statewide stage, to the chagrin and embarrassment of some of Orange County’s most respected Republican leaders.

Attracting the spotlight are Garden Grove’s Curt Pringle, the Assembly’s combative GOP leader and a contender for speaker, and one of his followers, Scott Baugh of Huntington Beach. Baugh, a political neophyte elected to the Assembly last month, is under scrutiny by the district attorney’s office for campaign irregularities, some of which may involve key aides to Pringle.

At stake, depending on the outcome of the investigation and the inevitable political repercussions, is GOP control of the fractious state Assembly, where Republicans hold a slight majority. But because of internal divisions, the GOP has failed to wrest control from the Democrats.

“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. While the GOP has a majority in the Assembly for the first time in many years, its tactics internally do not reflect any command of the situation and needlessly attract negative attention, Johns says.

“We have got to elevate our conduct until it is impeccable conduct,” he said.

For Pringle, the controversy is all too familiar.

As a rookie legislative candidate in 1988, Pringle’s campaign team was accused of stationing uniformed guards at polling places in his Orange County district to deter Latinos from voting.

Now, with newcomer Baugh, Pringle is seeing it again, as the investigation looks into whether Baugh might have played a role in allegedly planting a friend on the Democratic ballot to dilute the vote for Baugh’s main Democratic rival. Baugh denies the accusation.

The events of the past two months are more than just a reminder for Pringle of an untidy bit of personal history he would 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 speaker’s chair from its current occupant, Fresno Republican Brian Setencich, a moderate lifted to power on the shoulders of Assembly Democrats.

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With the stakes increasing, Pringle’s political enemies are suggesting privately that he might have played a role in the Baugh mess. Pringle acknowledged last week that one of his staffers had--unbeknownst to him--helped collect signatures to qualify a Democrat on the ballot who is a personal friend of Baugh.

And there are additional public relations problems.

Jacob (Jim) Rems, a Republican hopeful for Orange County’s 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 of Irvine. Meanwhile, another Republican challenger said last week that Pringle threatened in a telephone call to bring the forces of the GOP campaign machine down on him in hopes of clearing the field for Inland Empire incumbent Brett Granlund (R-Yucaipa).

Pringle says both men are blowing the cases out of proportion, but does not back away from the fact that he feels the challengers should step aside so valuable Republican campaign dollars are not expended in the primaries.

Some of the county’s Republican leaders consider the recent gaffes the byproduct of struggles for control of the California Assembly, which has been fractured since Republicans won a slim majority last year.

Even so, leaders such as Johns say that is no excuse for the blunders.

After learning of the Rems episode, Johns said, he called state Sen. John R. Lewis, a Republican from Orange and one of the party’s top political strategists, to tell 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.”

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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 and the lower house’s newly elected Democratic leader. “The poll guards, the strong-arming of candidates and certainly what happened with Baugh indicates a political operation out of control.”

Pringle says that critics 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.

For him, it brings back bad memories of the defining event of his early years in politics--the infamous 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 his current district.

Orange County GOP Chairman Thomas Fuentes said the public perception of the poll guards case generated by the media was distorted. He says Republican concerns about potential voter fraud were legitimized when a Democratic operative in 1988 was convicted of signing up noncitizen voters.

No charges were filed in the poll guards incident. 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.

Meanwhile, Baugh will attend his first Assembly session in two weeks. Democrats are warning of a chilly reception.

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. That might be so much political bluster. In recent years, several lawmakers of both stripes have continued serving in the Legislature even as they were under indictment for corruption.

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

“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 entry to politics. The press and others want to make him guilty of something. And in politics you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Times staff writer Peter M. Warren in Orange County contributed to this story.