Valley Candidates Pump Up the Volume of Attacks as Vote Nears

With the California primary just days away, candidates in the San Fernando Valley are unleashing a last-minute torrent of attack mail as they furiously try to portray their opponents as everything from sleazy malefactors to just plain liberals.

In the 43rd Assembly District race, businessman John Geranios is being dogged by variations on the carpetbagging theme: Does he sleep at Grandma’s duplex in the district or at his house just outside the district? He insists that he lives in the 43rd.

Opponent Pete Musurlian has a piece in the mail that quotes Geranios, who is running as a conservative Republican, as having kind words for Willie Brown, now San Francisco’s liberal mayor. This is not new territory for Musurlian, who also equated opponent Sheldon Baker with Brown earlier in the campaign.

“I’d like someone to attack me,” said Musurlian.

No one can make that statement in the 39th Assembly District, where it’s hard to keep track of the attacks without a scorecard.

The question of whether Democratic contender Valerie Salkin really is a licensed foster mother, as she claims, became fodder for a mailer. As did opponent Tony Cardenas’ failure to vote in 1992 and 1994 and Jim Dantona’s personal bankruptcy.

“Liar” is the epithet of choice in the vicious Republican primary for the 21st State Senate District, where Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Granada Hills) and businessman Robert Oltman have been blasting away at each other.

The latest Oltman mailer continues to refer to his opponent as Paula “Carpetbagger” Boland and lists the special-interest groups that have contributed to her campaign.

Meanwhile, another 21st District candidate, Wilbert Smith, had vowed to stick to the high road. But even he succumbed to temptation, portraying Boland as a career politician in a last-minute mailer.

Democrats Doug Kahn and Barry Gordon, candidates in the 27th Congressional District, scoured court archives for material for their mail bombs. Their booty: a 14-year-old restraining order on one side and a lawsuit against a retarded adult on the other.

Naturally, both campaigns, with some justification, insist that the court records are being distorted by their opponents.

Gordon’s ex-wife came forward to disclaim the 1982 restraining order as the work of an overzealous divorce lawyer. The Kahn lawsuit was filed after someone living in a group home repeatedly threw large rocks onto his property, breaking a window in the nursery.

This week, campaign managers found themselves defending their hit pieces as accurate and informative one day, and the next day excoriating their opponents’ attacks as hitting below the belt.

“This is what a hit piece looks like,” wrote Kahn manager Ted Toppin on a faxed copy of a Gordon mailer. The day before, Toppin had put forth a vigorous defense of a Kahn piece.

Last-minute mail attacks characterize every election cycle. But why so many hatchet mailers, which voters claim not to like?

“Hit pieces work--or are perceived to work,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. “Anger seems to be a prime motivator in moving voters.”

Oltman campaign manager Brian O’Neel said the escalating war of words is what gets voters to open the mail. Negative campaigning is “kind of like violence in the movies,” O’Neel said. “If people weren’t paying the ticket price, they wouldn’t be doing it.”

A case in point: the 39th Assembly District race, where a last-minute batch of mean missives has cranked the dial sharply toward the “highly negative” setting.

Closing the campaign with guns blazing is Dantona, a onetime high school teacher and legislative aide. In successive mailers, Dantona hammers away at attorney Salkin as “a fraud” who is soft on crime and who moved into the district from the Westside to run for office.

“I stand by my mail,” said Dantona, “because everything I have said has dealt with issues. There have been no personal attacks by me.” He added that his mailers illustrate Salkin’s “habit of saying things that aren’t true.”

Salkin has struck back with a hit piece offering “a word of warning” to the district’s voters, highlighting Dantona’s association with a public official who was convicted of bribery and citing a fraud lawsuit brought against him nearly 20 years ago by a former pupil who was upset with a life-insurance policy she had purchased from him.

The mailer alleges that Dantona sold life insurance to “his teenage students,” although the public record documents only one such case. Salkin said the word “students,” in the plural, was “a typo,” but defended the flier.

“The pieces that we did on Jim do not have the same inflammatory and distorted tone that [Dantona’s] do. They’re a lot more simple, a lot more factual,” she said.

A third candidate, real-estate broker Cardenas, has not escaped the mudslinging nor hesitated to join the fray.

A Dantona mailer attacks Cardenas for not voting in the 1992 and 1994 primary elections, which he does not deny. But “I’ll put my voting record in this district against any of my opponents,” he said, alluding to Salkin and Dantona’s relatively recent relocations into the 39th.